Tim Lott: I look at porn. Am I a monster?

I was genuinely surprised by the news that nine million adult males in the UK out of a possible 22 million have accessed porn sites on the internet.

Can the number really be so small?

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I likewise found unbelievable the information that in the past month, one in four of those aged between 25 and 49 have had a swift glance at the likes of Tugjobs.com or Bangmydonkeyupthebumwithacreambun.com. (I made those up, which is not to say they do not exist.)

Four in four is more like it. Show me a man who has not accessed porn on the internet, and I'll show you either a liar, a self-deceiver or a moral fanatic who is probably going to go mad with a meat cleaver in Tesco's one day when it just gets too much to hold in. Or someone who does not own a computer. After all, why not? It is free. It is downloadable And above all, it is there.

Of course, there are moral questions with accessing porn sites. Primary among these is, will anybody catch you? Then you have the moral question of how to explain to a disapproving third party, probably a woman, why you should feel the need for such mindless, degrading, shoddy and disgusting activities. To which I can only respond, again, only slightly more plaintively, because it is there.

There is a less flip answer to the ethical question of porn, and I will give it. But first, I want to sketch a brief social history of porn from the perspective of a 50-year-old London male (name and address withheld).

This hypothetical male got his first sight of a naked woman when he was an infant. In those days, the sight of a pair of bare breasts, particularly lacking the disfigurement of airbrushed nipples, was as rare as a well-cut pair of trousers. For most voyeuristic activity, this man was forced to turn to black and white reproductions of the Venus de Milo in Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopaedia.

Later, visits to the barber produced slightly more contemporary stimulation in the form of Health and Efficiency magazines (naked, smiling Germans throwing beachballs at one another), or if you were lucky, a well thumbed and smudgy copy of Parade, or Titbits.

Porn took a different turn in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was simultaneously condemned and appropriated by separate wings of the women's movement. The likes of Germaine Greer and Erica Jong took the part of sexual liberation. This involved Germaine disrobing for the underground magazine Suck and Erica's fictional alter ego/affectionate creation Isadora Wing journeying in search of the "zipless fuck". At the other pole, there were contemporaries such as Andrea Dworkin who believed the act of heterosexual intercourse was intrinsically an act of rape.

"Objectification" was also a buzzword. To pose in your frillies, or nothing at all (I could never remember which was considered to be more reprehensible) for the delectation of dribbling (they were always portrayed as dribbling) sexist men was to conspire in the marginalisation of women, and ensure their continuation as playthings and virgins/whores in a patriarchal society. Or something like that.

The high point of the Germaine/ Erica approach to pornography came in the 1970s with the popularisation of hardcore films including Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones. These were seen by some feminists as being about women having the political right to explore their own sexuality. Crucially, both Linda Lovelace and Georgina Spelvin (Miss Jones) seemed to be, and claimed to be, having a jolly good time on camera (though Lovelace later vigorously denied it).

This superficially happy-go-lucky approach to all things pornographic took a blow in the 1980s when New Romanticism in music and fashion jostled alongside the new puritanism in porn. Clare Short's 1986 battle to ban Page Three girls surfed the crest of a wave of female disapproval of pornography and, one suspected, sex in general. There were women I heard of at this time who would not allow anything other than the missionary position because more elaborate approaches were politically degrading. Even the innocent blow-job was frowned upon, and anal sex was entirely off the liberal heterosexual menu.

Porn largely consisted of nasty, childish magazines such as Fiesta, Hustler and Men Only, and all came under fire, often by women who favoured footwear that was insulated, symbolically, against chemical spillage. The Dworkin camp, it appeared, had won the battle against the unwelcome intrusions of the male gaze.

Then the terms of the debate shifted again. After a brief moment of respectability for men's magazines including Esquire and GQ in the late 1980s, most of them reverted to their essential functions of covert stroke magazines, but rather like the Hugh Hefner's Playboy, they disguised their nature by slotting in well-meaning articles to persuade the user that he was, in fact, a reader.

As the Loaded generation of the 1990s superseded these relatively high-minded magazines, and dragged them down in their wake, Madonna had more or less single-handedly effected a revolution in the way women saw themselves sexually.

