Yes: Victoria Segal

Of course pop music should be at least a little subversive, but if all it can do is channel the elderly libido of Hugh Hefner then it's time for a rethink. Nobody yearns for a Vera Drake society where sex is unmentionable and the only popular song is the equivalent of a covered-up piano leg – but not everything needs spelling out. Even though the birth of rock'n'roll brought with it pelvises and gyrations, the language of the earliest pop idols was still suggestive rather than overt; think of Elvis, all shook up, or the Beatles, the very thought of holding hands leaving them with "such a feeling/That my love I can't hide". Without some encoded furtiveness, some intimations of a secret through-the-looking-glass world, the magic vanishes. While not aimed at the two-year-olds Stock is oddly worried about, pop music should still be a playground, a soundtrack to nascent dreams and fantasies – not merely the X-rated cliches of schoolgirl, pole dancer, air hostess (and that's just Britney Spears).

In fact, Stock's concerns are not so much about the music but the inescapable visuals. Switch on any music television channel and there's Rihanna writhing with your Weetabix, Shakira cage-dancing at teatime. Occasionally, desperate to stop my sanity being crushed by the wheels of the bus going round and round, I do still turn on the television to find jumping-about music for my small daughters – then turn it off immediately after being confronted by an oiled-up Britney in a bikini. The words are beyond them, but they can see how she moves, how she stares, how she dresses. It's the tedious, Nuts-and-Zoo stuff to which they will be exposed all their lives and it's disappointing to find youth culture – in theory and dreams, the vanguard of the fresh, the new, the liberated – peddling old men's fantasy.

At these awkward moments, the Abba DVD comes out. While sexual longing permeates their best songs, it never rubs itself in your face. Yes, there are Gaga-worthy costumes, yet the wonky teeth, the natural curves, the oddly chaste dance moves (and that's just Benny and Björn) are a refreshing alternative to today's explicit, cosmetic-surgery perfect poses. Anni-Frid and Agnetha might have fuelled endless teen fantasies, but they weren't selling one monolithic version of sex.

Today, even the alternatives are fake: Katy Perry might have kissed a girl and liked it but nobody was fooled that this was pop broadening its horizons. While it's wrong to suggest that all female artists are manipulated by cigar-waving svengalis, there is frequently a sense that stars and their creative teams pragmatically pander to needs better met by adult websites. Perry's new album, Teenage Dream, features the not-so-subtle innuendo of "Peacock", the singer crowing: "Are you brave enough to let me see your peacock?" You could argue that it's nice to have women cheerily objectifying men for once – or you could wonder if this grip-and-grin attitude towards sex should be showing girls how to be women, or boys how to be men. The problem with the music upsetting Mike Stock isn't that there's a Lady Gaga-shaped wrecking ball smashing youthful morals, but that the version of sexuality it pushes is so dull. The language of pornography now dictates the language of pop music, and no matter how you dress it up (leather, rubber, baby oil) that's not sexy at all.

No: Laurie Penny

Pop culture, like every other type of culture, has always needed rich, powerful middle-aged men to tell us how women should behave, what they should wear and how their sexuality should be phrased. Step forward, Mike Stock, formerly a music producer at Stock Aitken Waterman, who has offered himself as moral defender of the next generation of prepubescent hussies.

Stock says he is concerned about the "sexualisation" of young girls. Not everyone would consider men such as Stock best placed to help young girls negotiate their developing sexuality in a healthy manner, but clearly, without the intervention of these brave moral arbiters, we would be overrun with the kind of wanton primary-school tarts who can't even glance at the video for "Telephone" without pestering their mothers for tiny thongs, crop tops and their very own strap-on dildo just like Lady Gaga.

The assumption is, of course, that once young girls are "sexualised", there's no going back: they are irreversibly tainted, transformed from innocent schoolgirls playing with their teddies into drone-like footsoldiers in the war on family values.

Stock used the opportunity to promote his new musical, The Go! Go! Go! Show, which is designed to be "family-oriented". One might almost suspect that Stock is just as concerned with capitalising on the modern fashion for melodramatic opprobrium over the sexuality of young women as he is with safeguarding the self-esteem of girls. This is the man, remember, who respects women so much he helped produce the 1992 song "Dance of the Handbags (Oh Lordy! It's The Fat Slags)" – a musical adaptation of Viz magazine's "Fat Slags" strip, which was an ugly stereotype of hypersexual "ladette" culture.

Unfortunately, though, Stock's complaint that a great many contemporary music videos resemble "softcore pornography" is undeniably the case. The key issue here, however, is not the fact that music videos portray women as sexual. The issue is the fact that some pop music portrays women as sexual chattel.

Suggesting that women are sexual beings is not problematic, particularly in pop, which has always commodified desire, but suggesting that women are submissive sexual objects who invite abuse and violence is deeply problematic. That narrative is central to the language of pop music today. Last week, Eminem and Rihanna's video for their latest single, "Love the Way You Lie", was seen by millions of young people; the song appears to glamorise abusive relationships, with Rihanna, who is well-known as a victim of domestic violence and has been celebrated for dumping the boyfriend who assaulted her, singing about a lover who likes to "stand there and watch me burn/But that's alright because I like the way it hurts". Yes, we can see almost all of Rihanna's legs in the video, but the type of passive, meekly brutalised sexuality being represented here is infinitely more troubling than its extent.

The distinction must be made here between legitimate concerns about protecting young women from abuse and the contempt for female sexuality in general suggested by the term "sexualisation". When feminists speak about objectification and abuse, we tend to be dismissed, precisely because those words still speak truth to power, frightening those who profit from the violent commodification of female sexuality. The notion of "sexualisation", on the other hand, is less threatening: it is easily incorporated into the strategies of conservative moral posturing, because it implies that sex itself is the problem – specifically, the women who have it. No wonder Mike Stock and other tabloid hand-wringers are so eager to jump on the bandwagon.