Hello. My name’s Tom. And I’m an addict. Don’t laugh: I’m addicted to MTV. It’s a serious affliction.

The symptoms manifest themselves in a number of ways. I get disappointed when I walk into a room and find that it isn’t full of black models in bikinis. Whenever I walk into a club, I find myself ordering a bottle of the most expensive Champaign , and uncontrollably start pouring it onto the floor, grinning. I find myself blinking, fast, in the company of beautiful women, to recreate those split-second images of women rubbing their bodies that litter music videos. And I’ve ordered a pair of glasses with built in ‘fish-eye’ lenses, so that I crawl around at knee level looking at girls bottoms. Champaign, black models, fish-eye lenses… OK, so the conventions of RnB music videos are pretty predictable. But the sheer amount of flesh on display makes it utterly compelling viewing. I’m addicted.

A friend of mine once described watching MTV like ‘being punched in the face with naked women’. He wasn’t wrong. Turn the sound down, and you could be watching a porn film. In fact, despite the fact that all of the submissive and frighteningly attractive girls in the videos manage to keep their underwear on, MTV is far more pornographic than any footage downloaded by your brother from the internet featuring a naked dwarf and a pair of rubber gloves. MTV is ten times more powerful because music videos work on what is implied. MTV knows something that the porn industry doesn’t: that what you don’t see is always far more arousing than what you do.

Old-school feminists like Andrea Dworkin used to take a firm stand against pornography. It’s an idea that’s completely out of fashion. In today’s world of gentlemen’s clubs and lapdancing franchises, where porn-stars are as well known as soap-stars, porn is overground. It’s no longer the kind of stuff purchase by dirty old men under the counter in brown paper bags, but is out there, in your face, its stylistic trappings stolen by everyone from the fashion industry to women’s magazines. Nowadays, we’re supposed to find pornography acceptable, liberating, even, blowing away the stuffy prejudices of the past.

People assume that feminists objected to porn because they were prudes. This isn’t true. The feminist argument was that pornography is a bad thing because it objectifies women. It turns them into the perpetual subjects of male desire – never acting, always acted upon. The feminist writer Germaine Greer once wrote “Never underestimate how much men hate women.” The most visible manifestation of this is in the porn industry, one which has rapidly moved away from sex in itself, towards humiliation. Hence the shift towards anal sex, twenty years ago considered a niche market; hence the shift towards modern humiliations like bukkake: look it up on the internet (just make sure you’re not enjoying a yoghurt at the time). The phenomenon of poverty-stricken Romanian girls being sold into sex slavery in the west and being raped by “as many as 40 men a day” (as a recent Guardian investigation suggested) isn’t some cruel underside of the sex industry. It is the purest expression of a business whose whole aim is to rob women of their autonomy and dignity.

So the problem with porn isn’t what it depicts. It’s the way it depicts women. This leads us to a big problem: almost everything that surrounds us, from MTV to advertising billboards, could be condemned as ‘pornography’. The net has widened. So, what are we to do? Call for a Stalinist ban on anything that ‘objectifies’ women? Get rid of almost every men’s magazine and a fair share of those for women? Censor MTV until they start depicting ‘modern, liberated women’ doing ‘modern liberating’ things like mending cars and building houses? I’m not sure. It’s certainly true that women’s bodies are depicted across the media in a matter that is pretty objectionable. But, regardless of the arguments, I’m not watching MTV any more. You see, I’m on the road to recovery…