When the sometimes flaky, always valiant, mother of the writer Alexander Fuller, in her memoir Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, saw elderly European women picking up rent boys on the Kenyan beaches, she gazed into her Tusker beer and mused: "Why on earth can't they go to bed with a good book like everyone else?"

A question I have also asked myself on the beaches of the Indian Ocean, but now find myself asking in the bookshops of the urban West. This week the publishers of Fifty Shades of Grey logged 50 million readers, in all its formats, of EL James's viral phenomenon: the trashy tale of a young woman, a "college graduate", in the thrall of a sexually submissive relationship with an intimidating business magnate whose sado-masochistic "disciplines" are conducted on his terms.

Why on earth can't these 50m readers – and they are mainly women – go to bed with a good book?

If they are looking for erotic literature there are several classics I can recommend, and although one or two also involve submissive sex (Graham Green said Pauline Reage's The Story of O was the only erotic novel worth reading) they at least have qualities of style and reflection which make them literature.

The "Mummy Porn" of James's money-spinner, whose fan base is apparently married women over 30, is tick-box writing; a masterpiece of the instantly gratifying and reductionist formulae of the digital age. It is not so much a best-seller as a viral event; something which, like Facebook, the more obsessive contributors to the twittering, wittering blogosphere want to be part of.

But at least it gives us old, unreconstructed 1970s feminists another excuse to moan about the inexorable descent of female sexual liberation into "slut walks", sleazy, self-destructive ladette sub-culture and the kind of exploitation which my generation protested against by burning its bras. Except we didn't. The myth of the bra-burning feminist was constructed by the media – then, as now, dominated by male editors with a taste for feverish headlines. But it did have some substance from its origins in a demonstration which took place at the Miss America pageant of 1968, when a group from New York Radical Women interrupted the ceremony and threw bras, mops, girdles, pots, pans and Playboy magazines into a garbage bin on the famous Atlantic City boardwalk.

The message was simple: things were going to be different, and for the next two decades they were. The mightiest female intellects in the West bent their brows over the new academic disciplines of female studies and sexual politics. On the ground, women made legislative advances in equal pay and workplace progress. The Pill had already given them control over their own fertility, to the point where they could not only avoid or postpone having children but, in the collapse of social taboos, elect to have children outside marriage, which has since become a career path for the non-aspirational.

We believed the future was bright, and it would include the building of new relationships with men. Even in Scotland, with its historical burden of repression and guilt and its dehumanising, industrial-scale machismo.

We thought we were better than men. (And so we are in many ways; we kill very few people, either locally or globally.) We would show them the error of their ways with our own standards of sexual liberation, lead them out of the commercial mire of their infantile appetite for pornography, strippers, prostitutes and Playboy (ah Playboy, how innocent it now seems) and engage them in economically well-balanced, mutually respectful, sexually fulfilling, loving partnerships. We would help men to mature.

How condescending. How naive. How self-deluding. Like Chairman Mao, we thought we could change human nature, including our own, although we might have had a chance to tweak the evolution of the revolution if it had not been hijacked and perverted by other fast-moving forces of social and economic change: uninhibited consumerism, the internet explosion, a grotesque celebrity culture, including the coarse values and cruel comedy of much of the entertainment industry, and the ruthless promotion of every commercially driven object of desire from recreational drugs to recreational sex.

The once harmless tradition of the "hen" and the (harmless enough) ritual of the "stag" have now become not only costly pre-requisites of every wedding but often involve scenes which would not be out of place in the streets of Sodom and Gomorrah.

This is not a rant against young women or even young men, but a rant against what we have encouraged them to become. They are our products, even if, as individual parents, we have tried to pull them from the path of the commercial and cultural juggernauts of the last 40 years. My own daughter is 28, and I am often required to see the world through her eyes and those of her friends – bright, kind, mutually supportive young women who don't quite "get" my resistance to some of the ways they dress and behave.

When we were watching Andy Murray's gallant failure in the Wimbledon final I remarked, when he took a tumble, that he was wearing black boxers under his white shorts (yes, I can still take an interest in men's boxers). "You don't seem to realise," said my daughter, "that these days underwear can be part of an outfit."

Fair enough. Visible bra straps and their owners aren't the worse things to be found in the gutters of today's Britain. But the whole point of the bra-dumping demo was that WE were going to take control of our sexuality and express it differently, take it or leave it, without submitting to the big-boob, big-butt requirements of male lust; which is why, while I endorse the sentiments of the recent parade of "slut walks" (a woman's appearance, however provocative, should never be an invitation to rape) I still feel uneasy about the wardrobes of the demonstrators. Prostitutes dress like "sluts" to send out signals hard-wired into the male psyche; while the work of writers like EL James encourages women to follow a male model of sexual fulfilment, taking its cues from male power and male violence.

We wanted to be equal. We never said we were, or wanted to be, the same. Please don't tell me we are now in danger of turning women into a new market for the highly lucrative, potentially addictive, ultimately damaging (as the most recent studies show) porn industry?

l Ian Bell is away.

Has Fifty Shades of Grey changed the sex lives of Scots? See the Sunday Herald tomorrow.