I am naturally monogamous-except when married. My impression is that most people are the same.

There is something distinctly anti-aphrodisiacal about the business of household duties: the spousal talk of bills, of broken drains, of electronics gone bung, of catshit on the lino, of mess. Children, too, are off-putting, all of them malevolent disciples of Saffy (the finger-wagging, snarly, termagant-daughter from Absolutely Fabulous); their disapproval, even disgust, at their parents’ clandestine antics must be the biggest sexual downer since bromide. How can any moderately sympathetic, loving, omniscient Creator have thought that sex could survive even a year or two of standard married humdrum, let alone a lifetime?

Something ought to be done!

The paradox is profound. Sex is now a commodified, ubiquitous aspect of life: every women’s mag offers advice on blow-job techniques or dogging sites; every newspaper has updates on genital flashing by no-knickers celebs; mainstream movies don’t even simulate sex any more, instead requiring actors actually to fuck. But private life can be a desert. The backdrop is a brothel, yet the bedroom at home is monastic. Not really a surprise when you appreciate the desperation of media facing extinction in a ruthlessly competitive, lucrative and changing market where anything goes. Websites offer your favourite film and pop stars (well, second-favourite) with close-ups of pink bits and every imaginable priapic contortion.

How are folk supposed to cope with this? When I first went to Israel many years ago, I saw a bus shelter that had been blown up by a bomb planted by the Orthodox Jews, who didn’t like the bikini advert that adorned it. It was madness-but I can understand how they felt. Everywhere you look, bodies are being thrust at you to sell gear. Sensitive types will-must-inevitably be affronted.

I am nearly always against censorship. It doesn’t work, least of all online. Yet you have to wonder at the sheer quantity of smut. The US alone spends $US10 billion a year on porn, more than Hollywood does on feature films; and the figure is expected to grow, according to Bill Asher, president of Vivid Entertainment Group, by 500 per cent every year as Internet videos improve. Why do so many citizens of a largely devout Christian nation, led by a born-again fundamentalist, need to watch so many strangers bonk? This is an industry, don’t ever forget, that rivals armaments in its global reach and impact. We are not talking about an occasional peccadillo, a rare sticky indulgence most of us might smile at. The World Is Awash.

What am I missing? I have never seen actual contemporary porn. I did, on your behalf just now, try to put key words or terms into Google; but I instantly got demands for credit card numbers (you’d be insane to comply) or infinite nonsensical reroutes. So I gave up.

I wanted to see how producers manage to get any variety beyond the yelping and the humping. Twenty positions or combinations, yes, but thousands’? What do they all do?

My enquiry (research, officer!) is strictly ethnological, of course. There may be, you see, an educational function to watching others having sex. I once had a long and thoughtful discussion with John Williams, the brilliant Australian guitarist, about his father Leonard’s studies of woolly monkeys. These charming creatures need to see adults copulating to know how it’s done. If kept innocent they are incapable, wrote Leonard Williams, of reproducing. Other monkey species may be similar in this.

This may be the clue. Porn is educational! These days we in the West no longer occupy forest dwellings, where once bucolic bonkers could be observed and notes taken; nor are we still bundled together in houses where, even as late as the eighteenth century, so many were crammed together that you’d be inches away from a loud coupling whether you liked it or not. Now we are all in sepulchral isolation and only the thin wall of the kit home can bring us close to the secrets of real sex. Even then it sounds more like suppressed asthma than conjugal delight.

(Porn may indeed have a role in education, but the real question is why it is such big business. Every posh hotel with exquisitely courteous, swooning staff has rooms replete with Hot Adult Filth on the TV. Does the manager, Sir Humphrey Appleby personified, actually vet this stuff?)

What do you know about sex if no one tells you? I worked out some of it by the age of eight. I knew that somehow willies were involved and was impressed at the size of babies. I thought hard on this and came up with the answer: testicles are the new life forms, and to get things going you had to place one or two testicles inside the mother’s belly. I’d seen enough inflated women to know that part, though how you got such an egg-sized bollock in there through her navel was the real mystery. And why would you want to? Must hurt men horribly, and she wouldn’t fancy it much either!

Yet there were children, so someone must have been facing up to the task. One of life’s endurance tests, I thought to my young self-like the prospect of death. My musings were not much improved by talking with kids at school (this was my volkschule in Vienna), all of whom provided their own appalling variations on a sex theme of Hogarthian squalor that would have sent most sensible girls screaming to nunneries and boys to the eternal distractions of mountain climbing, slalom practice and invading Poland.

Did our ancestors know what made babies? You have to wonder. The sex writer Shere Hite convened a meeting of anthropologists at the American Association of Science conference a few years ago and the consensus was that the hominids and their modern human successors did not know much. But life was so relatively restricted (governed, as David Attenborough once observed, by the three Fs: feeding, fighting… and the other one) that sex had to have been something a little more than just an evening’s entertainment. But whether they did or not, all those thousands of years ago, there must have been plenty to observe-and to learn from.

Porn, in this analysis, must therefore be seen as a modern cry for help. It is not necessarily something dirty or vile but an avenue for learning. Young people need to know what their parts are for and what the fuss is about. Grown-ups need to build ways out of routine and repetition. (Most pornography is crude, even brutal, just as teenage sex is appallingly unsophisicated and positively unhealthy. Porn is to good sex as Blazing Saddles is to animal husbandry.) Sex skills and pornography therefore need to be-isn’t this obvious?-on the high school curriculum and part of tertiary courses.

And not only studies but practical classes. This raises the tricky question of where to get the attractive expert sex surrogates, but I am sure we can leave this to the federal education minister and his or her bureaucrat grandees. These hands-on sex educators must not look like teachers-otherwise we’d be warped for life-but be attractive members of a slightly older age group. High schoolers would be taught by twentysomethings, seniors by those in their thirties. I am not sure how these sex instructors would be tested and themselves given certificates, but Canberra would find a way. It would be a kind of national service. Many would be pleased to do their duty. Fucking for Australia.