Hold the front page! It's the end of the 20th century, and the broadsheets have discovered SEX. And it sells. What else would persuade the otherwise staid Daily and Sunday Telegraph combined to use the word 'sex' 228 tines during November? The Mirror and Sunday Mirror used 'sex' 287 times; the Guardian 252 times (and that's just on six days a week).

The Times and Sunday Times used it 330 times.

That should keep us all happy over breakfast, but in the evening, when we apparently fancy something a little more adult, viewers may find the choice of titillating debauchery so varied it keeps them up well beyond their bedtime. And don't dare say they neglect the children, for much of what's on offer is available long before the tinies go to bed (start them off on orgasms, erections and buggery - all referred to recently well before the 9pm watershed). They can graduate later on to the likes of Channel 4's Ibiza Uncovered, a fly-on-the-wall documentary exposing their drunken teenage peers having it off in the gutter.

Perhaps this is supposed to be instructional as well as entertaining, so I expect there'll be a warning about the high rate of Aids in Spain, but it's clearly more fun than just going on a boring old family holiday. When the teens do switch off and pick up something to read, it might be Blitz, Sugar or Looks. Here, there are true-life stories - I Cut Myself To Survive, I Ran Off With My Best-Friend's Dad, I Found My Mum Bonking A Stranger On The Living Room Carpet. There's even one that seems to be by Chaucer, The Hairdresser's Story, which included, 'Come in, honey, she growled, and straddled a chair in the middle of the room. As soon as I started brushing her hair, she began squirming around all over the place, sighing and moaning .. soon, she'd arched her head so far back it was pressing against my wedding tackle!' (After this early blue period, Chaucer got rather dull and began writing about nuns.)

Recently, ITV, in Vice - The Sex Trade, featured prostitutes at 9pm. One, a woman who treated men as babies, dressed them in nappies and breastfed them. She worked from home, happy to let her own child share her ample breasts with her odd clients. A wet-nurse to the emotionally damaged, whose husband runs the business and, I presume, takes the money. But the powerlessness of this pathetic sex-slave was not the subject of the programme. Pure peep-show voyeurism showed her on the phone, telling a client that she could fill a pint glass from her breasts, and later feeding him.

There was a beautiful 18-year-old, rigid with tension as she described the utter revulsion she feels for the men who use her. Abused when in care, her only solace comes from the things she can now afford, bought with the money earned from sexual services sold in an alleyway. What was the justification for a series that appears to have no aim beyond peering at these sad victims of an already unpleasant and exploitative life?

Television's obsession with sexuality, however perverted or salacious, is clearly ratings driven, because this stuff gets viewers. A few programme editors will openly confess that "sex sells", but some exist in a state of denial, justifying their offerings in a number of ways - it's "educational and socially responsible", or "a popular expression of human psychology, with a serious intention behind it". Most deny its pornographic content and don't seem to have considered its effect on the viewers. And do any of us know what that long-term effect is? The question of what depraves and corrupts runs like a coal seam through centuries of literature, theology and philosophy. It links the mark of such thinkers as Aquinas, Shelley, Sartre, DH Lawrence and Milton's epic theme in Paradise Lost, where Satan perverted Eve, and Adam and Eve's innocent pleasure in each other is turned into lasciviousness. And isn't it the question of perversion that we really need to address? To pervert, meaning to turn something from its right course, from truth, to ruin, lead astray, could be applied to much of this material.

In the struggle against the prejudices that crippled us, and for the implementation of laws upholding racial and sexual equality, ours has become a more liberal society. But without arguing for censorship, which I do not, have we got lost in our new-found liberalism? Are we afraid to speak out, to condemn things we won't tolerate? As politicians search for an overall plan, a Third Way, there is a recognition by many people of the confusion they feel when it comes to the ethical basis of their life. Just as we seem to lack confidence in our values, so little of the material about sex on television shows any confidence in dealing positively with the significance of sex in our lives.

Sex is, surely, simply good or bad. Good Sex can be any of the following: thoughtful, sensitive, elegant, witty, erotic, mysterious, full of empathy and sometimes self-denial. It overcomes embarrassment and inhibition through love, humour and respect. Bad Sex is brutalising exploitative, coarsening, fetishistic, corrosive of self-esteem, harmful, sad and sick. What we see on television and read in magazines and newspapers falls largely into the Bad-Sex category. There are exceptions, but not many. The use of the word 'documentary' to describe some of these programmes is a pathetic attempt to make them sound respectable, but they do not begin to help us understand more clearly the emotional paucity of the men's changing-room culture we still inhabit.

Perhaps it's all part of the struggle to be free of the embarrassment and pain of Anglo-Saxon inhibitions. In this, the media may be acting as the brutal advance guard for a society in the throes of great changes, and its genuine wish to be more open about our sexual natures. Are we on the right track, and simply struggling through the primeval slime before we emerge into the sunlight? Is it a cleansing process to hear the worst words, witness the crudest sex, and giggle at the worst perversions, before switching off having found a new maturity? Or should we now stand up and say, 'Enough'? We, the public, will no longer buy, read or watch this corrosive stuff.