Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
When the child grows up, he fights against his original abandonment in two ways. He tries to deny the separation: he crushes himself in his mother’s arms, he seeks her loving warmth, he wants her caresses. And he
tries to win the approbation of others in order to justify himself. Adults are to him as gods: they have the power to confer being on him. He experiences the magic of the gaze that metamorphoses him now into a delicious little angel and now into a monster. These two modes of defense are not mutually exclusive: on the contrary, they complete and infuse each other. When seduction is successful, the feeling of justification finds physical confirmation in the kisses and caresses received: it is the same contented passivity that the child experiences in his mother’s lap and under her benevolent eyes. During the first three or four years of life, there is no difference between girls’ and boys’ attitudes; they all try to perpetuate the happy state preceding weaning; both boys and girls show the same behavior of seduction and display. Boys are just as desirous as their sisters to please, to be smiled at, to be admired.
It is more satisfying to deny brutal separation than to overcome it, more radical to be lost in the heart of the Whole than to be petrified by the consciousness of others: carnal fusion creates a deeper alienation than any abdication under the gaze of another. Seduction and display represent a more complex and less easy stage than the simple abandonment in maternal arms. The magic of the adult gaze is capricious; the child pretends to be invisible, his parents play the game, grope around for him, they laugh, and then suddenly they declare: “You are bothersome, you are not invisible at all.” A child’s phrase amuses, then he repeats it: this time, they shrug their shoulders. In this world as unsure and unpredictable as Kafka’s universe, one stumbles at every step.
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That is why so many children are afraid of growing up; they desperately want their parents to continue taking them on their laps, taking them into their bed: through physical frustration they experience ever more cruelly that abandonment of which the human being never becomes aware without anguish.
It is here that little girls first appear privileged. A second weaning, slower and less brutal than the first one, withdraws the mother’s body from the child’s embraces; but little by little boys are the ones who are denied
kisses and caresses; the little girl continues to be doted upon, she is allowed to hide behind her mother’s skirts, her father takes her on his knees and pats her hair; she is dressed in dresses as lovely as kisses, her tears and whims are treated indulgently, her hair is done carefully, her expressions and affectations amuse: physical contact and complaisant looks protect her against the anxiety of solitude. For the little boy, on the other hand, even affectations are forbidden; his attempts at seduction, his games irritate. “A man doesn’t ask for kisses … A man doesn’t look at himself in the mirror … A man doesn’t cry,” he is told. He has to be “a little man”; he obtains adults’ approbation by freeing himself from them. He will please by not seeming to seek to please.
Many boys, frightened by the harsh independence they are condemned to, thus desire to be girls; in times when they were first dressed as girls, they cried when they had to give dresses up for long pants and had to have their curls cut. Some obstinately would choose femininity, which is one of the ways of gravitating toward homosexuality: “I wanted passionately to be a girl, and I was unconscious of the grandeur of being a man to the point of trying to urinate sitting down,” Maurice Sachs recounts.
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However, if the boy at first seems less favored than his sisters, it is because there are greater designs for him. The requirements he is subjected to immediately imply a higher estimation. In his memoirs, Maurras recounts that he was jealous of a cadet his mother and grandmother doted upon; his father took him by the hand and out of the room. “We are men; let’s leave these women,” he told him. The child is persuaded that more is demanded of boys because of their superiority; the pride of his virility is breathed into him in order to encourage him in this difficult path; this abstract notion takes on a concrete form for him: it is embodied in the penis; he does not experience pride spontaneously in his little indolent sex organ; but he feels it through the attitude of those around him. Mothers and wet nurses perpetuate the tradition that assimilates phallus and maleness; whether they recognize its prestige in amorous gratitude or in submission, or that they gain revenge by seeing it in the baby in a reduced form, they treat the child’s penis with a singular deference. Rabelais reports on Gargantua’s wet nurses’ games and words;
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history has recorded those of Louis XIII’s wet nurses. Less daring
women, however, give a friendly name to the little boy’s sex organ, they speak to him about it as of a little person who is both himself and other than himself; they make of it, according to the words already cited, “an alter ego usually craftier, more intelligent, and more clever than the individual.”
