Female penis envy is not innate but learned and variable.

Evidence

Few questions are as much discussed by psychoanalysts as the famous “female castration complex.” Most accept today that penis envy manifests itself in very different ways depending on the individual case. First, many girls are ignorant of male anatomy until an advanced age. The child accepts naturally that there are men and women as there are a sun and a moon: she believes in essences contained in words, and his curiosity is at first not analytical. For many others, this little piece of flesh hanging between boys’ legs is insignificant or even derisory; it is a particularity like that of clothes and hairstyle; often the female child discovers it at a younger brother’s birth, and “when the little girl is very young,” says Helene Deutsch, “she is not impressed by her younger brother’s penis”; she cites the example of an eighteen-month-old girl who remained absolutely indifferent to the discovery of the penis and did not give it any value until much later, in connection with her personal preoccupations. The penis can even be considered an anomaly: it is a growth, a vague hanging thing like nodules, teats, and warts; it can inspire disgust. Lastly, the fact is that there are many cases of the little girl being interested in a brother’s or a friend’s penis; but that does not mean she experiences a specifically sexual jealousy and even less that she feels deeply moved by the absence of this organ; she desires to appropriate it for herself as she desires to appropriate any object; but this desire may remain superficial. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 684

Categorization

• DEFINE: Beauvoir’s empirical dismantling of the ‘castration complex’ — central to her project of showing femininity as socially constructed rather than biologically given.
• QUESTION: Beauvoir cites Deutsch to refute classical Freudian claims here; worth noting that Deutsch herself was an orthodox Freudian adapting these ideas — Beauvoir’s selective use of psychoanalytic evidence is a method question.
• SEED: The claim that girls see the penis as ‘a growth, a vague hanging thing like nodules, teats, and warts’ — a child’s-eye phenomenology of anatomy — could anchor a piece on how concepts like ‘lack’ are adult retrofits onto childhood experience.
• XREF: Contrasts with Sartre’s account of the gaze and being-for-others, and with the later ‘difference’ feminism of Irigaray and Cixous. — connects to: Phallic privilege is contingent on situation, not anatomically destined — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 128; Female erotic development is psychological, not anatomically determined. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1033; A young girl’s discovery of the boy’s penis can arouse envy rather than shock (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Female erotic development is psychological, not anatomically determined. #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1033
• Sexual attraction arises from socially conditioned images, not raw nature #corroborates (0.80)
• A young girl’s discovery of the boy’s penis can arouse envy rather than shock #qualifies (0.75)