Is porn now respectable?

On Channel 4 a woman, her boyfriend and her mother are chatting about their experiences of acting in pornographic videos. "I heard you thoroughly enjoyed it," says the daughter to her mother roguishly.

"I always knew that this is what she'd do, even when she was a young girl," says the mother contentedly about her daughter. The younger woman's boyfriend describes a funny thing that happened to him the other day when he was having anal sex with a stranger who hadn't douched thoroughly. The three laugh together as cosily as if they were swapping tips on cooking rather than sex work.

Pornography: The Musical alternates between documentary interviews with porn actresses and songs performed by the actresses to the cameras. Although some commentators have eagerly suggested that Pornography: The Musical is a shocking work with graphic sequences and a gritty approach to the industry, nothing could be further from the truth. It is a bit like an industry promotion video, with soft-focus sequences in lapdancing clubs intercut by old-fashioned songs performed by girls wearing feather boas or stroking a python.

But it is hardly a oneoff. As pornography itself keeps pushing the boundaries of what can be seen, so it keeps encroaching further and further into mainstream entertainment. Television schedules are being filled by documentaries on lapdancers, porn stars and porn barons, each one claiming, unbelievably, to lift the lid on a little-known industry.

Yet another one, Sex Empires, started last Sunday on BBC2, rehashing the well-worn stories of Playboy's Hugh Hefner, Penthouse's Bob Guccione and Hustler's Larry Flynt in "the golden age of girlie magazines". Channel 5 has worked hard to build a television audience for explicit sex since launching in
1997. Typical programming was a Sex and Shopping series in 1999, which the British Broadcasting Commission censured for showing "female sexual organs in detail". But relatively few viewers complained.

On other channels - without wandering into porn pay-per-view - the culture gets even more enthusiastic about pornography. Bravo!, for example, is celebrating the life of "pornstar and top director Randy West"; another offering is Sin Cities, about sex tourism.

Feature film makers have also found a new source of earthy heroes and heroines in the porn industry, and the saucier the better. In Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson was applauded for presenting the world of 1970s pornography in an affectionate, kooky style. But Wonderland, the forthcoming film about the life of the porn star John Holmes, has been criticised by reviewers for concentrating on the sad end of Holmes's life rather than his "Parnassian achievements as a love god", as one reviewer put it.

Given the new acceptability of porn, it's odd that nobody has set a soap opera in it yet - but wait! They have. American audiences are now seeing a glossy, mainstream soap opera from Fox called Skin, in which Hollywood veteran Ron Silver stars as a porn mogul and real porn stars are drafted in to play themselves. Because of the huge presence of pornography in our culture, it's inevitable that mainstream television producers, film makers, writers and artists will respond.

And on the internet, porn seems to lurk around every corner: in 1997 there were about 20,000 registered pornographic websites, now there are said to be more than 300,000, and the number is growing every week. Of the UK's 10 million regular internet users, more than a third log on to porn sites, it is claimed. Having seen the circulation of his magazine drop from five million to around a tenth of that, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione has admitted there is now "no future" for mass market adult magazines because technology can sate all our desires.

According to a recent book, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs And Cheap Labour In The American Black Market, by Eric Schlosser, pornography, including videos, the internet, live sex acts and cable TV generates around $10 billion (£6 billion) a year in the US alone. Some commentators have talked alarmingly about a culture bigger than all other art and film combined. Even the cooler heads who examined the industry data for Forbes magazine estimate that the American porn industry grosses $4billion.

There is something scary in the way that pornography spans all countries, all cultures, and the way that it has become so pressing by dropping into email inboxes without warning.

Pornography has an endless appetite for pushing at boundaries and the boundaries seem to be constantly flexible. As one taboo after another - pubic hair, erect penises, penetration, anal penetration - has been breached in openly sold magazines and on accessible websites, you can't help wondering where pornography will go next. What can hold back its seemingly inexorable growth and acceptability?

