McSteamy orders a Happy Meal

If you're nicknamed McSteamy, cast on a show titled "Grey's Anatomy," and a sex tape of you, your wife, and an ex beauty queen surfaces, the sheer possibilities for jokes and witticisms could letter a text larger than "Gray's Anatomy." And by now, they may have.

In the latest in the canon of celebrity sex tapes, television M.D. Eric Dane is the lead. Posted by Gawker's Defamer.com on Monday, a sex tape of Eric Dane, wife Rebecca Gayheart, and ex Miss Teen USA Kari Ann Peniche hit the contemporary "big screen": the Internet. As Gawker describes, in the video the undoubtedly inebriated trio "loung(e) au naturel in the fallen beauty queen's Studio City apartment, passing around the camera and, for giggles, discussing what their porn names should be. . . . Soon the threesome move to the bathroom where the two ladies disrobe and get into a jacuzzi tub while Dane takes over the camera duties." Gayheart is heard remarking she's "so high" she needs to lay down; Peniche comments on the "fun" of drugs. But with no one actually caught on their knees, Dane and Gayheart's lawyer, Marty Singer, released a statement refuting the characterization of the video as a sex tape. According to Gawker, Singer declared, "From what I've seen it's a naked tape, not a sex tape. . . . At most it's 3 people maybe wanting to have sex."

But the content of the tape isn't the only thing racy. Kari Ann Peniche, 25, is a former Miss Teen USA de-crowned after posing in a November 2004 Playboy. Recently, as Us Weekly reported, the self-prescribed sex addict was booted off Dr. Drew Pinksy's "Celebrity Rehab: Sex Addiction" for "apparently entertaining inappropriate guests and for stealing from her roommate." And the past of Rebecca Gayheart is no Nickelodeon. On November 27, 2001, Gayheart pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter in the death of Jorge Cruz, Jr., a 9-year-old boy whom she accidentally hit as he walked across an L.A. street. Then, in June 2009, the National Enquirer published a photo of a nude Gayheart in a bathtub with another woman, a lighter, and a glass crackpipe.

With the females caught in fodder, it may just be possible that TV doctor Eric Dane had the only clear chart. No longer.

But while tabloids get punny with headlines, stories discuss the legitimacy of "sex tape" status, the stars' peppered pasts percolating, and the LAPD investigating possible illegal activity, a key question seems to have been lost:

With salacious sex tapes rising through the chimneys of Hollywood mansions—Kim Kardashian and Ray J, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, Paris Hilton and Rick Solomon, Tanya Harding and Jeff Gillooly—one has to ask: when did the sexual act itself become insufficient? In this age of iPhones and Skype, when each gleaming electronic can capture or record, has it become more orgasmic to be the voyeur of your own life than to live it? In short, when two beautiful people need a camera to climax, one has to ask: Has it become more titillating to tape? Are we choosing film over flesh?