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or scrap of female clothing or, in a pretense of more civilized behavior, merely stealing a woman’s handkerchief, expresses two mutually incompatible assertions: “the woman has still got a penis” and “my father has castrated the woman.” In this way he is able to treat his fetish both with reverence and at the same time, with the contempt and hostility deserving of someone who has been castrated.
    When Freud concludes “Fetishism” with his observation, “the normal prototype of inferior organs is the woman’s real small penis, the clitoris,” 56 it is not clear whether he is alluding to a little child’s fantasy or an adult fetishist’s fantasy. In my opinion, most likely the phrase “real small penis” rep- resents Freud’s own irrepressible infantile version of the female genital regions. Freud’s intimacy with the workings of the unconscious mind did not exempt him from a prototypical, albeit unconscious attitude toward the female geni- tals, an attitude that expresses simultaneously an idealizing reverence and a hostility based on all the unwelcome news that is called to mind by the female genitals.
    Like the perversion itself, Freud’s “Fetishism” unsettles the boundaries between the real and the not real . Freud’s concluding sentence about the female’s real small penis is tantamount to a disavowal of the enormous and terrifying and humiliating significance of the actual female genitals. The female genitals are the emblem of that unwelcome news that Mother and Father share a desire that excludes the little child. The mother does have some genitals of significance and the father does desire her for having them. The little boy, of course, is competitive with his mother for his father’s love. He wishes to be in her submissive position with the dominating father.
    He envies her the power she has over his beloved and mighty father and would just as soon imagine her genitals as insignificant and puny—castrated, if necessary, and definitely inferior to his own.
    Yes, the crucial point, which keeps peeking through the misogynism of Freud’s “Fetishism,” is the male’s unconscious wish to fulfill what would otherwise be his shameful feminine longings, as well as his unconscious envy of the female’s extraordinary sexual powers. As most contemporary psycho- analysts would acknowledge, their clinical experience with male patients brings this point home, over and over again—very subtly in most patients, quite emphatically in some others.
    There are, for example, those ultra-macho men who are fascinated by “studying” the sexual allure of female prostitutes and call girls. As they speak about their desperate hunt for more and more contacts with professional sexual partners, who “know all the moves,” they eventually reveal their iden- tifications with these powerful women, their wish to be like them, their wish to be as sexually alluring as they are. Some men exhibit this by dressing up like women and then masturbating. Others, more secretively, wear shreds of female undergarments under their business suits, workman’s overalls, or police and military uniforms. Still others exhibit this feminine identification by giving up their apparently tranquil domestic life in order to devote them- selves to their “studies” of female sexual behaviors. Very often, the biggest turn-on of all for these super-macho males is observing lesbians making love to each other. That way they can have it both ways. They can be both sub- missive-femme and macho-butch;—categories that have more to do with their own fantasy life than what the lesbians are experiencing when they assume top and bottom and in-between sexual positions.
    For a short while, the TV series The L Word , which features a wide variety of sexually alluring females who seem to be empowered with a variety of erotic ingenuities, took over the place in male imaginations previously held by the departed Sex and the City . On posters and in