I found myself strangely moved by the MP Denis MacShane on Newsnight on Thursday. As details were still emerging of the sordid Christmas “party” held for Manchester United players (so far we have one alleged rape, one “roasting”, and anecdotes of women being passed around “like pieces of meat”), MacShane spoke eloquently about the need to prosecute men who pay for sex.

MacShane and two other former ministers have tabled a motion calling for the police to be given the power to prosecute such men – the idea being that extending successful action against kerb crawlers to brothels and massage parlours may put an end to Britain being the capital of Europe when it comes to trafficked and abused women. Harriet Harman, the women’s minister, said: “Do we think it’s right in the 21st century that women should be in a sex trade or do we think it’s exploitation and should be banned?”

Quite right, too. Except that on Friday morning I read a grotesque account of the aforementioned “roasting” and it occurred to me that perhaps prostitutes are a dying breed, since there exist young women who will perform the same services free. I’ve been trying since to get my head around the question of why a 19-year-old girl would allow herself to have sex with five, or possibly six, men in a row, to jeers and catcalls, and proclaim herself delighted by the outcome.

A hotel guest at the Great John Street hotel in Manchester, where the party was held on Monday night (guest list: the team and its entourage plus 100 pretty young women), shared her reminiscences with The Sun. She said: “I was upstairs in the hotel with a friend when I heard cheering and clapping noises coming from one of the rooms. We could hear the voices of around five or six men, together with the groaning noises of a girl who was clearly having sex. The men were shrieking like hyenas and shouting, ‘Get in there’.

“My mate and I sat shocked as it was so vile. After a few minutes the men filed out of the room laughing and rushed downstairs for more booze. I recognised three of them as members of the Manchester United squad – one of them a well known name. The girl then came staggering out boasting she had just had sex with all the men. She was clearly very drunk and very pretty, and probably about 19. I asked if she was okay and she said, ‘Yeah, of course. Why wouldn’t I be? They said I was a great shag’ and then she hobbled down the corridor.”

Obviously the men’s behaviour is unlovely, too. But let’s be grown up about it: most men, whether they are Premier League footballers or not, will have random sex with random people if it’s offered to them on a plate. If I were a stupid young man who’d made insane amounts of money because I was good at running about on my little legs, kicking a ball, and someone threw a party for me where the only guests were good-looking women, and it was clear that many of those good-looking women wanted to sleep with me, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with the situation. I wouldn’t bother myself about exploitation and I’d be too thick to ask myself what all these women were hoping to gain.

What is far more perplexing – mind-boggling, really – is what the female guest list thought they were doing there. “Cattle market” doesn’t begin to cover it. Did they think the men wanted to have intellectual debates with them? Swap seasonal sprout recipes? Ask them about their hobbies? Of course not. They were hoping that by standing around looking sexy – because nobody went wearing furry slippers and no make-up – some of the dubious glamour of the team would rub off and change their lives for the better. They were there because they might hook a footballer, or someone close to one, through sex. It’s tragic, as well as sordid, as well as incredibly stupid.

Some things never change – not the fact that a certain kind of man wants to be witnessed by his mates having sex (I’ll leave you to work out the homoerotic aspects of “roasting” for yourselves); and not the fact that the girl who is the roastee is now viewed, and always will be viewed, as a spectacular slag. Put it this way: her stock is unlikely to rise. She has been a repository for six strangers’ semen in the space of a short time: it’s not going to win her any medals – not even from the strangers themselves. If the girl in question was a prostitute, she could at least comfort herself with the thought that this unpleasant ordeal was work, charge the blokes £500 each upfront, and stagger out feeling self-disgust but pleased to have some extra cash for Christmas. That is a scenario I can understand.

Instead the girl staggers out, impoverished in every respect by her experience, but pronounces herself pleased because “they said I was a great shag”. It is extraordinary. What is the matter with this girl and with others like her? What is the matter with the women who went to the party in the first place? (Reports say hundreds of other uninvited young women were queueing round the block to get in.) Are these women in the habit of offering an impromptu gang bang to the trolley collectors at Asda? To random groups of blokes in the street, in the hope that they’ll be awarded the accolade of being “a great shag”? I expect not.

It’s not original to state that the deification of football players in this country has reached demented proportions, but stories such as this one show how important it is to keep saying it. Clever women have always used sex to get what they want – or rather used the lure of sex to achieve their goals. But there is a difference between the lure of sex and getting down on all fours and yelling “Who’s next?”

That difference is called victimhood. And it ought to concern us that there exist, in this country, in 2007, thousands of young women who don’t understand the difference and who are so stupid, damaged and brainwashed by their idiot magazines that they believe that free access to their genitalia – ooh, hello number five, what’s your name? – is a surefire way of landing them a fantasy Wag lifestyle.

Prostitutes are not generally held in high esteem but they are just doing their job, through gritted teeth. Any new measure that makes them safe and exempt from abuse and violence is welcome. But this new lot – the Free Prostitutes – are another thing altogether and more depressing because nobody’s making them, forcing them, threatening them. They give themselves away because they can, pour la gloire. Some gloire.

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