'Everybody must be just like me': observations on female castration anxiety

The concept of primary femininity entails an assumption that the girl develops some mental representation of genital femaleness at an early age. I have suggested one form that such a mental representation may take and a particular expression of female castration anxiety that may develop in consequence. I have suggested that the young girl begins by assuming that everyone has a vulva like hers, with the possibility of an opening and the possibility of an inside space. Among the consequences of such an assumption may, in certain girls, be the development of a castration fantasy in which males represent the frightening possibility that such an opening in a female could be endangered, lost, or closed up as that opening is imagined to be in males. I have suggested that certain sterotypic features of the ways in which some women characterize men (i.e. men are emotionally closed, unable to be receptive, without access to inner feelings or sensitivities, etc.) may be understood at least in part as derivatives of this fantasy.