A few years ago, during the push for tighter regulation of internet porn, I asked a senior political staffer in Parliament House why one or other party did not take up the issue. Opinion polls showed very high percentages in favour of requiring Internet Service Providers to filter out porn. Support for a crack-down was even stronger among parents. It looked like a political no-brainer.

I was not expecting the staffer's answer - although, on reflection, I should have. He said that some political leaders have skeletons in the closet. As porn users themselves, it's just not an issue they want to go near.

Subsequently, Labor's then Communications Minister Stephen Conroy took up the cause. He became the subject of a ferocious attack by internet libertarians (leaving him with what must be the most biased biography on Wikipedia). The silence from his male colleagues was almost audible.

Today's porn plague is due in part to enabling technology and in part to cultural demand. The proliferation of extreme and violent porn on the internet intensifies the shame most men feel after consuming it. The funky Gen-X comedian Dave Hughes once said on television that he always feels dirty afterwards. (Kudos for honesty, I suppose.) It's not just the shame but the hollowness left by the debasement of sex itself that characterises many modern porn genres.

That enfant terrible of French literature, Michel Houellebecq, writes of an era not far into the future in which sex is no more than a pleasant pastime, devoid of sentiment and commitment, a triumph of the male fantasy:

"The centuries-old male project, perfectly expressed nowadays by pornographic films, that consisted of ridding sexuality of any emotional connotation in order to bring it back into the realm of pure entertainment had finally, in this generation, been accomplished."

The world described by Houellebecq is captured in Shame , the 2012 film that traces a few days in the life of a New York man addicted to sex. The lead role of Brandon is played with eerie veracity by Michael Fassbinder. Margaret Pomeranz was dumbstruck by the film: "I don't know what to say about this film except that it is one of the most powerful, emotional film experiences I had last year."

For some, it's comforting to see Shame as a film about no more than a man with a pathological addiction to sex drained of all intimacy. Interpreted that way it has nothing to say about the hyper-sexualized society in which the film is set, a society in which the dreams of liberation have in real life led as much to the brutalisation of sexual pleasure as to its celebration.

Many reviewers said they found Shame hard to watch, perhaps because it was too confronting to follow a man whose outer life concealed an inner chasm filled only by a compulsion to satisfy his animality. Perhaps there is a widespread fear among men that that is what they themselves could become.

If director Steve McQueen had made a film only about cosmopolitan alienation and the emptiness of sexual relationships in the absence of intimacy, it would have been a cliche. But Brandon is a man who lives the pornographic life to an extreme - so extreme that in the climactic scene (in both senses) Fassbinder contorts his face in a way that makes us think not of sexual release but of some kind of existential yearning that ejaculation can only frustrate.

One reviewer felt Shame to be "a suffocatingly moral piece of work." Another attacked its "underlying Puritanism." These are strange projections because the film left one disturbed because of the absence of any moral judgement. Only the plot-line itself, one of descent into self-destruction under the influence of an addiction, makes us recoil from Brandon's carnal binge. But isn't that the lesson of all addictions?

Like Pulp Fiction, which for many was disturbing because the gratuitous violence was not countered by any ethical force (there were, for example, no characters representing the law), there is no conscience anywhere in Shame, no character or force that exercises any kind of ethical restraint or mirror in which the protagonist, and the viewer, can find something to hold onto. Brandon's sister cannot bring him back, for she herself is just as fractured and lost.

One can't help thinking that today's opium of the masses has become, to mix metaphors, bread and porn. "The craze for political revolution in decades past has now turned into a craze for money and sex." These words could have been penned by Houellebecq to describe the betrayal of the promise of the 1960s sexual revolution, but they were in fact written by Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese dissident writer now decaying in jail for his excoriating attacks on the state of political and moral corruption in his native land.

For Liu, far from being the harbinger of political liberalisation, sexual licence is a symptom of China's contemporary spiritual and moral collapse, with its roots in Mao's systematic destruction of all "reactionary" moral traditions. He understands the latter-day Chinese preoccupation with sex as politically convenient: "sexual indulgence becomes a handy partner for a dictatorship that is trying to stay on top of a society of rising prosperity."

Shame was rated for adult viewing. One po-mo critic lamented, "Younger viewers will have to go elsewhere to learn that sex can sometimes be fun," as if young people, now from around age 10, were not already swamped with the sex-is-fun trope and have no need to learn of its dark side.

If only our cultural commentators in the West could understand that, while sexual repression served the social order in the 1950s and 60s, today it is erotic overload that helps prop up the economic system, just as in China.

Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.