Oedipal boxing is clearly every man's favorite event on a Friday night, but just how did it get to be that way, and how does Freud's mother find her way into the equation? The new documentary to air on PBS next Friday at 8 p.m. takes up this issue as a subject of its inquiry. In the excitement leading up to this possibly sexually stimulating (hopefully fulfilling) piece, I asked my father about this pregnant topic last week . . . exclusively for this article, of course:
"I remember when I was younger, we used to crowd around the TV to watch the heavy-weight bouts as my older brothers would fight my father to the death for the pleasure of my mother. As the years passed, I became an only child but grew to appreciate these things in a new way such that after 10 years of a happy relationship with your mother and three children later I realized that I was a homosexual as I had never had an urge to copulate with my mom . . . Ah Oedipal boxing, it reminds me of when I was young and soaked in my brothers' blood again."
As these pithy words for my father (who will remain nameless for everyone's safety) illustrate, Oedipal Boxing is a social institution as old as those such as eating a meal around a table, shooting the breeze with friends and castrating yourself after a long day of perpetrating male chauvinism.
Politicians, celebrities and everyone else in between their mother's labia agree that this cultural institution is one that is enjoyable, entertaining and sexually satisfying; even science and the disciplined field of science has been pervaded by the phenomenon. In Albert Einstein's famous words, "Trying to brutally maim your father in order to copulate with your mother is as gratifying as it is confounding and frustrating physicists mutter the world round while deeply penetrating" (translated from the Yiddish by Heinrich Himmler, vaunted Oedipal boxer of the first order).
The documentary goes through everyone's favorite Oedipal boxers through the ages (my particular favorite, of course, was Elizabeth I), movies detailing the exploits of vaunted Oedipal boxers, as well as the genius himself, who standardized the rules and brought it to the masses Sigmund Mutter Freud screwed deeply. However, this is where the most anxiety arose during the documentaries' pre-screening for the pre-pubescent critics. The maker of the documentary Childhood Desires seems to assert that he has uncovered letters to the effect that Freud abhorred the practice and found it socially repulsive.
The following seems to be his strongest piece of evidence:
Dear Id,
How have you been? I haven't heard from you in a while. Your vacation in Salzburg going alright? Have you been to the brothels there? I hear they're amazing!
I just wanted to impart to you by post that while screwing my mother is fun and very satisfying, I just can't find the energy to maim and castrate my father; I have too much performance anxiety.
Love,
Sigmund
While some of the other critics chose to wet their diapers at this point in the documentary, I found myself confused by the simplicity of the letter and the way in which it related to my own childhood, as I had never had performance anxiety when penetrating my mother.
Nevertheless, the documentary gets four erect penises inserted in their respective mother's wombs as it shows a great history of Oedipal Boxing that my father would be proud to see had I not killed him during our interview last week when he decided to touch my mother despite his homosexuality. This documentary is so good, I will never show it to my sons.
Next week: a review on the disappointing Biopic of Elektra and the ways in knitting her mother's breast together in the symbol of a chalice did not seem an ideal metaphor for her complex.
