of course, Madonna have all chosen to blur the boundaries of pop and porn in recent videos. They're far from alone. Basques and fishnet stockings have become the pop uniform. Somewhere being a pop star and being a glamour model became the same thing - possibly on the same day that it was decided you could only look sexy if you also looked trashy. It's all a little too desperate.

A similar thing has been happening among male pop singers over the past decade: from Peter Andre to Usher, having a body rather than a voice is the number one concern. Meanwhile a boy band cannot really be classified as a boy band unless they flash their six packs once every five minutes - a contractual obligation the current hotties JLS are more than happy to

fulfill.

What makes this undressing of pop so curious is that we live in an era of peculiar mixed messages - the wholesome fantasy of High School Musical, the growing market for mature artists like Susan Boyle and the daily dishing out of moral admonishments in the online comments of the Daily Mail at one end of the spectrum, and at the other Lady Gaga simulating masturbation while straddling a motorcycle and being admired by seven men in leather posing pouches.

Nowhere was this pop culture dichotomy better illustrated than on The X Factor. Early in the series Cheryl Cole scolded the tacky girl group Kandy Rain - four girls who all met when they worked as pole dancers, lest we forget - that they wouldn't be taken seriously if they continued to wear suggestive outfits. Now call me old-fashioned but if anyone's entitled to wear a suggestive outfit then it's a pole dancer.

Then, with Kandy Rain but a distant memory, several weeks later Cole - the most sexy woman in the world according to FHM - performed her debut solo single on the show wearing knickers and a slit skirt that was all slits and virtually no skirt.

Ah, if only we could turn back time to a simpler age when pop stars were pop stars and porn stars were porn stars and we only had to look at girls' bottoms or boys' six packs if we chose to do so.