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Anatomically, the penis is totally apt to play this role; considered apart from the body, it looks like a little natural plaything, a kind of doll. The child is esteemed by esteeming his double. A father told me that one of his sons at the age of three was still urinating sitting down; surrounded by sisters and girl cousins, he was a shy and sad child; one day his father took him with him to the toilet and said: “I will show you how men do it.” From then on, the child, proud to be urinating standing up, scorned the girls “who urinated through a hole”; his scorn came originally not from the fact that they were lacking an organ but that they had not like him been singled out and initiated by the father. So, far from the penis being discovered as an immediate privilege from which the boy would draw a feeling of superiority, its value seems, on the contrary, like a compensation—invented by adults and fervently accepted by the child—for the hardships of the last weaning: in that way he is protected against regret that he is no longer a breast-feeding baby or a girl. From then on, he will embody his transcendence and his arrogant sovereignty in his sex.
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The girl’s lot is very different. Mothers and wet nurses have neither reverence nor tenderness for her genital parts; they do not focus attention on this secret organ of which only the outside envelope can be seen and that cannot be taken hold of; in one sense, she does not have a sex. She does not experience this absence as a lack; her body is evidently a plenitude for her; but she finds herself in the world differently from the boy; and a group of factors can transform this difference into inferiority in her eyes.
Few questions are as much discussed by psychoanalysts as the famous “female castration complex.” Most accept today that penis envy manifests itself in very different ways depending on the individual case.
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First, many girls are ignorant of male anatomy until an advanced age. The child accepts naturally that there are men and women as there are a sun and a moon: she believes in essences contained in words, and his curiosity is at
first not analytical. For many others, this little piece of flesh hanging between boys’ legs is insignificant or even derisory; it is a particularity like that of clothes and hairstyle; often the female child discovers it at a younger brother’s birth, and “when the little girl is very young,” says Helene Deutsch, “she is not impressed by her younger brother’s penis”; she cites the example of an eighteen-month-old girl who remained absolutely indifferent to the discovery of the penis and did not give it any value until much later, in connection with her personal preoccupations. The penis can even be considered an anomaly: it is a growth, a vague hanging thing like nodules, teats, and warts; it can inspire disgust. Lastly, the fact is that there are many cases of the little girl being interested in a brother’s or a friend’s penis; but that does not mean she experiences a specifically sexual jealousy and even less that she feels deeply moved by the absence of this organ; she desires to appropriate it for herself as she desires to appropriate any object; but this desire may remain superficial.
It is certain that the excretory function and particularly the urinary one interest children passionately: wetting the bed is often a protest against the parents’ marked preference for another child. There are countries where men urinate sitting down, and there are women who urinate standing up: this is the way among many women peasants; but in contemporary Western society, custom generally has it that they squat, while the standing position is reserved to males. This is the most striking sexual difference for the little girl. To urinate she has to squat down, remove some clothes, and above all hide, a shameful and uncomfortable servitude. Shame increases in the frequent cases in which she suffers from involuntary urinary emissions, when bursting out laughing, for example; control is worse than for boys. For them, the urinary function is like a free game with the attraction of all games in which freedom is exercised; the penis can be handled, through it one can act, which is one of the child’s deep interests. A little girl seeing a boy urinate declared admiringly: “How practical!”
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The stream can be aimed at will, the urine directed far away: the boy draws a feeling of omnipotence from it. Freud spoke of “the burning ambition of early diuretics”; Stekel discussed this formula sensibly, but it is true that, as Karen Horney says, “fantasies of omnipotence, especially of a sadistic character, are as a matter of fact more easily associated with the jet of urine passed by the male”;
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there are many such fantasies in children, and they
survive in some men.
