YOU'RE TENDING YOUR roses on the New Jersey shore when you get a call from your 22-year-old daughter.

"Mom? You know that part-time job I was telling you about? The one where I get paid 1,000 bucks an hour? I haven't been fired exactly, it's just that my employers are under a bit of pressure. I've had to cancel my Facebook page and everything. You know, the one with me in the maid's outfit. And well, they're saying I'm a prostitute, when we you know and I know I'm a singer/songwriter. Do you mind if I move back home for a while?"

So you answer: "You and I are very close, dear. I will always support you, even though you say you were a teenage runaway who left an abusive childhood to become homeless and do drugs. Let's get you a good agent. You're a very bright girl. If anyone can handle a man like the governor, you can."

"Ex-governor, actually."

"I'll get the maid to prepare your room. By the way, I see your Timbaland-style R&B single, Move Ya Body, is getting 98 cents a hit. And the reality TV show is a fabulous idea! Making $29,000 in a weekend pales in comparison. We must talk about your investments."

"It's like Wall Street, Mom. You have to go in, make your money, and get out."

My flight of fancy incorporates media quotes from mother and daughter, but who knows how the conversation really went when Ashley Dupré phoned home to her mother, Carolyn Capalbo, with the news that she'd become famous overnight, just like she'd always dreamed of. America has become entranced with this 21st-century version of Fanny Hill. Since when was prostitution a career move? Since forever, actually.

A wife who does little in exchange for being supported, a professional fiancée or girlfriend - we all know these women who live on the gravy train. Throughout history we've had concubines, geishas, call-girls, courtesans, mistresses, models - each of these a potential euphemism, fairly or not, for prostitution. Even in literature and the arts, prostitutes have had a freedom wives can only envy. While the pitiful ones sell themselves on the streets, those who are "artists" can name their price.

Ashley Dupré may be a high-school drop-out, but she has this knowledge in her bones. "I am all about my music, and my music is all about me," she says. "It flows from what I've been through, what I've seen and how I feel . . . I love who I am." Maybe so, maybe not.

And then there's Dupré's opposite, the Manhattan charity wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, standing by her man like fragrant Mrs Archer. Silda, who says her name comes from the Old German for "Teutonic warrior maiden", surrendered her career as a corporate lawyer to be the full-time wife of Eliot Spitzer, a difficult, moralistic man known as "Mr Clean" before his dirty pay-per-encounter sex life was revealed.

Comparing Ashley and Silda, who would you rather be? Ashley, with her life ahead of her and media offers flowing in (for the next few weeks anyway)? Or Silda, enduring a power-marriage that has lost its sheen now that Spitzer is no longer governor? Both, from a feminist perspective, have sold out, giving up some aspect of their integrity (a career, dignity and a body in Silda's case, merely a body in Ashley's) in the service of a powerful man.

Silda now holds her husband by the short hairs. She's reported to have a close relationship with her mother-in-law, which means she's bent on not disgracing her husband's family - and that's worth a lot to a clan with the wealth the Spitzers have. Playing the forgiving saint, as Hillary did with Bill, could pay off for Silda in terms of financial security, as long as she doesn't plan on running for political office.

Ashley's power is ephemeral and depends on the expertise she hires to design her career trajectory, although with a reality show in the offing and perhaps a book, even a film and more of those R&B songs about the soul of a prostitute, she could make enough money in a year for a nice little nest-egg to tide her over until the next rich man comes along, maybe a husband this time.

I'm as entranced as everyone else, in case you couldn't tell. They're stereotypes, these two women. Silda, with her high-maintenance life and her Manhattan family values (only original artwork by family members allowed to hang on the walls), arrived in the higher echelons the day she met Spitzer at Harvard, and nobody's going to push her off that pedestal. Ashley is also the kind of woman you meet in New York. Living in an expensive apartment with no visible means of support, her Jersey accent betraying her origins, her desire to "network" makes every social meeting a potential breakthrough for her musical career.

We have Ashleys in Dublin, of course, just as we've had one or two miserable political wives. Just type "call girls Dublin" into your search engine and you'll find photographs of nearly naked girls that make the Emperor's Club's website (linked to Eliot Spitzer) look tame.

One website trumpets a system whereby independent call girls advertise for and visit clients, eliminating brothels, the "nasty pimp" and the risk of "an encounter with the gardaí". This plan didn't work for Eliot Spitzer, but maybe it works here for the great and the good who are so inclined. When was the last time an Irish politician was outed as a heterosexual prostitute-user? And do we have the stomach for it? We don't. So if, like Ashley, you see prostitution as a stepping stone to a new career, move to New York or Hollywood, where you're more likely to get caught.