[€uroMeinke]

Today we visited the Norton Simon Museum of Art. Among their collection is a stone temple carving of a couple (man and woman) in a pre-coital position. (Perhaps someone who took some pics of this one can post them here). I mention this as another model, where sex is part of a religious or spiritual experience - whether or not that existed in place of commodification, I don't know, but it is another point of reference.

I suppose one element of living in a capitalist society is that ultimately everything gets assigned a dollar value, that crassness one the one hand offends us and so we object to it's use for certain things, like sex or happiness. Nonetheless, it may well be this sublimation that makes it so effective as a marketing tool.

I'm curious to see where this discussion will lead. To answer directly for myself, a tend to be a moral relativist so I see no inherent right or wrong in the situation you describe, but I think it telling none-the-less of our own values and insecurities.