While WASP swearwords are to alarge extent centered on the anus - 'asshole', 'up your ass', 'shithead', 'full of shit', 'kiss my ass' - the Bulgarian swearwords/concepts (as well as the Serb and Russian ones) are centered on the act of 'fuckingthe mother'. 'Ireallyfucked my mother' (mamata siebah) means 'I caused myself grief bya certainact', although with a change in the tense - 'I have fucked my mother' (mamata sym si ebal), it can mean 'I have accomplished a great feat/I'm really a special person'. 'I reallyfucked his/her/their mothers' (mamata mu/i/im ebah) means 'I really showed them'. 'you sure fucked my mother' (ti mi eba maikata) means - 'I didn't expect such a thing from you'. 'Aw fuck his mother' (mama mu d'eba) is just general swearing with a vague target.
Althoughwhite AngloSaxon
protestants seem more fixated onanal matters than penetrating their mothers, the later motif is supplied
bythe Negro and Latin American influences who, like the Slav, appear tobe 'motherfuckers'.
But back to the pregenital stages:
the oral and analerotic tensions of early childhood
facilitate the appearance onone hand of a cruel andprimitive Superego, whichlater develops
into a more sophisticated version, and on the other hand of
correspondingsadomasochistic fantasies.
Melanie Klein9shows back in the 1920s,that the earliestsadistic impulses to hurt
and destroy, coupled withthe compensatoryfears ofbeinghurt and destroyed, appearduring
the oral stage, whenthe whole worldof the infant revolves around
the bliss of suckling and Chilla Bulbeck, 'Reorienting
Western Feminists. Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World', Cambridge
University Press 19989 Melanie Klein, 'Love, Guilt and Reparation and other works 1921 -1945'
(Bulgarian edition), Sofia the agony of
not having the breast.
In the framework of Klein, a harsh and barbaric Superego
already exists in the infant, manifested in persecutionanxiety, long before the appearance of
what Freud would recognize,
as Superego 'proper', and not mereguilt. Byyear one the small
human alreadyhas intense fear of being torn into pieces and eaten, just as it in turn has intense
desires to tear apart and swallow that which it desires -the first object of attraction
- the mother figure. Lateron, and on this Helene Deutsch10
also write persuasively, the idea of
one's body beingdismembered by giant penetrating bodies (or exiting children) appears as
well.
Karen Horney attributes these fantasies in small girls to earlyvaginal sensations, while
Deutsch maintains that these fantasies "refer to the internal organs
of thebody, that is tosay, the stomach and intestines, and the paths of penetration and
expulsion arerepresented by the
mouth and anus. (p 231)" I would agree withDeutsch - for these fantasies are also present - inprojected
'active' form - inmales, as can be seen in various horror flicks, 'gore' metal
bands 11, the writings of Marquise de Sade and his imitators, the 'Hentai'
brutal animated porn12, as well as general sadistic fantasies of
penetrating brutally andbloodily and tearing apart - and males
have no vaginal sensations whatsoever.
Later on, as the Superego becomes more sophisticated, the anxiety ridden erotic fantasies follow suit and are translated fromprimitive
cannibalism and dismemberment, into more
'cultured' themes of violent rape by males/creatures with huge penises -thoughnot all
females have the capacity to see themselves as the
object of rape in the fantasyandsubstitute another womanor girl for
themselves, as (to jump ahead of schedule again) do the fantasizing males. The obviousness to
both sexes of the choice of 'woman' or 'girl' for these fantasies isdueto the gender hierarchy
of the patriarchy, in which females are the obvioustargets of sexual violence.