A double life? Somehow I have the idea that leading a double life brings hurt, humiliation and suffering to others. In recent weeks, The Age has reported in detail two significant cases of men leading a double life: Richard Pratt and Herman Rockefeller. There is not much appeal or style in people being robbed, cheated on, deceived or murdered.

There is nothing subtle in the ad; it portrays a young woman - virginal, without make-up, dressed in white, bare-footed, wandering country paths past odd Amish-like depictions of olden days as she approaches the lake.

Interspersed in this vignette is a parallel one with the same girl, now unabashedly seductive and glamorous (and drawn on down by the insistent call "O sisters let's go down . . . O fathers let's go down . . . O mothers let's go down . . . Down to the river to pray"). In contrast to open-faced sweetness and simplicity, we now have sultry, cool-as-ice class, high fashion, a banquet and tables laden with "decadent" (Tourism Victoria) foods, which she plucks at suggestively while firing seductive glances at a waiter. Simmering looks are reciprocated. In less time than it will take to read this sentence, we are made aware that the two, pointedly led by the girl, have cavorted into the lake and into a sexual encounter in the fields - this is where subtle meets subliminal, but the implication is unmistakeable.

Her double has, meanwhile, meandered into a church, her man now ready, waist deep in the baptismal font as she steps down to him and is baptised by him. She rises, drenched, to stare enigmatically, perhaps defiantly, at the camera. "Lead a double life" is the bold imperative - and conclusion.

Perhaps someone needs to talk to Tourism Victoria about the difference between sexy and sordid, because it is difficult to think of any situation in which the concept of a double life is a positive one, or where it would not involve a victim. Someone might also put it to them that this promotion is seriously distasteful, trampling community values and moral codes.