THE DEGRADATION OF THE SPECIES

Tania Kindersley believes in freedom of expression and in an unfettered

sexuality, but in this frank and disturbing investigation shows why hardcore pornography is repulsive, demeaning and dangerous

PORN is in, darling. Porn is this season. Arse, says my friend the Man of Letters, is the new rock 'n' roll.

Martin Amis charted the zeitgeist with his investigation of the American porn industry; lap-dancing clubs soared from seedy to hot-ticket. Sophie Dahl, having frightened the horses by posing naked for the Opium ad, arrived at parties in a T-shirt with the slogan 'Pornography Rocks'. Several cutting-edge film directors introduced hitherto unspeakable acts into the happening arthouse circuit.

Tatler frantically reported that the newest greeting in fashionable clubs is, 'Babe, you look so porno.' The piece was illustrated by a photograph of a glassy-eyed Madonna in a ripped shirt, posing with Heff and his interchangeable bunnies. Porno heaven! The Material Girl says Yes!

Finally, to put the rubber stamp on it, The Spectator ran an article by Toby Young trumpeting the joys of pornography. Consuming 'thousands' of dirty films in his life hasn't done him any harm, he says, trotting out the old argument that pornography empowers women; women in porn films are as sexually voracious as the men; it is the women who are in control. A.A. Gill made this pitch several years ago: the women players are the stars, while the men are paid less and have to fret miserably about staying hard.

All this made me cross and confused. My gut feeling has always been that pornography is a ruthless business that exploits men and women both. It felt unseemly that it should be the next big thing, celebrated by columnists who should know better and Blist celebrities looking for a splash in the red-tops. But then I thought. perhaps I am turning into a prude; maybe the old majorgeneral in me is running riot; the porn lobby may be right when it talks about the liberating sexiness of a really dirty film. There is nothing I believe in more than freedom of expression and unfettered sexuality; the great advance for my generation of women is that we no longer have to lie back and think of England.

I decided that it was time to put my money where my mouth was. I braced myself and marched brazenly into a sex shop in Old Compton Street. I braved the leery, greasy proprietor. 'Nothing too extreme.' I said, as if I did this all the time. He ran into the back, and I was left alone with an ageing Ted with two-foot vertical hair that made Lyle Lovett look like a Guards officer. He gave me a fish-eyed stare. 'Are you an Elnette girl?' I said, looking at his coiffure. He seemed pleased that I'd noticed. 'I used to be,' he said. Awkward pause. 'Do you work here?' I asked. 'No,' he said, `I'm just hanging out.'

Hanging out in a sex shop? Why? It was a joyless, loveless gaff, neon-lit, thin grey institutional carpet on the floor; across the road there were bars and restaurants and pubs: pleasure palaces where people were laughing and talking and flirting and picking up real women, rather than lurking furtively by the triple-X section.

The boss came back. I'd scored. Seventy quid for three; research comes expensive. 'Little bit of everything,' he said. 'We like to keep our customers happy. Poppers?' he offered plaintively, but I was out of the door.

I wasn't a porn virgin. I'd seen Electric Blue when I was a curious teenager; I'd

examined my older brother's stash of Penthouse and Playboy. Last year, on a silly drunken summer evening, I watched hotel porn with a friend who had just flown in from Los Angeles. Hotel porn is soft, overlaid by cheesy Seventies Muzak. There were scenes in a suburban conservatory; girls with improbable embonpoints and implausible suntans gingerly rubbing at each other with nails whose phenomenal length precluded any real action. In one preposterous episode, a housewife was in the kitchen of her lovely Surrey home when a naughty Tory canvasser arrived at the door; before you could say 'Save the Pound', he was canvassing the life out of her over the washing machine. In the end, it was quite dull and unintentionally comic. It bore a vague relation to the embarrassed British attitude towards risque sex, the Benny Hill idea of naughtiness: a bit smutty, a bit of a laugh, confessions of a window cleaner and how's your father.

But hardcore: it's a whole other ball game. I had wondered if I would find it erotic, but I had to turn off all three of my new filthy flicks halfway through, because I was wincing too much. A porn star interviewed recently in Salon magazine revealed that a lot of penetration is illusory. 'It's not really in,' she said, 'because of the soreness.' These films were nothing but penetration, brightly and unforgivingly lit, so you knew it was the real thing: huge, turgid penises, attacking every orifice.

The men stood tall, expressionless, proudly showing off their monstrous tools; the girls knelt, gazing rapturously upward, as if in genuflection. It was patent, as the films wore painfully on, that the obsession de nos fours is, as my literary friend said and as Martin Amis wearily observed from the front line of the skin trade, Arse.

These films were not fetishistic. There were no whips or chains or rape fantasies, just a little bit of hair-pulling and mild slapping; nothing extreme, as I had requested. But if you watch a thin girl having a penis the girth of a jamjar rammed up her jacksic, her face fixed in a rictus of fake arousal while she grunts in pain, it disturbs you. After each act, the camera lingered clinically over the women's genitalia, shaved clean except for a tiny suggestion of hair (this was also worrying in its parody of childhood). I saw now what the porn queen in Salon meant about soreness. The girls' bottoms, front and back, were as red and swollen as a baboon's bottom; I felt a lurching, protective desire for someone to offer them Germolene and some chicken soup and a nice hot bath.

