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Recognizing the male envy of the female body as a psychic universal, Boyarin considers the phallus myth a kind of couvade, the denial of the male desire to be female and the primitive desire for female plenitude constituting a crisis in male subjectivity. He explores Freud's resistance to investigating male patriarchy and Lacan's refusal to grant signifying power to the female body, and he sees the fiction of the phallus as the denial of the desire to have babies. He examines the anxiety about the paternal function in Rabbinic culture, viewing masochism as a series of acting out of childbirth, and castration as an attempt to achieve the status of femaleness.
In both Christian and Jewish religions the eroticization of pain in religion is analyzed as an identification with the mother: desiring to bear the father's child in a painful re-enactment of childbirth, and acting out the female demand for recognition from God, the male other, through accepting and even desiring pain. Womb envy is thus identified as the cross-cultural motivating force for much violence toward women. The possibility of nonphallic masculinity is presented: a male who resists or renounces the myth of bodily coherence, power, and unimpairability