Britain has come top among Western industrial nations in the world casual sex league, a kind of Olympic medal table for shagging. The survey, by researchers from Illinois, not only showed that Brits are more promiscuous than Germans, Americans, Australians, French and Canadians, but also revealed that we have markedly more liberal attitudes towards one-night stands.

Which, if you ask me, is more worthy of celebration than anything that happened at the real Olympics in Beijing. It seems that, 80 years after the underground publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Britain is finally shedding its stifling and hypocritical prudishness.

I know what (some of) you are thinking. Only a man could think that casual sex is a Good Thing - only a chap wanting to get his end away and who cares not a jot for the feelings of women likely to regret any dalliance that does not lead down the aisle. Only an alpha male who perceives nothing of the cruel ironies and ambiguities of sexual conquest; who expends not a thought for the emotional damage wrought on credulous women; who is focused only on the paroxysms of pleasure known as the orgasm and whose honeyed words are directed at achieving that end at all costs.

But this is precisely the kind of stereotyped claptrap that has condemned sexually active men and women to a state of guilt for decades, if not millennia. It tells us that men's brains only rise above their belly buttons in the event of an erection and that women who indulge in casual sex are deluded, dysfunctional or depraved, and probably all three. It is the stuff of biological determinism cobbled into a theory about what is good for men and women in general. As if there are not men who are turned off by the idea of casual sex and women who are turned on - and I mean genuinely turned on, not merely faking it to prove their ladette credentials.

Anyone who has spent more than three minutes in Singledom (or, indeed, Marriedom) in any city, town or village ought to know that human sexuality cuts more ways than Spaghetti Junction. Not just in terms of orientation but in inclination, fetishism and whatever else.

I dated a woman in the summer of 2007 who was not merely into S&M, but wanted an open relationship. Involving voyeurism. And whipped cream. Now, I am as open-minded as the next deviant but this was too much even for me, and not just because I feared for my cholesterol level. So we went our separate ways. But I did not feel the need to spend three hours questioning her for evidence of dysfunctionality any more than I did when I found out that she liked reading Chaucer.

The whole idea that women are hardwired for apple pie, motherhood and monogamy and that anyone who deviates is denying her true nature is not only historically and biologically suspect, it is morally perilous. Its roots lie deep in male paranoia about female sexuality and the desire to control the means of reproduction, often articulated with a religious twist. But this is about more than Germaine Greer and the Archbishop of Canterbury. My problem is that this attitude towards women means that men have to defend our flings from the implication that some sort of deceit must have been

perpetrated on the “victim”. “Did you promise to take her on a date? Did you promise an engagement ring?” “No, I bloody didn't and she would have run a mile if I had!”

We think in such crude and misleading categories. Yes, men and women are different. Yes, a man is more likely to want casual sex than a woman. Yes, women are more inclined to regret a one-night stand. But men are, on average, better than women at tennis, but I can find you a few million females who would smash the typical male 6-0 in the same way that I could find you countless women who enjoy no-strings sex even more than Joe Average.

You know what really gets my goat? The idea - touted by smug marrieds sipping sauvignon blanc and exuding faux sympathy - that casual sex is inherently superficial and evidence of a gaping hole in one's life. Huh? Sure, I want a loving, stable relationship, but please don't mistake my flings in the meantime for moral or philosophical bankruptcy. The immorality of sexuality has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with dishonesty. That's right: it consists in infidelity, all too often perpetrated by smug marrieds. It also consists in concluding that a relationship is over without bothering to tell the other half, allowing it to drift on while you look for someone else. Anyone who supposes that this kind of duplicity has anything to do with the casual sex enjoyed by consenting singles is kidding themselves.

No-strings sex also gets a kicking from the holier-than-thou brigade because of its “association” with teenage pregnancy, STDs and the like, but these have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with stupidity. Armed with an ounce of common sense and a packet of condoms, the parties to a one-night stand have little to fear beyond a squeaky mattress. Sure, not every fling is wonderful, any more than every friendship or every marriage. They can be awful and should never - but never - be undertaken when too hammered to have a hope of remembering what happened. But flings can also be genuinely wonderful - life-affirming liaisons that electrify the soul and exalt the spirit. And that is true whether you are from Mars, Venus or wherever else in the unmapped and uncharted galaxy we call human sexuality.

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