Camille Paglia famously wrote that pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer: 'What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden.' When this was posted on an Internet message board, an indignant woman, wonderfully named Phoenix Willow, replied tersely, 'If Debbie Does Dallas is PagHa's idea of "the deepest truth about sexuality" I feel sorry for her.'

Trawl the Net for porn, and you are overwhelmed: no sooner do you click on one site than another five spring into life (one was so tenacious that the only way I could remove it from my screen was to shut the computer down and reboot). The delights on offer suggest how liberating for women porn truly is: Cheerleader Covered in Come; Teens Pissing Everywhere; Horney [sic] Asian Sluts in Hard Sex. (Go on, girls, throw off those mental chains and join in the party.) Tightanalsluts.com screamed: 'Watch young teens bite their lips as they get it in the ass for the first time!' All tastes are catered for: you can enjoy Cum-drenched Whores Gasping for Air, Pregnant Babes, Girly Zoo (girls with animals, it kindly explains, just in case we hadn't quite got the point). After this bombardment. I was almost touched by the restraint of Elder Erotic: old people like it too.

Maybe there are films and Internet sites out there where the girls are having fun: where it's erotic and beautiful and brings out the pagan goddess in them. But it strikes me that those brave exponents of the delights of porn should ask themselves one serious question: would you let your daughter become a porn star? Would A.A. Gill be pleased and proud if he had a little girl who grew up to become a member of the Girly Zoo? Would Toby Young's eyes mist over with delight if his 17-year-old daughter ran away to join the Teen Sluts? Would the Feminists against Censorship sincerely feel that the battle for liberation had been won if their daughters grew up not to be doctors or lawyers or writers, but chose double penetration for a living?

This is not a feminist argument; it's a human argument. Would the porn crusaders be deliriously triumphant if their sons chose a career shooting their wads in dirty movies? Would they feel that all their talk had been vindicated if their sweet little boys grew out of train sets and Harry Potter into a serious adult hobby: spending their money and time on the dedicated consumption of porn? It's easy to watch Red Hot Dutch after the pub and think that pornography is just fluff, wallpaper, one step up from Cany On Camping. I'll bet you that the Hello.' girls who run around in their 'Porn Star in Training' T-shirts have never got within spitting distance of hardcore. The liberated women who accuse those of us who don't revel in porn of being po-faced and anti-sex should try spending a night watching an endless parade of humourless anal penetration. (No jokes in porn, said Amis, which is one of the sadder reflections on the genre, especially when you compare it with the real thing.) Germaine Greer is right when she says that the cool post-liberal consensus on porn misses the point.

Let's not confuse pornography with erotica, which celebrates sensuality, desire and mutual pleasure. Erotica is about suggestion and imagination, thrills and possibilities; the mundane blatancy of porn is about impoverishment. Porn isn't about sex, it's about money. It doesn't sate the appetite it feeds, but increases it; the palate stales quickly, so the industry finds more and more freakish acts and genres and combinations to keep the punters hooked.

Censorship isn't the answer. The free market and the Internet would make any attempt at control look like taking on an elephant with a pea-shooter. A war on porn would have the same pompous pointlessness of the war on drugs; and, as the misguided crusades of Mary Whitehouse showed, there are inherently illiberal dangers in telling people what they should be allowed to watch. The only weapon of any potency against the tide of market forces is, paradoxically, fashion: tell the kids that porn is cool and groovy, that the perform ers really love what they do, and you breed an eager new generation of consumers. But if the rock chicks and movie icons and renta-crowd celebrities were bold enough to proclaim that sitting in a darkened room with a can of lager and a copy of Latino Sluts is a pitiful substitute for the real thing, then it might be a start.

The old saw goes that true tolerance means tolerating what we find intolerable. But there is a fine line here, a risk of sliding into moral relativism. Present porn as a giggle, celebrated by the mainstream, aped by society girls and film stars, and it's a short walk to finding that Dirty Teen Sleazes isn't really so shocking. We get jaded, overwhelmed; it's here to stay, why make a fuss? Too much pornography and we start to believe that women are gagging for it and men can only get turned on by fisting and fivesomes and women with FF tits who do deep throat. Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it, as D.H. Lawrence wrote.

So, I admit it: I'm out of the loop. I just don't get porn. It doesn't make me feel sexy or liberated or swinging. It makes me feel sad. The websites, the free pixx, the toothless hotel porn, the hardcore

they are all so ugly, so staged, so unspontaneous, so phoney, so profoundly unerotic. They lack all the things sex should have: joy, abandon, beauty, fun, adventure, laughter. The effects of porn. as Terence Blacker observed mournfully in the Independent, are where the really interesting story lies. My fear is that the story is a shoddy and depressing one: with unlimited porn available at the touch of a button, no strings attached, the danger is that real sex will start to seem second-rate or old-hat or too much trouble or not filthy enough. And we are all degraded.

Tania Kindersley's new novel, Nothing to Lose, is published by Hodder in April