And so we understand not only the boy’s preferance for masculinity but also the girl’s “penis-envy.” Both boys and girls succumb to the desire to flee the sex represented by the mother;16 they need little coaxing to identify with the father and his world. He seems more neutral physically, more cleanly powerful, less immersed in body determinisms; he seems more “symbolically free,” represents the vast world outside of the home, the social world with its organized triumph over nature, the very escape from contingency that the child seeks.† Both the boy and girl turn away from the mother as a
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