SEX! Sex! Sex! Well, I wanted to grab your attention and encourage you to read this column. And you're reading it. So it works. That therefore justifies the three mentions of sex at the beginning of this article, doesn't it? If it gets your attention, you can't argue with its effectiveness. Retail is detail. Or is this ejaculation a bit premature? (Geddit? If you don't, get your grandchild to explain it to you. And tell you the joke about condominiums. You're clearly not wired into this modern world. Have you thought about therapy?)

Sex sells. Anything. But it exacts a price. More of that later. But just in case you lose interest - Sex! Sex! Sex! There you are, back on course! Even Bill Clinton's reading it now.

Look at the television programmes. They're full of grunting and groaning and hairy arses bobbing up and down in what looks like synchronised swimming without the smiles - and that's just the children's programmes. We haven't had demonstrations of putting condoms on a banana on Blue Peter yet, but it'll come, so to speak. This week's parody is next week's po-faced reality.

Look at some of the titles of TV documentaries. Human sexuality has been examined from every possible angle on every possible channel, on every possible evening. All in the name of science. Now it's the turn of poor inoffensive copulating animals who are only minding their own business. And insects! Have you read about the proposed TV documentary on the sex life of midges which have been injected with minuscule doses of Viagra? (OK, I just made that up. But we are now inhabiting such fruitcake territory that it's hard to tell the difference.)

The other morning the telly was on at breakfast in the B&B at which I was staying. Emotional mayhem had apparently broken out in the television studio, with people shouting and sobbing. Somebody famous for being famous was presiding over a programme titled: Sex: are you getting enough? All this at 9.10 in the morning! Have we all gone off our heids? How long can civilisation continue when so much of its televised output seems to consist of dysfunctional exhibitionists waving their emotional willies around for the benefit of jaded voyeurs?

Some of the late evening TV ''comedy''

drivel would rot the brain of a Lochgelly gnat. Sex is such an inherently preposterous activity that it is rightly a subject for raunchy and raucous humour. But serial mediocrity paraded

in front of lobotomised studio guests who explode with uncontrollable laughter at every mention of the word ''shag'' is not the stuff of a satisfying adult life. The soaps have gone bonkers (geddit?) with sexual plot-lines which make ordinary fetishists look like Sunday school teachers. (Maybe they are.) Even trailers for classical costume dramas treat us all like half-maddened sexual obsessives.

What of the spaces in between the programmes? There is no respite. Interested in buying a car? On comes the cutesy model to say, with a knowing look, ''Size matters''. Is that right, hen? This advert is not produced by Son of Einstein.

But sex sells. That's the bottom line. (Cue hysterical studio laughter.) It sells cars, newspapers, clothes - and now, legal services. One of Scotland's leading legal firms, Ross Harper and Murphy, is selling its wares by means of a TV commercial featuring a couple in bed.

It's all so crushingly predictable. There is the inevitable outcry. Critics are patronised as

out-of-touch bampots who don't live in the modern world. The firm laps up the resultant publicity, which is precisely what it wanted in the first place. This is a very tired, dog-eared script. A spokesman pronounces weightily that the strength of the ad is that it is ''open to interpretation''. Aye, right pal. Is this what is known as diminished responsibility? ''It has proved very successful - the phone has never stopped ringing.'' That's all right, then.

Sex today is a marketing opportunity, a photo-call, a major piece of the commercial action. The filmy images are of fantasy, simulated sex, not of genuine human relationships.

Real sex is a vehicle for ecstasy, passion, affection; it is also all too often an arena of terrible woundedness, of sadness, of abuse. It is, above all, intensely personal and private, not for the gaze of the bored slavering voyeurs we are becoming.

What is this globalised sexualisation of ordinary discourse all about? When I was brought up among the political wolves of west Fife I was taught to ask a key question of any cultural and political shift. It is this: whose interests are at stake? If you follow the trail you usually end up sniffing money, serious money.

And the price? It will ultimately be paid in the dark coinage of human misery by our children. Their innocence is being violated by a sad, exploitative culture of tacky ''adulthood'' and ersatz relationships. Implants for

12-year-olds is next on the agenda, according to yesterday's Herald.

Glenn Hoddle rightly walked the plank for saying absurd things which damaged innocent people. Absurd sexualisation which hurts kids, however, is a dogmatic zone which is apparently exempt from serious critique.

This is not freedom but enslavement, in a world which is increasingly orchestrated by rapacious predators with lecherous smiles, and empty eyes that tell us that no-one is at home.