As calls grow for the resignation of Max Mosley I would like to express a little solidarity with the president of Formula One's governing body by confessing to the ownership of a pair of leopardskin handcuffs.

Now, it might be argued that a bit of light-hearted bondage is very different to a Nazi-style sado-masochistic romp with five prostitutes, but who's doing the maths? In the continuum of sexual behaviour from straightforward missionary to hardcore sadism, where does one cross the line from healthy adult to sexual deviant? And where does it say that deviancy is a bar to serving at the helm of Formula One?

The head of a leading Jewish organisation said that Mosley should resign because his alleged re-enactment of concentration camp rituals was insulting to Jews. Call me pedantic, but how can someone be taken as insulting when his actions took place behind closed doors and were not intended to be seen by those who are now taking offence? Had Mosley merely fantasised about his Nazi fetish without acting it out, would that have been a resigning matter?

One sometimes wonders how much longer it is going to take before we pay something more than lip service to the tenets of liberalism. To paraphrase Locke, what the hell have a person's fetishes got to do with anyone except those who are asked to indulge them? Not even D.H. Lawrence, that great chronicler of English sexual hypocrisy, could have imagined that, 80 years after the underground publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, we are still haranguing people for their private sexual preferences.

Our revulsion at Mosley's behaviour is breathtakingly irrelevant. I am repulsed by homosexuality - in the strict sense that I feel nauseous at the thought of personally engaging in gay sex - but that is not sufficient reason to condemn gay men. Disgust carries not a shred of moral or legal force when it is directed at those engaged in mutually consenting behaviour, whether it involves sex, spanking or leopardskin handcuffs.

I have a question for Censorious of Tunbridge Wells: during the strange paroxysms of ecstasy known as the human orgasm, have you never indulged in fantasies of a kind that you would not wish to share with your grandparents? Have you not, in your various forays into the perplexing and uncharted waters of human sexuality, glimpsed the curious affiliation between the forbidden and the erotic, between shame and arousal?

It has been shown that pornography and prostitution can lead to a reduction in violent sexual crime by releasing pent-up tension, but it is also true that they can legitimise the kind of behaviour that leads to criminality. One thing, in my mind at least, is clear: Mosley falls into the former rather than the latter category. We may speculate that Mosley's sexual motivation sprang not from anti-Semitism but the powerful erotic instinct allied to the assuagement of guilt. What, I ask you, does that have to do with the rest of us?

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