Pornosophy: The Joys of Nagging

engraving of Scold's bridle (John Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele)

Jung famously said the "craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our our being for wholeness...." The same can be said for nagging. Whether it’s a thirst is up for grabs, but it’s definitely lower level. A lot of people don’t have the stomach for full-blown S&M and it also requires not only the ability to maintain an erection (an increasingly dubious proposition in these perilous times) but also the ability to sustain a role—something which is incidentally one of the most important aspects of the actor’s art. Nagging is to S&M what improvisation is to what Stanislavski called Building A Character. You're not going to blindfold, handcuff, tie to the bedposts, flog, Greek, smother or gag. Rather you’re apt to criticize, humiliate (a cross over technique employed by both naggers and sado-masochists), demean, deride and generally push your love object to the point where they will scream at you (something produced in S&M sessions by both submissives and dominants but by other means). In the midst of bickering you might think to yourself, why can’t this misery be turned into something more glamorous and dramatic?  Anyone can participate in endless anal arguments and most people would rather be right than happy. But how many couples practice anal sex with dildos and restraints? How many couples live like the larger than life characters of Fifty Shades of Grey? Compare and despair. This is precisely the kind of thinking that loses sight of the subtle joys that go into nagging or being nagged to death. Familiarity breeds contempt is the mantra of the nagger who is not only tired of the person he or she is with, but with life in general. Sure you can and should probably move on, but you can’t and that's what makes the pleasure of hocking away at your loved one so sublime.

Cialis Now and Then

There’s the famous scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen tells Diane Keaton they have to get the kiss over with so they can get on with the date. So in the same spirit let’s get the Cialis joke off. Contrary to the disclaimer in the television commercials about calling a doctor if you have an erection for more than four hours, wouldn’t it be best to call all your friends?  But there are actually other things wrong with the commercials. In theater circles there used to be a battle between adherents to the Stanislavski, Moscow Art Theater Model, known as “the method” and practiced by the Actor’s Studio in the States and the say Meyerhold creating a mask model of acting. The ferocity of the conflict between the two was tantamount to the struggle between capitalism and communism. The actors in the Cialis commercial seem to be suffering from a conflict between these two kinds of conservatory training. On the one hand they are plainly attempting to create realistic characters by delving into their own psychological histories, in depicting the dilemma of a man who wants to be functional with the woman he loves when the right time comes. But  they are plainly straining under the burden of the realism. In fact as we know all kinds of unconscious drives contribute to sexual performance along with physiological capability and so the actor who taking a Willy Loman approach to his portrait of the slightly over the hill middle-aged man will likely be suppressing his inner Ubu Roi. Naturally commercials are just that—commercial. So they can’t aspire to the highest levels of theatrical art. The technique of Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor Theater will probably never be invoked in the making of a Cialis commercial. But that’s not to say that the commercial wouldn’t have profited if it broke down the putative fourth wall. As Picasso said, “art is the lie that tells the truth.” Directors of commercials for drugs like Cialis might be advised to throw verisimilitude to the winds when they deal with the problem of erectile dysfunction.