Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/160

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The clitoridal woman develops, very early, an underlying denial that she is indeed feminine or that she has any use for the things of womanhood. She learns to feel that womanhood is dangerous, a slavish and humiliating role. Only men are powerful and secure; and thus she identifies herself with the male exclusively.

If you will recall that, sexual anatomy aside, there is little to distinguish boys from girls either psychologically or glandularly in the first ten years of existence, you will get some indication that the desire to be a boy need not seem so impossible of fulfillment to a little girl. And even if we take her sexual anatomy into consideration, the idea does not seem farfetched to her. She does have a clitoris, which, in her wishful psychology, she can consider a penis, or at least the beginnings of one. Though it is small it is, in medical parlance, "the homologue of the penis." It can become erect; it has a head; it has a prepuce. Girls who are going to pursue (albeit unconsciously) their daydreams of becoming male, eschewing femininity, pay a great deal of very minute attention to these similarities.

Such was the case with Toni. Typically for such cases, her father had rejected her. During the stage of development when a young daughter needs a sufficient quota of her father's love and tenderness to give her an experience of the rewards of womanhood, a substrate of feminine security, he simply ignored her. He was, by all accounts, a very cold man, engrossed in his business and quite indifferent to both his wife and daughter. The concept that men rejected women, were actively hostile to them, was very much deepened in Toni by the fact that her father behaved in exactly an opposite manner to her brother, who was three years younger. This young fellow received, by all accounts, the lion's share of her father's small store of attention and devotion.

Reports from a patient, while they have a certain relia-