My first reaction when asked to sample some pamper-pedlars was, "Get lost! Do I look like a shallow, sex-starved saddo?" I've always thought of beauty therapy, "alternative" treatments and the like as the female equivalent of brothels - for essentially self-deceiving people who feel a bit hollow and have to pay to be touched. As with prostitution, money changes hands so strange hands may touch body parts for a brief duration. And, as with prostitutes, the hired help is usually a lot more attractive than the hirer. On the other hand, beauticians and therapists don't tend to have miserable later lives or be murdered by clients. So I gathered my courage and two friends, Angie and Yv, and minced off to experience Brighton and Hove's primping palaces.

Yv is a single mother on benefits whom I met at a day centre for adults with learning disabilities where we were both volunteers. She is the opposite of the media spa-junkie, always doing things for others and spending nothing on herself; the sort of person who'd be justified in calling for Me Time but never does. Angie is a sweet-natured soul left weary by her years in the sex trade; so another suitable case for treatments. And me? Well, I've lived a singularly lush life, underworked and overpaid, ending up rich, religious and very happy in my third marriage, so I'm hardly a deserving case. But I do have gout, so clearly my wicked ways have taken a modest toll.

I hate any variation on the word "pamper". It's a weasel word that, while pretending to celebrate women, in fact expresses disdain and distaste for them, implying their bodies are so revolting that even their so-called Me Time must be dedicated to beautification if suitors are to be prevented from running for the hills. The promise of "pampering" implies that a caravan of elephants painted pink and carrying fine sherbets and shimmering amethysts is wending its way towards you, when it really means, "Have a wash, love! Get that fur off your minge! Ew, what man would ever have sex with you?!"

Men want sex too much to care about grooming, or lack of it, so who sets these standards? It's women, not men; women who approach sex as though they were up for Best of Breed at Crufts; women who are, perhaps, unloved. But rather than admit that they may be unloved because they are unlovable - dull, clingy, humourless - they presume that one more treatment will put it right. Of course, no one in their right mind believes that nail technicians are part of a global patriarchal plot to render women powerless. It's the overlap, rather, between beauty therapy and therapy proper that is so sinister - not just "I can do your nails" but "I can change your life".

Anyway! I started my sojourn of touchy-feely sorrow with Angie at Revitalise in Hove. This was until a few years back Planet Janet, a place with a cafe downstairs and colonic irrigation upstairs. My prejudices were set to be proved right when the man at the desk told me that Janet had been a real person who had cancer, tried alternative therapies and "she still died, but she felt she lived longer!" The smell of hippy home cooking brought tears to the eyes, and we were relieved to escape upstairs with our reflexologists, Brazilian Sonya and German Hannelore. Footwear came off, Satan-sucking ambient CD went on and before you could say, "Snake oil" we were stretched out on twin tables under white blankets. What's it like having your feet fiddled with for an hour? Well, tingly, tickly, pleasant in a piffling way, as was the hour of reiki afterwards, but all in all too much like endless foreplay and no fucking.

According to my reiki results, there's a lot going on in my head (you don't say!), I'm pre-menopausal (about time, too: I'll be 49 in July!), I've got a strong immune system (all that shagging and Christianity) and my kidneys are "putting up a fight" (against the drink, one presumes). I need to drink less vodka, eat less cheese and strive for "balance", Sonya says.

I then told her the awful truth. "The thing is, it's not going to happen. I'm addicted to having fun."

"There are other ways to have fun..."

"Good. I'll try them when I'm 60!" What a very boring world a very balanced world would be. I'd had a mildly pleasurable time, and my gout seemed better, but when it came back next day I realised this was because I had been lying down for two hours.

I asked Ange, "How was it for you?" She replied, "I've often wished, after a session with a client, that I could have someone concentrate on giving me pleasure for an hour as I did to them." Bingo! She'd unwittingly confirmed my entire thesis on day one.

Day two saw us pounding the streets in search of a nail-job. The first two salons told us we'd need an appointment, but the third, Diamond Nails, said to come back in 15 minutes. It is the sort of rough and ready nail salon of which New York is full, but my shocking pink acrylic nails made me much happier than the reiki and reflexology, and I dragged my gouty feet a little as we trotted off back to Revitalise for something called "The Journey". This is the heavy hitter, therapy-wise, offered by one Katherine Walmsley and described thus: "The Journey is now recognised internationally as one of the most powerful healing processes available. It works at a cellular level - imbalances created by emotion-driven issues showing up, for example, as career and money blocks, ME, allergies & chronic pain, muscle degeneration, sexual fears, addictions, abuse and loss traumas, can be tackled through The Journey."

Walmsley trained as an accredited Journey therapist with Brandon Bays, the US therapist who inadvertently pioneered The Journey as a result of dealing with her own illness. This was a tumour the size of a baseball in her uterus that was eliminated within six weeks of Bays finding and facing the layers of "undigested emotions" driving the growth of the tumour. The size of a baseball!

