A bubbly soak in the big spa is a sacramental baptism of impending humiliation -- whether on higher-budget network shows like "Joe Millionaire," "Meet My Folks" and "The Bachelorette" or in the lowly land of syndicated dating games. In the hot tub's pH-balanced bacterial stew, almost every semi-manufactured plotline comes to a frothy head: Hold on, Trista's getting in the La Quinta hotel hot tub now with some of her bachelors! Viewership steams up in anticipation, as the hot tub scene gets us closer to a potential transaction of flesh.

Deferring to the eye of the beholder, let us behold the hot tub: How can something so restful, therapeutic and really not much different from a kiddie pool go from being a mundane experience to a preamble to copulation? Are hot tubs sexy? Is sex in a hot tub all that great? (We answer definitively: "Eh.")

Oh, for a few minutes in Joe Millionaire's Jacuzzi. There's a bleachy moral cleansing behind all that steam: "Nothing happened in the hot tub," more than one vixen or stud has assured her or his reality-cam inquisitor. "Something almost happened in the hot tub," says a man trapped in "The Real World." And still another of Realityland's witless participants wipes a guilty tear from her face and confesses: "I feel bad about what happened in the hot tub."