Want to Be a Nude Cleaner? Then Pop Into the Jobcentre

I think we know where the government stands on the sex industry. It disapproves. The home secretary, Jacqui Smith (stop laughing at the back, please), wants men to rethink their attitudes to prostitution. She wants the laws on paid sex to be redrawn so that they're tougher on men than on the young women they use. Meanwhile, the deputy labor leader, Harriet Harman, has run a vigorous campaign persuading newspapers that they mustn't carry ads for escort agencies and massage parlors, because these businesses are fronts for organized prostitution and human trafficking. She wants society to send a clear signal that it disapproves.

It's all very firm and coherent. So aren't you just a little surprised to find that your friendly local job center is carrying ads for just these sorts of jobs? Last month, in Doncaster, women could apply to strip naked in front of webcams and hold sexually suggestive conversations with punters at a rate of £10 an hour. The rates for lapdancers in London's Hoxton were meaner - "above the minimum wage". Elsewhere in the country, over the past year or so, the database has carried ads for escorts at £200 a shift - no experience necessary - masseurs, nude models, nude cleaners, pole and erotic dancers, sex chatline workers, and performers on topless TV.

What an awful message that sends to the newly unemployed. After all the talk about building skills, fighting sexism, and making the workplace fairer to women, a teenage girl can walk into the national job agency and find that, actually, getting your tits out and parting your legs is one of the career choices that are officially on offer. Slipping into the sex industry couldn't be made easier.

Of course, that's not what the Department for Work and Pensions claims to be doing. Reading its guidance on these jobs is excruciating, as it contorts itself to show that it is following policies on equality, diversity, discrimination and legality. Under-18s may not apply, supposedly, though anyone can read the jobs list, and can often call numbers.

You, I and Harriet Harman may all know what goes on in saunas and between escorts, but the DWP must remain painfully, institutionally oblivious. It says primly that before it accepts ads involving physical contact, it demands a statement from employers confirming that no illegal activity is taking place, and that "the vacancy does not involve contact of a sexual nature". Once a job seeker has a post, the DWP will contact them again "to see if anything illegal was subsequently found to be part of the job requirements". You will be reassured to know that it received only five such complaints in one year, of which four were upheld and the employer banned.

Nor would the DWP like you to assume that the industry principally exploits women. It tells you that 59% of the applicants for the 351 sex ads it carried last year were male. Look at the figures a little closer, though, and you see that the men were overwhelmingly applying for jobs in warehouses, in sex shops, or as non-dancers in the lapdancing clubs. Fudging the nature of the jobs obscures what's really going on. For men it's not exactly exploitation; more a chance to ogle the exploited.

And indeed, it's the fudging of boundaries and categories that is the problem. The DWP says it has no choice in carrying the ads after a landmark legal judgment. Until 2001 it banned job ads for the sex industry, but permitted them for retailers such as Ann Summers. That year it extended the ban to sex-toy shops too. Furious, Ann Summers took the DWP to court, arguing that having to pay for commercial ads was costing it £250,000 a year. It successfully argued that it should be allowed to advertise in job centers since its business was both legal, and not part of the sex industry. The high court ruling went further, saying that job centers must carry vacancies for legal work in the "sex and personal-services industries".

The logic of the judgment is staggering in its stupidity for it has legitimized ads for the likes of escort agencies and massage parlors. It's a huge leap from selling vibrators in a sex-toy shop to selling your sexuality to strange men. In the first, you're selling an object; in the second, you are the object being sold. Yet once the Summers ruling was made, that's what happened.

The labor MP Des Browne, a minister in the department at the time of the case, is uneasy about what's followed. "It may be that the structure of law we have forces us not to discriminate between one sort of job and another, but it doesn't seem right to me," he said. "There's a big difference between being a warehouseman and working as a masseur in a massage parlor. We don't have the legal vocabulary to make the distinction, and maybe we should."

Even the DWP is uneasy about what it's having to do, which is why it has just held a consultation on the subject. At least one lawyer writing to it has argued that there was no legal justification for extending the Summers ruling to embrace the commercial sex industry. I'd say it was imperative that if we don't have the legal language to distinguish risque shop jobs from sex work, we should find it, fast. Listing sex work next to jobs in hospitals or bars makes it look normal, but anyone who takes it up is not only being pushed towards the criminal world, they're immediately acquiring a shameful past. If neither law nor government can find a way out of this, then both law and government are an ass.