Hey you – what are you doing to halt the sexualisation of children? We know it's happening. It must be. It's in the papers and on the news all the time, usually accompanied by a photograph of a kiddy-size T-shirt with "Future Pornstar" on it or a padded bikini designed for eight-year-olds. What next? Lapdancing poles for foetuses? Jesus. What can we do about it? Easy: pretend sex simply doesn't exist. Like the Tooth Fairy myth, but in reverse. Next time a child asks you where babies come from, just shrug, then ask them what a "baby" is.

I don't have children, but I was one once (still am, come to think of it). It was different in my day. Sexual imagery wasn't shoved in your face, unless you watched TV or looked at a magazine or newspaper or walked past a billboard advertising absolutely anything.

The rudest imagery appeared in schools – scrawled in the margins of exercise books. That iconic schoolboy's doodle – the puerile "spunking knob" – how did we know what that looked like? It's like a cave painting symbolising not fertility, but gleeful stupidity; an image hard-wired into the mind of every sniggering boy in Britain. Everyone smiles inside when they see the spunking knob scrawled in the dust on the back of a van, or scribbled on a poster. Is it a global phenomenon? Strikes me as inherently British. It should've been our logo for the 2012 Olympics.

But I digress. It's perhaps more accurate to say that "saucy and sexist" imagery abounded when I was a kiddywink. Legs & Co on Top of the Pops. Barbara Windsor losing her top in Carry On Camping. When I was about seven, I loved the animated "Captain Kremmen" sequences from Kenny Everett's original ITV show, partly because they included a character called "Carla" who was an insanely buxom cross between Lieutenant Uhura and Marilyn Monroe: probably my first TV crush. The cartoon was jam-packed with double-entendres, which zoomed over my head, but there was no mistaking Carla's, um, impact.

Generally, the early TV and films I encountered depicted "sexy women" as non-threatening airheads (except when attempting to seduce Kenneth Williams for comic effect), while sex in general was discussed with a nudge, a wink and an accompanying swanee whistle. Come to think of it, that's another mystery: is there a less sexy noise than the swanee whistle? How did that become the default acoustic signifier for "erecting penis" or "rude insertion"? Imagine the sound effects they'd use in a modern hardcore version of a Carry On film. It'd probably end with a spluttering duck call.

As for actual porn – the closest you got to that was finding a discarded copy of Mayfair in a hedge near a road, which would then be circulated among all the pre-pubescents in the vicinity like a secret dossier. There was an implicit understanding that this material was not aimed at us, but rather at the lorry driver who'd lobbed it into the hedge on his way home. Thankfully, it never occurred to any of us to contemplate what he'd probably been doing while "reading" it. We genuinely believed the pages were stuck together because the magazine had been rained on.

Innocent times. I'd hate to be an adolescent today, with the internet providing a bottomless filthpit to gawp at. How in God's name are they supposed to focus on exams? Or even eating, come to that?

But apart from the net, we're worried when the likes of Beyoncé prance about in provocative outfits, because some little girls try to copy them. I can't work out if that's better, worse, or essentially the same as me pretending I was James Bond machine-gunning henchmen as a child. Beyoncé, at least, seems tougher than Bond ever did.

The Daily Mail, however, isn't a fence-sitting wuss like me. Last year, outraged by Christina Aguilera and Rihanna's raunchy pre-watershed dancing on The X Factor, it ran a fuming article accompanied by shocking pictures of the most extreme bits, which helped fuel thousands of complaints.

Later, Ofcom agreed that the routines were "at the limit of acceptability", but went on to say the images in the Mail article were "significantly more graphic and close-up than the material broadcast and had been taken from a different angle to the TV cameras . . . Readers would have been left with the impression that the programme contained significantly more graphic material than had actually been broadcast".

The Mail wouldn't let it lie. "In fact, the pictures we used were provided by ITV and The X Factor's official photographic agency, with the exception of one screen grab of the show's transmission", it complained last week. That's odd: responding to the criticism that the images hadn't been broadcast by confirming they hadn't been broadcast. Next they'll be printing artists' impressions of Adrian Chiles's genitals and complaining they'd been spotted on Daybreak, beneath his trousers.

Still, the thrust of the Mail's article was that Ofcom is toothless and pre-watershed TV should be less sexy. That's its opinion, and it's got every right to hold it.

But as I was reading the article on their website, my eye was drawn to a variety of other raunchy images running down the righthand side: Hollyoaks actress Jennifer Metcalfe "shows off her fuller figure in a bikini as she films Hollyoaks in Ibiza"; "The Saturdays hog the limelight in hotpants"; "Lady Gaga parades down a runway in see-through dress"; "Katy Perry spoofs Janet Jackson's boob-baring 'wardrobe malfunction' in new video" . . . and so on, and so on. Starlets and sex, sex and starlets – all of it in plain view on the Daily Mail website which, to the best of my knowledge, has no age restrictions in place: nothing even approaching a watershed. A child as young as four could be exposed to Katy Perry's breasts over breakfast. I bet even Russell Brand thinks that's going a bit far.

At the time of writing, if you type "Lady Gaga" into Google, the top result is the Mail's "see-through dress" story, full of smutty pictures. Must they fling this filth at impressionable young kids? Won't somebody at the Mail please, for once, just think of the children?