For the lads ?

'Lad's mags' work to a winning if cynical formula. Football, gadgets, bloke-lit writing Andy McNab style ... and tits. It's s all a bit crap really but it's the tits that have got them in trouble and now there's a move to have them treated like porn.

Strange really - they are also fixated with horrible ghoulish freak-show images of 'the boy who is turning into a dolphin' or gore-fest images of horrendous injuries. But apparently that's all ok - it's the tits that really seem to upset people.

Much like the page 3 of an earlier generation the women featured are all non-threatening 'girls next door'; reality TV rejects and wannabes, soap cast-offs and the latest phenomena, amateur 'high street honeys'.

In an age when the real thing is only a couple of clicks away it is fairly evident that this isn't porn - its cheap titillation.You might not like it but try legislating about it and you're going to end up looking pretty daft.

It all falls apart when you try to define and quantify what is and isn't deemed acceptable. From there it's but a short step to counting nipples and formulating bizare formulas that a bare bottom is the equivalent of six topless pictures. And before you know it you've banned McGill's saucy postcards and Carry-On films.

I've blogged about this before. The only safe way through the moral maze is to forget our own tastes and remember that it's just pictures. There's plenty of truly horrible shit in the real world to get worked up about - let's concentrate on that.