The Abject of our Desires.

I remember once chuckling outside, our local newsagent at the leader-board headline for one of those interchangeable women's magazines -- Closmo, Cleopolitan, whatever. `Special Sealed Section,' the blurb enticingly began. `Our Guide to the Ultimate Orgasm!'

What a commercial blunder! Surely, I mused, a cannier editor would have offered readers advice on the penultimate orgasm that month, and so left something to titillate in the next issue. After which, of course, the subject would necessarily be closed, at least until a subsequent generation of naive readers felt the blood stir in their loins as they rent asunder the special sealed section in 2008. Providing, of course, that sex still sells then.

Lately, this has seemed like an apt analogy for the latest target of Senator Alston's ire: the advent of those relatively sexually explicit programs on commercial radio and television, particularly the sex advice talkline on FM radio's Triple M and the ads -- for the oxymoronically termed `phone sex' -- on late night TV.

What's puzzling is that, thirty years after the beginning of the so-called sexual revolution, there's still much left to talk about at all, let alone broadcast. Let's face it, there are only so many physical permutations available to your averagely endowed human couple when it comes to, er, coupling. Beyond the basic `glue tab A to tab B and insert into slot C' instructions that have been around since that notorious special-sealed-section issue of the Kama Sutra, you'd hardly think there'd be much ground -- or grind -- to cover these days. So why the sudden intrusion of the infotainment program into the most intimate crannies of the domestic sphere?

It could, of course, be argued that low levels of literacy beyond the level of glossy magazines have for decades prevented accurate, therapeutic sexual information from trickling down into the wider population, despite the strenuous efforts of Ruth Ostrow and Bettina Arndt. So has this singular failure of the much touted information age to inform, provided a niche market for broadcasters?

Unfortunately, we'd be naive to believe that a commercial media obsessed with its own G-spot won't treat the issue of sexual health as subservient to the greater imperative of healthy ratings. Far from responding to any real need to educate and provide a forum for the mature discussion of sexual issues, media executives are clearly more influenced by the lowest-common-denominator effect, particularly during a post-primetime ratings slump caused as viewers' glands find greater stimulus in the offerings of the internet or cable TV.

Sex is a fascinating subject, but as with the aforementioned women's magazine dilemma, beyond a certain point of mutual interest, in practice it can cease to be a glue, becoming instead a source of friction and even the cause of relationship breakdown, often when either party realizes they've merely become a sexual plaything, while their partner's predilections have evolved into peculiarities. The current obsession of the tabloid media with various new methods of enhancing male erectile tissue -- through either surgery or drugs -- is clearly providing an impetus, if not a rationale, for such possibly pathological folly.

Any self-regulating TV executives hoping to maintain interest in a program by trawling from such a roiling sexual sea will find it all too easy to haul up some ugly creatures in their nets. If only to vary the menu, networks will be under pressure to explore the limits of sexual proclivity. But where can this week's smirking discursive on sex toys lead but to next week's `happiness is a warm cucumber'. And what about the week after that?

Despite wowserish overtones, Senator Alston's finger-wagging reference to what befell Biblical fornicators may nonetheless say something about the fundamental nature of mass media in any age. The Roman games, for instance, though beginning as competitions based on Greek Olympic tradition, also saw a gradual escalation away from public demonstrations of martial prowess to include spectacles of the marital -- and decidedly extramarital -- kind.

Over time, as its leaders competed to titillate their consuming constituency, Roman culture increasingly displayed symptoms of the same kind of spiralling negative feedback loop that our global cultural-industrial complex is clearly evincing now. Well before Rome's demise as a coherent civilisation, its citizens were denied the opportunity of individual identity inside their society and a means of withstanding a public culture which had been increasingly appropriated by political and commercial self-interest. Restricted to inconsequential and immature outlets for self-expression, marginalised and reduced from a role as participant to that of viewer and finally to voyeur by an exploitative and cynical elite, the dumbed-down Roman masses demanded ever more extreme and lurid variations on what had initially been, at worst, gritty spectacles.

Their network overlords, also denied meaningful self-expression within a shallow and amoral political culture, meanwhile resorted to ever more aberrant and ultimately damaging personal sexual activity themselves, influenced both by a profound sense of civic frustration and the philosophy of the arena: let's whoop it up, for tomorrow we die. The resultant personal pathologies produced a general social ennui (soul-rot) that marked an economic malaise which led to the fall of a civilisation.

While it's easy to overstate and doomsay, that seems to be the rub any time an amoral marketplace seeks to wriggle between our sheets; when the private act of sex descends, like public executions, to being little more than a gratuitous sop for mass consumption; and when orgasm, not a loved one, becomes the object of our desires.

Andrew Herrick is a carpenter who works from home.