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has his, rather than believing it is possible that they had them and lost them, the boy convinces himself that they have them, but they are located somewhere else on the body. He spends an immense amount of time looking for the physical penis, and at some point gives up on finding it, but transfers it to something a woman does have -- long hair, or pointed high heels, or any other object representing her power and her missing phallus for him. Without the presence of this object, the adult male cannot experience sexual release, it is an integral part of his psychological concept of the woman he is with, and without it, she is castrated in his eyes. Although a fetish is a more common perversion in males, it can occur in females as well, who as girls avoiding recognizing their own lack of a penis by substituting some other object for it in their mind (long braids, perhaps, or a necklace). Like sadomasochism, fetishism is a form of sexuality that does not recognize difference between genders, or difference, fundamentally, at all. Many people are skeptical of Freud because he so often refers to childhood sexuality, and the concept meshes poorly with our beliefs about what children are like.
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