That doesn't mean that all pornography is mainstream, or that all mainstream culture that celebrates sex is pornographic. Although our culture has become more sexually explicit, there is still a real difference between, say, the actresses on Sex and the City talking about having anal sex in their relationships and the women on hardcore websites actually doing it. There is still a real divide between the Adult Channel and a storyline in Friends in which Chandler is caught out watching pornographic television.

But references to pornography, its props and personnel, have certainly become mainstream. And porn has become a source of inspiration whenever a little frisson of naughtiness is required, whether that's Kate Moss pole dancing or Madonna wearing a Tshirt bearing the legend Porn Star, or John Galliano sending his models out in rubber gear and carrying whips.

One troubling development is that where pornography is used as a subject for more highbrow art or fiction, it is so often taken up by men who seem to believe that they can represent what the women in the industry are feeling better than the women themselves. The producers of Pornography: The Musical clearly felt something would be added to the women's experiences if songs with banal lyrics were put into their mouths, and yet they added nothing.

Similarly, it is fashionable for male novelists to take porn as their subject with a blithe disregard for the idea that women's and men's experiences of the porn industry might be very different. Martin Amis in Yellow Dog, Irvine Welsh in Porno, Tibor Fischer in Voyage to the End of the Room: all draw pictures of women who are sex workers, but they shrug off the drawbacks of their work. These novelists push their own views on pornography through the voices of willing female characters, and in doing so they blur the line between women's own sense of their sexuality and what is presented in pornography.

Indeed, whenever pornography hits mainstream culture, it gets airbrushed into something more acceptable. But as pornography gets bigger, it is vital that we confront the harm that it can do. You don't have to take up a firmly anti-pornography viewpoint to admit this harm exists. You just need a little honesty. The naive habit of presenting pornography as something lighter and easier than it really is makes it tough to confront the full scope of its reality.

No wonder Tony Blair was taken aback when people - including some of his own ministers - expressed outrage at the Labour Party taking donations from Richard Desmond, the owner of Express Newspapers and a raft of "skin" magazines. "If someone is fit and proper to own one of the major newspaper groups in the country, there is no reason why we shouldn't accept donations from them," Blair remarked.

But the more pornography is seen as acceptable, what gets lost is its full impact - both on those who produce it and those who consume it. The usual run of documentaries likes to concentrate on women in control of their work, who run their own websites or who take photographs for Playboy, say. Less empowered, less happy and articulate women get shunted to the edges of the picture.

It has become utterly unfashionable to suggest that some women might end up working in the industry not as a cool career choice but through pressure or poverty or the real absence other choices.

So when one of the women in Pornography: The Musical talks with miserable precision about her traumatic and exhausting experiences of making a "water sports" video, and says, "inside, you're screaming", it comes as a surprise. When she goes on to talk about how she regrets what she does and says, "If you go into pornography, you lose any hope of bettering yourself. It is like having a tattoo on your forehead saying I am a slut", you start to feel rather uncomfortable. But that discomfort is all very quickly smoothed over as the editor cuts to an enthusiastic lapdancer telling us how she loves her career or to another song sequence.

It is rare to hear these voices, the voices of women who have found it hard to make real choices about their work, the voices of women who regretted what they did or found themselves disempowered through their work. If some women are screaming inside while they are smiling outside, then they should be allowed to express those screams.

And it has also become hard to talk about the harm done to the people who consume pornography. With the - necessary - outrage about the consumption of child pornography, there is a concomitant assumption that any other kind of pornography is fine.

But almost everyone knows that there is a level of pornography that isn't fine for them. For some of us it stops even before soft porn, for others the level lies elsewhere. But there is a point where they feel that the pictures stick like burrs in their minds, disrupting the continuum of their own fantasies and the particular sensuality of their own relationships.

So if we're going to hear so much about pornography, let's hear about the dark side as well as the light.