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Abraham speaks of “the great pleasure women experience watering the garden with a hose”; I think, in agreement with Sartre’s and Bachelard’s theories,
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that it is not necessarily the assimilation of the hose with the penis that is the source of pleasure;
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every stream of water seems like a miracle, a defiance of gravity: directing or governing it means carrying off a little victory over natural laws; in any case, for the little boy there is a daily amusement that is impossible for his sisters. He is also able to establish many relations with things through the urinary stream, especially in the countryside: water, earth, moss, snow. There are little girls who lie on their backs and try to practice urinating “in the air” or who try to urinate standing up in order to have these experiences. According to Karen Horney, they also envy the opportunity to exhibit that the boy is granted. A sick woman suddenly exclaimed, after seeing a man urinating in the street: “If I might ask a gift of Providence, it would be to be able just for once to urinate like a man,” Karen Horney reports. It seems to girls that the boy, having the right to touch his penis, can use it as a plaything, while their organs are taboo. That these factors make the possession of a male sex organ desirable for many of them is a fact confirmed by many studies and confidences gathered by psychiatrists. Havelock Ellis quotes the words of a patient he calls Zenia: “The noise of a jet of water, especially coming out of a long hose, has always been very stimulating for me, recalling the noise of the stream of urine observed in childhood in my brother and even in other people.”
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Another woman, Mrs. R.S., recounts that as a child she absolutely loved holding a little friend’s penis in her hands; one day she was given a hose: “It seemed delicious to hold that as if I was holding a penis.” She emphasized that the penis had no sexual meaning for her; she only knew its urinary usage. The most interesting case, that of Florrie, is reported by Havelock Ellis and later analyzed by Stekel.
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Here is a detailed account from it.
The woman concerned is very intelligent, artistic, active, biologically normal, and not homosexual. She says that the urinary function played a great role in her childhood; she played urinary games with
her brothers, and they wet their hands without feeling disgust. “My earliest ideas of the superiority of the male were connected with urination. I felt aggrieved with nature because I lacked so useful and ornamental an organ. No teapot without a spout felt so forlorn. It required no one to instill into me the theory of male predominance and superiority. Constant proof was before me.” She took great pleasure in urinating in the country. “Nothing could come up to the entrancing sound as the stream descended on crackling leaves in the depth of a wood and she watched its absorption. Most of all she was fascinated by the idea of doing it into water” [as are many little boys]. There is a quantity of childish and vulgar imagery showing little boys urinating in ponds and brooks. Florrie complains that the style of her knickers prevented her from trying various desired experiments, but often during country walks she would hold back as long as she could and then suddenly relieve herself standing. “I can distinctly remember the strange and delicious sensation of this forbidden delight, and also my puzzled feeling that it came standing.” In her opinion, the style of children’s clothing has great importance for feminine psychology in general. “It was not only a source of annoyance to me that I had to unfasten my drawers and then squat down for fear of wetting them in front, but the flap at the back, which must be removed to uncover the posterior parts during the act, accounts for my early impression that in girls this function is connected with those parts. The first distinction in sex that impressed me—the one great difference in sex—was that boys urinated standing and that girls had to sit down … The fact that my earliest feelings of shyness were more associated with the back than the front may have thus originated.” All these impressions were of great importance in Florrie’s case because her father often whipped her until the blood came and also a governess had once spanked her to make her urinate; she was obsessed by masochistic dreams and fancies in which she saw herself whipped by a school mistress under the eyes of all and having to urinate against her will, “an idea that gives one a curious sense of gratification.” At the age of fifteen it happened that under urgent need she urinated standing in a deserted street. “In trying to analyze my sensations, I think the most prominent lay in the shame that came from standing, and the consequently greater distance the stream had to descend. It seemed to make the affair important and conspicuous, even though clothing hid it. In the ordinary attitude there is a kind of privacy. As a small child, too,
the stream had not far to go, but at the age of fifteen I was tall and it seemed to give one a glow of shame to think of this stream falling unchecked such a distance. (I am sure that the ladies who fled in horror from the urinette at Portsmouth thought it most indecent for a woman to stand, legs apart, and to pull up her clothes and make a stream which descended unabashed all that way.)”
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She renewed this experience at twenty and frequently thereafter. She felt a mixture of shame and pleasure at the idea that she might be surprised and that she would be incapable of stopping. “The stream seemed to be drawn from me without my consent, and
yet with even more pleasure than if I were doing it freely
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This curious feeling—that it is being drawn away by some unseen power which is determined that one shall do it—is an entirely feminine pleasure and a subtle charm … There is a fierce charm in the torrent that binds one to its will by a mighty force.” Later Florrie developed a flagellatory eroticism always combined with urinary obsessions.