Post Madonna - and you can throw in Camille Paglia if you must, so long as you do it respectfully, sensitively and with her explicit consent - it became an act of liberation for women to display themselves on their own terms (whatever the hell that means) for the titillation of men, and perhaps other women. Sexuality was power, so why not use it?

This paradigm remains essentially in place, with ladettes in their hundreds of thousands getting pissed and going on the pull, from the Bigg Market to Faliraki. Women, in other words, treating men as sex objects.

Which brings us almost up to date, and back to internet porn. For something has changed again. Whereas at one time porn for most men meant softcore, largely because of availability and the simple embarrassment of walking into a shop and politely asking for hardcore, now it was the touch of a button away.

But is it moral? No one really has a clue any more. In the 1960s and 1970s, most men did not really give it a second thought. By the 1980s, there were plenty of men who felt the objectification of women was infantile and wrong , as portrayed in the most unapologetic stroke mags (Juicy Jugs, for god's sake!) and on Page Three.

On the other hand, many thought genuine hardcore porn, if man and woman were having a good time, seemed relatively egalitarian. After all, if we are to believe the Madonna thesis that women are as keen on sex, even anonymous sex, as men, why not? What's the harm in having sex in front of a camera for cash? On this view of things, it rewarded participants and observers alike.

Then the internet opened up a whole new can of worms. Because the things you see on the web are as far away from 1970s "innocence" or 1980s "empowerment" as you can imagine. In fact, for the most part, they are truly disgusting. The hatred of women, always implicit on the fringes of traditional porn, is now unfettered and undisguised.

Porn websites talk almost entirely in a language of dirty sluts, whores and bitches. There are sites such as Brutal Blowjobs which mean half-choking a woman in a way you can imagine. Many of the women are not going to be making a (relatively) free choice like the fame-hungry bimbos of Page Three notoriety. Given the unregulated global nature of the operation, a lot of them are likely to be women abused, enslaved, drugged or brutalised into participating.

Apart from this, the level of idiocy and pathetic adolescent language on the internet takes the game to a new low. And if you want to find your way there, there are children. And animals. And children and animals. And god only know what else; it is a landscape of terrible human degradation.

It would be so tempting to stand above the fray and wash your hands of it all, protesting that it is now completely beneath one. The truth is that although most men are genuinely repulsed by what may be glimpsed on the internet, curiosity may still often win out. Because it is an irreducible truth and a constant that there are very few men morally delicate enough not to feel the magnetic pull of porn.

(Of course there are millions who will lay claim to that moral delicacy, but I would refer them to that great Joni Mitchell lyric: "Like a priest with a pornographic watch/looking and longing on the sly/ sure you can strike it from your uniform/but you can't get it out of your eye.")

What is the fallen liberal to do? He is bound to be disgusted to use the entrance to what are unquestionably nowadays moral sewers, and yet at the end of the day, he is still a man with all that implies. If only he were culturally constructed he could be redeemed. But he is not. He is intractable.

Perhaps there is only one solution, the hardcore equivalent of the Fair Trade logo, which is state-licensed to ensure women participating a certain website or magazine have not been in any way coerced, enjoy the protection of safe sex, and are properly rewarded for participation. Good production values would be nice, too.

With a Fair Porn logo, the viewers could successfully persuade themselves that the sex worker engaging in erotic display for their solitary pleasure - or perhaps mutual pleasure, because there is certainly no shortage of women who are voyeurs - is actually enjoying herself. Or at least not hating herself, and therefore the imagined viewer.

And this leads us to the greatest male fantasy, possibly competing on equal terms with death. This is not power and not rape, or the sight of a woman screaming in pain and humiliation. Those desires arise truly arise out of the death instinct, or Freud's depiction of Thanatos.

No, this true sex fantasy is rather to make a woman, as Woody Allen rather mysteriously put it in Annie Hall, "miaow like a cat". I am not quite sure what he is talking about. But I know what he means. And unlike rape and humiliation, I believe impulse arises out of Eros, the life instinct. This is the true meaning of erotica.

Because the best, most civilised voyeur - and such a thing can be imagined as existing - will seek a fantasy about not only what men want, but about what women want too. And that is not shabby and it is not hateful. It is simply one aspect of what it is to be human.