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In psychoanalysis, phallic woman is a concept to describe a woman with the symbolic attributes of the phallus. More generally, it describes any woman possessing traditionally masculine characteristics.[1]
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Freud considered that at the phallic stage of early childhood development, children of both sexes attribute possession of a penis to the mother—a belief the loss of which helps precipitate the castration complex.[2] Thereafter males may seek fetishistic substitutes in women for the lost penis in the form of high heels, earrings or long hair to alleviate the castrative threat[3]—terrifying phallic women such as witches (with their broomsticks) representing the failure of such substitutes to cover the underlying anxiety.[4] The female, whose love (in Freud's view) was originally "directed to her phallic mother",[5] may thereafter either turn to her father for love, or may return to an identification with the original phallic mother in a neurotic development.[6]
The phallic mother can be (though need not necessarily be) an actively castrative figure, stifling her children by pre-empting all room for autonomous action.[7]
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Rather than seeking or identifying with the phallic mother, libido may instead be directed at the figure that has been termed the phallus-girl.[8] For the male, the phallus girl may be represented by a younger (perhaps boyish) girl, in whom he can find an image of his own adolescent self.[9] For the female, such a position may either entail a submissive merger with the male partner (identification with a body-part),[10] or an exhibitionist display of the self as phallus: as Ella Sharpe put it of a dancer, "she was the magical phallus. The dancing was in her".[11]
Soft porn marks out the phallus girl through such symbols as whips, bikes and guns;[12] while she also underpins the action heroine such as Ripley or Lara Croft.[13]
Later developments
The twenty-first century ladette can be seen as a phallic girl—her emphasis on light-hearted, recreational sex serving as a passport to being 'one of the boys'.[14]
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- Picasso in the interwar years produced many paintings of women with phallic attributes.[15]
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer demonstrates an ambivalent relationship to her phallic power as slayer/staker.[16]
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