I Broke My Hip in a Cialis Commercial

Cialis. It's the extended dance-remix version of Viagra. Take it, and you've got 36 hours to convince someone to have sex with you.

I could care less.

But while I am as sick as anyone else of the constant stream of content-free drug ads featuring frolicking puppies and toddlers, harmonious family dinners, fleece-clad upwardly-mobile thirty-somethings scaling mountainsides and dancing in pollen-infested meadows, and sixty-year-olds demonstrating their newfound taste for Moderate Physical Activity, with no mention of what, other than some general improvement in quality of life, these drugs can be expected to proffer, and while the Cialis ads do speak of what it is they are meant to address ('erectile dysfunction'), they manage to be as noxious as the vague 'you'll just have a better life, but we won't tell you how' ones.

Why? I don't mind the naughty-naughty nudge-nudge-wink-wink 'we're seventy but we're still going to git-it-onnnn' tone. Get it on, septuagenarians, get it on! And if you need a pill or a pulley system or a troupe of Chinese acrobats to get you there, it's not for me to judge. I think the more people there are succeeding in having happy sex lives, the fewer aggressive drivers, bar brawls, and Monster Trucks we will encounter in the world. And, the drug is about sex, after all, so fair play to the advertising firm for finding the space in their thirty seconds to be clear about that.

So clarity or frankness is not what gets under my skin here. It is those accursed bathtubs! These ads all focus on sex within a relationship, the intimacy of it. That the sex, qua vehicle of intimacy, guarantor of intimacy, proof of intimacy, was what was missing in an otherwise good relationship. Take this pill, you'll get that back, and then all the other good stuff that you did have will be even better by virtue of this restored sexual sharing. The ads show the couples doing things together, looking good together, sharing vacations, sharing a life.

And then they close with them up on a hill in separate bathtubs. Matt Beebe of Lilly says that shot was all but accidental originally. But they've stuck with it, and it's stupid. Take the drug, get it on, and then go your separate ways. If there has to be a bathtub - which is, I would argue, not necessarily the case - then have one bathtub, with the happy and contented reconnected seniors in it together.

The bathtub evokes a womb. Security, comfort, safety, warmth. Which is, in the ads, part of what the sex was meant to signify for these couples, as well. The men are portrayed not as popping a pill and heading out to the local bar to troll for strumpets, but, rather, as still attracted to, and wishing to have sex with, their wives, who are presented as attractive and havesexwithable. And then, after the shots of romantically-lit cuddly moments, the tinkling of soft jazz and wine glasses, a voiceover about livers, kidneys, blood pressure and the risk of four-hour erections takes place over a shot of the couple unable to have sex, because they are stuck precariously on a cliff, or stranded in a field, separated by walls of porcelain, something perhaps a four-foot, but not a four-hour, grandissement could solve.