Jacques Lacan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
There is no signifier of Woman answering to the phallic universal, and the sentence says that and nothing more. It is a statement about the symbolic order, not about women.1234
Except that what he takes on is the cause of his desire, the cause I have designated as the objet a. That is the act of love. To make love, as the term indicates, is poetry. Only there is a world between poetry and the act. The act of love is the polymorphous perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being.Feminine Sexuality, pp. 143–145
That naturally, even if the function of attribute was one day invented, why would it not be in relationship, in the first ridiculous steps of the structure of the semblance, that every man is phallic, every woman is not so. Now what has to be established, is something quite different.Seminar XVIII, On a discourse that might not be a semblance, pp. 151–152
It is possible to propose the following truth function, namely that all men are defined by the phallic function, the phallic function being specifically what obturates sexual relation. The universal quantifier will be defined in a different way when the upside-down A is furnished, which is what I have been doing, with a bar that negates it, V.Seminar XIX, or Worse, p. 40
Lacan, therefore, returns to the debates of the 1920s and 1930s (Abraham, Jones, Klein) and criticises what he sees as a reduction of the phallus to an object of primitive oral aggression, belonging in the realm of the instinct. Instead he places the phallus within the symbolic order, and argues that it can only be understood as a signifier in the linguistic sense of the term.Feminine Sexuality, pp. 74–75
One of the most contested claims in the corpus, and one where his own defenders and his critics agree on the wording and disagree on everything else.