Olivia Lichtenstein forces herself to watch porn films for the Daily Mail

Rather bizarre column in today's Daily Mail by Olivia Lichtenstein, who was asked by the Daily Mail to watch the kind of porn films that you can get through Sky (not the hardcore Oksana Flic En Uniforme type but the rubbish ones).

Not having spent much time watching porn myself, I was interested to hear that "Much of the footage is of a very amateur, 'readers' wives' nature.While many of the women look self-conscious and embarrassed, others approach their task with a gusto that seems born of desperation." and that there is a porn film called Dirty Chavs.

Olivia Lichtenstein also attempts to analyse why Richard Timney watches these films, saying "Could this be the key to why Mr Timney likes it so much? He has such a powerful wife - who is also his boss."

So, shockingly, porn could be argued to be degrading to women and there is a lot of it out there, although to read Olivia Lichtenstein's column you'd think it was being handed out at primary school assemblies "Hundreds of hours of this garbage television are available each day from ten at night until four in the morning in our living rooms - the result of a dangerously misguided liberalism which says there should be no censorship, no moral checks - that we are all grown up enough to see and do whatever we wish."

However, you have to subscribe first and pay 15.99 a month, with an additional £15 joining fee. You also need to know how to get past parental controls.

The real issue is that the porn films that Jacqui Smith's husband watched were charged to the British taxpayer, not that Jacqui Smith's husband watched porn.

This article is an excuse to show scantily clad pictures. In fact, it's almost a promotion for these kinds of porn films.

The Daily Mail highlights that Olivia Lichtenstein is "a writer and Bafta award-winning documentary maker who's married with children aged 15 and 20". Good, because I don't want porn analysed by anyone who hasn't won a Bafta.

If you really want to see something degrading to women, you could watch Headcases, a "satire" show that mocks Jacqui Smith's breasts by having Gordon Brown ask her to appear topless during a terror threat alert.

As Nick Cohen points out in Waiting for the Etonians, the writers of Headcases don't want to attack anything in case people are uncomfortable.

I'd love to know how the Daily Mail proposed this to Olivia Lichtenstein. She's only written one article for them before. Did they ring her up and say "Could you watch some boring porn for us and then denounce it while relating it to Jacqui Smith's latest expose?"

If the Daily Mail did review porn each week while pretending to be shocked, I wonder what would happen to its readership figures.

Richard Littlejohn was also interested in how easy it is to obtain porn, reading the Television X website.

"In alphabetical order, it starts with 'Anal Boutique' and goes downhill from there. Suffice it to say, the line-up specialises in what we in the trade call 'acts too disgusting to be described in a family newspaper'."

Well it seems that porn has been described in depth in the pages of the Daily Mail. Wonder how many readers will read the two articles and think "So that's where I can get some cheap porn from".

(If you did read the Daily Mail articles and think that, there is also quite a lot of porn on the Internet.)