Some fathers, of course, have a closer identification with their sons than with their daughters. Men who are not aware of this tendency can wreak great havoc with a daughter’s personality at this stage of her growth. Since she adores her father and wishes to become what he will admire, she will quickly detect her father’s preference for the male. This often causes her to attempt to cultivate male characteristics and male pursuits and to depreciate totally all those typically feminine goals which one day she must achieve if she is to be a true woman. The latency period, as we saw, is a non-sexual time for both boys and girls. Aside from their anatomical structure, there is little difference between boys and girls at this juncture: their glands function in roughly the same way; none of the typical characteristics which will differentiate them later have yet appeared. They are both interested in mastering the world about them and the world inside them; they are both roughly equal as far as their innate store of aggressiveness is concerned. Indeed, many scientists call this whole period the bisexual period of development. For these reasons a father who implants male goals into his daughter’s psyche at this point finds a ready audience. Psychoanalysis shows us that the little girl very often can develop fantasies of an extremely odd kind at this juncture. In some children, for example, the idea that they can somehow magically grow a penis and turn into a boy is too often quite conscious. But even if such ideas do not become conscious, the yearning of the little girl to become a boy to win her father’s esteem can remain as part of the total equipment of her unconscious mind. Later, although hidden and disguised, this wish can be at the root of much of her sexual problems with men, causing her to be neurotically competitive with them and to reject her own female role as unworthy. We saw that the girl in puberty and in adolescence had a formidable task to achieve. She must learn to accept and to love the “dangerous” role of the woman--she must, in effect, be willing to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put childbirth and the welfare of the child ahead of her own needs and safety. If she is not encouraged to believe that the feminine role is a worthy one, if she is taught that the male role is superior, then she will be highly motivated to reject her femininity and, almost literally, try to be a boy. It is frequently exactly this that occurs when a woman’s fear and rejection of femininity result in an inability to respond vaginally in sexual intercourse. In a curious and of course unconscious manner she may hold onto the sensual responses of her clitoris as if she had a small penis, but feel unable to allow the sensual feelings to be experienced within the vagina.