The notions of inferiority complex and masculinity complex remind me of the anecdote that Denis de Rougemont recounts in La part du diable (The Devil’s Share): a woman imagined that birds were attacking her when she went walking in the country; after several months of psychoanalytical treatment that failed to cure her of her obsession, the doctor accompanied her to the clinic garden and realized that the birds were attacking her. Woman feels undermined because in fact the restrictions of femininity undermine her. She spontaneously chooses to be a complete individual, a subject, and a freedom before whom the world and future open: if this choice amounts to the choice of virility, it does so to the extent that femininity today means mutilation.

— The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (Page 558)