Love & Passion Quote by Al Goldstein

Goldstein doesn’t describe boredom; he performs it, turning married sex into a theater of medical violation. The comparison is engineered to be obscene in a different register than pornography: not explicit bodies, but explicit disgust. “Awake during your own autopsy” is a surgical image of self-alienation, the nightmare of consciousness trapped while something intimate is disassembled. The joke lands because it’s excessive; it doesn’t argue that marriage can dull desire, it declares marriage as death with paperwork.

The follow-up, “root canal work without anesthetic,” shifts from existential horror to banal torture. That matters. Autopsy is grand, gothic, absurdly final. Root canal is suburban, routine, and still dreaded. Goldstein’s intent is to collapse the romanticized institution into the kind of appointment you postpone until you can’t. Sex, in this framing, becomes obligation: scheduled, endured, and extracted rather than shared.

Subtextually it’s also a defense of his brand of libertine commerce. As a porn publisher and provocateur, Goldstein had every incentive to sell marriage as the enemy of erotic truth: a moral contract that turns pleasure into labor. The extremity isn’t just punchline; it’s positioning. If married sex is pathology, then the alternative market he represents becomes “medicine” - transgressive, immediate, anesthetic.

Context seals the cynicism. Coming out of late-20th-century culture wars and the rise of confessional raunch, the line weaponizes shock as critique: a tabloid scalpel aimed at bourgeois respectability, daring the audience to laugh and flinch at the same time.