From the author: Published on the website www.psycall.org Sleeping Beauty When talking about femininity, we usually mean something external: behavior, appearance, clothes, that is, something that without a doubt allows us to classify a woman as the gender opposite to male, that is, female, but only by external signs. In this article we will talk about the feminine - deeply hidden for both sexes and requiring a lot of mental work (from both men and women) for its disclosure. One is not born a woman, one becomes one! The discovery of a woman is impossible without a man. But this is only possible with a man who can accept the feminine in himself. This event - the discovery of the female gender - does not happen to all men and women. The feminine for both boys and girls is associated with the mother and her relationship with the child. A mother, from the first day of a child’s life, invests her love in a boy or a girl in different ways. Remember what mothers look at when they see their newborn for the first time. If it's a boy, she exclaims: “It's a boy! Look what a penis he has!” And if it’s a girl, then when she discovers that a little thing is missing, she exclaims: “It’s a girl!” Look how pretty she is!” The mother’s love and attention invests the girl’s entire body (one might say that she is all to her like a boy’s penis), and the boy is invested by her, first of all, as the owner of what she herself does not have. Until adolescence, there is only one gender - male, because girls and boys identify themselves with a representative of one sex or another only by the presence or absence of a penis. That is, there is no talk about the female gender yet, since it, unlike the male one, is invisible and is a secret for both boys and girls themselves. In other words, either you have a penis or you are castrated. This corresponds to the common children's fantasy that a girl is a boy who was born without a penis, or she lost it, was deprived of it for some sins. For both boys and girls, the penis becomes an extremely valuable organ: boys are afraid of losing it, and girls hope to acquire it. It is more correct to talk here not about the penis, but about the phallus, since the phallus is something that one is proud of, which gives an illusory feeling of integrity and completeness, but with the help of the phallus it is impossible to get pleasure - it is a useless decoration, suitable only for attracting attention. Unlike the phallus, the penis is an organ with which you can receive pleasure yourself and deliver it to another. Therefore, later, “big boys” who deny the feminine are proud of big houses, powerful cars, high achievements, strong muscles, the number of victories over women, etc. (this corresponds to the greatness and strength of the phallus), and “grown girls” who deny the feminine are proud of their femininity: their outfits, the jewelry with which they are decorated, makeup, broken men’s hearts, everyone’s attention, and this is also phallic (this corresponds to her body, his beauty and attractiveness). According to the logic of the PHALLIC, there are no two genders, but only the phallic and castrated (humiliated and sublime). But a phallic man is a bad lover. The French say: it is easier to fuck 15 women than to fuck the same woman 15 times. The phallic protects a person from awareness of the difference between the sexes, since this awareness itself is traumatic and involves hard mental work to accept one’s imperfection, lack and need for another. We see this protection everywhere. Phallocentrism is rampant all over the world. Women's movements seeking equal rights with men are all about the same thing, about the refusal to accept the difference between the sexes. Phallicity, centered on the phallus, precedes the Oedipal drama played out between a child (from 3 to 5 years old) and his parents, the successful resolution of which contributes to the discovery of adolescence, gender difference, that is, the discovery of the second gender - female. For both girls and boys, mother is their “first love,” and this love must inevitably end.