Now the plebs can be sexual deviants too

It's Sunday morning, so another tough decision. Shall I go to church, or shall I write about sex fantasy stories on the Internet?

OK, not that tough. And the day after Pride London (not London Pride - a beer I've never rated) seems an ideal time to write about sexual deviancy.

Back in the good old days, only the rich and powerful were allowed to be sexual deviants. Lord such-and-such might have a taste for young boys, but he was decent enough to keep it private and, in so many other ways, he was a fine and upstanding chap so it could be overlooked.

But the hoi-polloi were a different matter. As we all know from the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial (it's the only thing we do all know from it), the prosecuting barrister rather blew his case by suggesting that, whilst the book might not corrupt a gentleman, his wife and servants were another matter.

Mervyn Griffiths-Jones may have been behind the times, but not that much.

The last eighty years has seen the democratisation of pornography. From the tijuana bibles - erotic cartoon strips popular in the first half of the 20th century through to the growth of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and their ilk to the massive boom of the Internet age that's made all sorts of specialist material available with a few clicks of a mouse.

And the curious thing, as I noted a few days ago, is that men haven't been turned into wild beasts as a result. Men aren't all treating their wives and girlfriends as mere objects, or committing more sexual assaults than in the past. If anything, we've gone the other way - western societies where we have access to all this stuff are also those which have seen the rise of feminism, greater equality for women and the growth of the idea that the husband/wife relationship is one of partnership, not to mention the shocking arrival on the scene of the considerate lover.

So, joy of joys, it turns out that the authors of sex stories on the Internet aren't to be prosecuted for obsenity.

This, you may have seen, all came about when the decision was made to prosecute 35-year-old civil servant Darryn Walker who had written a little story about the members of Girls Aloud (who, I'm told, are a popular music group, similar to the Supremes), being kidnapped, sexually tortured and finally killed.

Darryn's story is just one of thousands - millions probably - exploring every imaginable dark recess of our sexuality (and probably a few we'd never imagine). They come from men and women of all ages, all nationalities. Few have any great literary merit, being written to be read one-handed.

There's a rather good article on the issues around these stories in yesterday's Guardian which is definitely worth a read.

Although attempting to ban this stuff in the Internet age is obviously futile, it seems to me that there are a couple of reasons why we might want to if we could.

If there was a link between the material and crime, that could give us justification. Perhaps people who read the stories are more likely to treat women badly, or to commit rape or sexual assault, or maybe the act of writing a story - putting a mental fantasy onto the page - makes the author more likely to do something nasty.

Unfortunately for the would-be censors, there's no evidence of any of that.

We might also want to censor these stories simply on the yuk factor. No matter how cosmopolitan your sexuality, there's bound to be things out there that disgust you. I can understand wanting to ban stories on that basis, although I disagree with it.

But that battle's long been lost - we could clog up every court in the land for years with obscenity trials and it really wouldn't make any difference.

The truth seems to be something more interesting.

It turns out, despite what many of our ancestors thought, that you can enjoy all sorts of kinky, unusual and downright bizarre sexual practices, have all sorts of frankly disturbing sexual fantasies, not be posh and still be a normal person. You can be into S&M or any number of other fetishes and not be mentally ill, unstable or even damaged.

Who'd have thought you could get your rocks off fantasing about torturing and killing people and still be a perfectly decent, normal person who's no danger to anyone - but that's what the evidence tells us.

Life's rich tapestry, eh.