The Pleasure Principle: Freudian Sex Advice with Bambi: Multilingual Blowjobs

Q: Dear Bambi,

Is a French blowjob better than an American one? I know that sounds dumb, but something about the difference in tongue movements seems like it could result in plausible analysis. What would Freud do?

Signed,

Tongue-Tied in New Orleans

A: French vs. American? We don’t tread on unpatriotic territory where Bambi is from (it could get you relocated to the steppes). But what I will venture to say is that being multilingual couldn’t hurt the aesthetic nuances of said job.

To be sure, linguistic anthropologists have delineated theories in which second language acquisition after a certain age, somewhere around 12, dooms the tongue to forever sounding FOB in most cases. This critical period is very debatable when it comes to grammar, vocab, and things of the mind. But for the most part, fluency without an accent is the gem we are seeking–it is where the tongue has mastered movements: Andalusian lisps, Indian curls, Polish rolls, Hebrew gutturals (oh la la). Just think of the possibilities! With a capacity for a breadth of dialects, multilingual fluency is Kama Sutra in your mouth.

But enough from that dying field of social science; you asked WWFD.

You’ll have to excuse the origin of this golden nugget I dug up. In Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria, Freud lays out plain as pudding that growing up using your mouth extensively leads to creative reappropriations of the funhouse he refers so eloquently to as your mucuous membrane:

No one will feel inclined to dispute, I think, that the mucuous membrane of the lips and mouth is to be regarded as a primary ‘erotogenic zone,’ since it preserves this earlier significance in the act of kissing, which is looked upon as normal. An intense activity of this erotogenic zone at an early age (multilingualism) thus determines the subsequent presence of a somatic compliance on the part of the tract of mucuous membrane which begins at the lips. Thus, at a time when the sexual object proper, that is, the male (or female) organ, has already become known, circumstances may arise which once more increase the excitation of the oral zone, whose erotogenic character has, as we have seen, been retained. It then needs very little creative power to substitute the sexual object of the moment (the penis) for the original object (the nipple [or the hard, rolling Russian r’s]) or for the finger which does duty for it, and to place the current sexual object in the situation in which gratification was originally obtained. So we see that this excessively repulsive and perverted phantasy of sucking at a penis has the most innocent origin.

I don’t know about “excessively repulsive,” but Freud has a point, that his coming in your mouth is an identical gratification to that A in French class. So laissez les bons temps rouler, whatever the pidgin, TTINO. But if you’ve stumbled on a mate who can pronounce ñ’s, ж’s, and ř’s with ease, that, my friends, is the true Rosetta Stone.