Arriving at 12 sharp, we had a 20-minute wait for Walmsley, a posh, amiable lady who came blustering in complaining about the traffic on the way from London - not a good start to our journey! - led us up to a bare room, set out three chairs and sat looking at us warily, as we did at her. "So what would you like to ask me about The Journey?" she finally asked.

"Well, nothing, really. Can't we just start now?"

"What, the two of you? You can't just walk in off the street and expect me to give you The Journey!"

That prostitution metaphor came back to me as I said, "We haven't just walked in off the street - we booked you, yesterday, the two of us, for an hour."

"Oh no, no, no - it takes three or four hours... at the weekend, maybe."

I jumped up testily. "There must have been some sort of communication breakdown." I went to the front desk and found myself sounding more than ever like a thwarted punter: "Oi! You said she'd do The Journey! Two of us together, for an hour!"

"She will," said Front Desk Man.

"She won't, though!"

Ange caught up with me and we left them to sort it out between themselves, feeling we'd had a lucky escape: not so much a Journey as a fool's errand.

Day three was much more like it: the Treatment Rooms, your classic high-end urban spa. Now, if I liked this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing I'd like: no tall tales of shrunken tumours or whiff of hippy cooking; just fragrant calm on all sides. That I didn't get more out of my hour-long massage and hot stone therapy had nothing to do with Fay, my therapist, and everything to do with me. After 30 years of hardcore hedonism, your fun thermostat inevitably gets out of whack. On the other hand, Yv said it left her floaty and made her sleep better, and she's well-placed to judge the benefit of such things. But having her face bathed in oils was "like being licked by a big sloppy dog", and she was embarrassed by the routine foot-washing that starts such sessions. "One human being shouldn't kneel to another one," she said simply, summing it up neatly.

At the Lansdowne Place Hotel spa they didn't wash our feet - they covered us in mud instead, and very nice mud it was, too - but, as with Fay earlier, Charlotte and Skye made me feel the world had gone topsy-turvy. Youth and beauty shouldn't act as handmaidens to age and decay, and old, rich women who disregard this fact will end up looking like Little Britain's Bubbles Devere. We women laugh at ugly, old, rich men whose money ensures a beautiful young girl is on their arm, but is it any less humiliating for our cash to buy a beautiful young girl at our feet?

The therapists I met worked with a serenity and discretion that never wavered. They all responded identically to my questions. Have you ever turned away a client because they were distasteful to you? "No." How old is your oldest client? "In their 90s." Does anyone come for the same treatment more than once a week? "No." Do you like your job? "I love it."

I don't think they're lying, least of all about the last one. Research into a DTI poll of 22,500 workers in 2004/2005, published in the Industrial Relations Journal, ranked 81 occupations by how satisfied their employees were. First, predictably, came corporate managers and "senior officials", second came beauty therapists and hairdressers - 80% female, not generally well-paid, and happier than any group apart from our dear fat cats. Judging from my week in pampering purgatory, that's because they are destroyers of the great modern monster, stress, rather than carriers of it, like the wealthy, educated women whom they must purge anew each day.

Stress! What skives are committed in your name and how much moolah pocketed in seeking to relieve you! "Stress" was the catch-all every pamper-pedlar I spoke to used to explain why healthy women feel the need to be regularly patted, petted and preened into a state of babyish beatification. Battered by a century of "too much choice", no doubt, which has led to forced "juggling" and foolishly trying to "have it all". Just like Victorian maidens forever reaching for the smelling salts and fainting on to sofas when life got too much, today's women are encouraged to reach for the aromatherapy and massage table.

What did women do between the Victorian era and now without lavender oil to calm them down and ylang-ylang bath melts to get them in the mood for sex? Went around jumping off bridges and being frigid, I guess. Or maybe they just got on with things - as they still do. Make no mistake, most women are well aware that they've never had it so good; when they enter a spa or salon, it is purely a hair/nails thing, a prelude to an evening of guilt-free fun.

While young women know exactly what they want from the beauty culture, and so are likely to get it, the older the woman, the higher her expectations and the more disappointed she will be. We all lose our charms in the end, T&A-wise, but any of us can be a charmer well past our physical prime if we surrender the flesh and accentuate the fun. And when a woman reaches a certain age, well, she's seven sorts of fool if she spends too much on beautifying herself.

As Umberto Eco wrote in 2005, "GK Chesterton is often credited with observing: 'When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything.' Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity."

Nowhere can this be seen better than in the. claims of beauty and alternative therapies. One day's volunteer work would give these self-pampering, self-pitying nincompoops more of a lift than a week of "treatments" - and they could give the money they save to charity. In the end, the pursuit of the self serves only to make one less of a real, individual, interesting person; the over-examined life is not worth living. It just feels longer.