An eight-year-old boy appears white-faced in the kitchen with his friend. Curious, his mother goes into his bedroom and looks at the search history on his computer. She laughs when she discovers they’ve Googled ‘boobs’. She stops laughing when she sees the search result: a 15-year-old girl having anal sex with an older man while giving another a blowjob.

Sexualised images stare at us from billboards, TV ads and magazines, accompanying humdrum messages about car insurance, sofa sales or holiday destinations. Our bodies have become the pornographic wallpaper of modern life, while porn has become something altogether darker, harder and more violent.

‘Porn is seeping into popular culture,’ says marriage and family therapist Dr Julie Albright. ‘There is S&M and full nudity on MySpace and, according to a recent survey, there are also 26,000 registered sex offenders on the site.’

Even if we’ve wondered why our partner would rather gawp at fantasy women than come to bed, we may have been reluctant to voice our concerns about porn. We’re afraid if we aren’t enthusiastic about trying something new we’ll appear prudish or boring. Christine Lacy, a sex-therapist from Relate says, ‘Some women will go along with porn fantasies for a while, but then the sex might become so degrading they want out.’ Instead of speaking up about porn, we often prefer to voice our concerns through the more anonymous avenues of online forums and surveys.

‘How can I get rid of the anger towards my ex-boyfriend for his porn addiction? His rejection of me sexually has left me feeling unattractive and betrayed’ – this was recently posted on the Psychologies website. ‘Porn can cause women’s self-confidence to be shot to pieces and it’s important they know what they’re feeling is normal,’ says Lacy. Christie Brinkley’s husband had a £2,000-a-month web-cam habit. If a supermodel can’t compete, who can? According to Lacy, a third of cases at Relate now involve men who have lost interest in sex, often as a result of porn.

Real women versus fantasy women

In a recent study of 15,246 people in the US, Albright confirmed what we’d been fearing: porn is leading men to be more critical of women’s bodies, and less interested in actual sex. ‘Porn encourages the user constantly to seek the new experience, the next girl – it’s not about committed relationships,’ says Albright.

As a lecturer at the University of Southern California, she is seeing first-hand the effect of porn on college students. ‘Young men are expecting instant orgasms from their girlfriends, because the women in porn are faking it. One student told me her boyfriend asked why she didn’t moan “like they do in the porn videos”. What it’s doing is giving young men a very bad message about what pleasures women.

Porn is creating desires that would have confounded Freud. ‘One man was only turned on by smearing and eating faeces. Another client described to me in detail the perverse sex he was into, but he didn’t want to change. Instead, he asked me if I knew any women who would be happy to be involved in this kind of sex.’

Larry and Wendy Maltz, co-authors of ‘The Porn Trap’ (HarperCollins), believe porn changes our brain chemistry. ‘Watching porn releases a cascade of pleasurable hormones and chemicals. Some scientists have likened the changes to those that occur when using cocaine.’ Couple therapists for more than 20 years, the Maltzes recommend a holiday from sex for those corrupted by porn, since frequent viewing of explicit images and masturbation can leave the user desensitised to normal intercourse. For Lacy, ‘the turning point only seems to come when the user begins to see the genuine hurt and distress of their partner’.

Porn and children

‘Orgasms are alien and frightening to a child,’ says John Woods, child and adolescent psychotherapist at London’s Portman Clinic. ‘Being faced with explicit sex scenes on their computer can be disturbing and damaging.’ Woods treats young offenders, ranging in age from nine to 21. ‘Sexually inappropriate behaviour’ now dominates his caseload. ‘It obviously takes more than pornography for an adolescent to abuse a younger child,’ he says, ‘but porn is a very powerful factor.’

So what’s the answer? Putting parental controls on home computers is a good idea and Woods believes schools can play an important role through promoting the importance of meaningful relationships.

Perhaps an internet virus will descend on the contagion, or we’ll reach a titillation tipping point. But most likely we’ll have to learn to live with pornography and teach our children and partners that porn won’t love you back.