Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
It is a strange experience for an individual recognizing himself as subject, autonomy, and transcendence, as an absolute, to discover inferiority—as a given essence—in his self: it is a strange experience for one who posits himself for himself as One to be revealed to himself as alterity. That is what happens to the little girl when, learning about the world, she grasps herself as a woman in it. The sphere she belongs to is closed everywhere, limited, dominated by the male universe: as high as she climbs, as far as she dares go, there will always be a ceiling over her head, walls that block her path. Man’s gods are in such a faraway heaven that in truth, for him, there are no gods: the little girl lives among gods with a human face.
This is not a unique situation. American blacks, partially integrated into a civilization that nevertheless considers them an inferior caste, live it; what Bigger Thomas experiences with so much bitterness at the dawn of his life is this definitive inferiority, this cursed alterity inscribed in the color of his skin: he watches planes pass and knows that because he is black the sky is out of bounds for him.
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Because she is woman, the girl knows that the sea and the poles, a thousand adventures, a thousand joys, are forbidden to her: she is born on the wrong side. The great difference is that the blacks
endure their lot in revolt—no privilege compensates for its severity—while for the woman her complicity is invited. Earlier I recalled that in addition to the authentic claim of the subject who claims sovereign freedom, there is an inauthentic desire for renunciation and escape in the existent;
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these are the delights of passivity that parents and educators, books and myths, women and men dangle before the little girl’s eyes; in early childhood she is already taught to taste them; temptation becomes more and more insidious; and she yields to it even more fatally as the thrust of her transcendence comes up against harsher and harsher resistance. But in accepting her passivity, she also accepts without resistance enduring a destiny that is going to be imposed on her from the exterior, and this fatality frightens her. Whether ambitious, scatterbrained, or shy, the young boy leaps toward an open future; he will be a sailor or an engineer, he will stay in the fields or will leave for the city, he will see the world, he will become rich; he feels free faced with a future where unexpected opportunities await him. The girl will be wife, mother, grandmother; she will take care of her house exactly as her mother does, she will take care of her children as she was taken care of: she is twelve years old, and her story is already written in the heavens; she will discover it day after day without shaping it; she is curious but frightened when she thinks about this life whose every step is planned in advance and toward which each day irrevocably moves her.
This is why the little girl, even more so than her brothers, is preoccupied with sexual mysteries; of course boys are interested as well, just as passionately; but in their future, their role of husband and father is not what concerns them the most; marriage and motherhood put in question the little girl’s whole destiny; and as soon as she begins to perceive their secrets, her body seems odiously threatened to her. The magic of motherhood has faded: whether she has been informed early or not, she knows, in a more or less coherent manner, that a baby does not appear by chance in the mother’s belly and does not come out at the wave of a magic wand; she questions herself anxiously. Often it seems not extraordinary at all but rather horrible that a parasitic body should proliferate inside her body; the idea of this monstrous swelling frightens her. And how will the baby get out? Even if she was never told about the cries and suffering of childbirth, she has overheard things, she has read the words in the Bible: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children”; she has the presentiment of tortures she cannot even imagine; she invents strange operations around her navel; she
is no less reassured if she supposes that the fetus will be expelled by her anus: little girls have been seen to have nervous constipation attacks when they thought they had discovered the birthing process. Accurate explanations will not bring much relief: images of swelling, tearing, and hemorrhaging will haunt her. The more imaginative she is, the more sensitive the little girl will be to these visions; but no girl could look at them without shuddering. Colette relates how her mother found her in a faint after reading Zola’s description of a birth:
[The author depicted the birth] with a rough-and-ready, crude wealth of detail, an anatomical precision, and a lingering over colours, postures and cries, in which I recognized none of the tranquil, knowing experience on which I as a country girl could draw. I felt credulous, startled and vulnerable in my nascent femininity … Other words, right in front of my eyes, depicted flesh splitting open, excrement and sullied blood … The lawn rose to welcome me … like one of those little hares that poachers sometimes brought, freshly killed, into the kitchen.
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The reassurance offered by grown-ups leaves the child worried; growing up, she learns not to trust the word of adults; often it is on the very mysteries of her conception that she has caught them in lies; and she also knows that they consider the most frightening things normal; if she has ever experienced a violent physical shock—tonsils removed, tooth pulled, whitlow lanced—she will project the remembered anxiety onto childbirth.
The physical nature of pregnancy and childbirth suggests as well that “something physical” takes place between the spouses. The often-encountered word “blood” in expressions like “same-blood children,” “pure blood,” and “mixed blood” sometimes orients the childish imagination; it is supposed that marriage is accompanied by some solemn transfusion. But more often the “physical thing” seems to be linked to the urinary and excremental systems; in particular, children think that the man urinates into the woman. This sexual operation is thought of as
dirty
. This is what overwhelms the child for whom “dirty” things have been rife with the strictest taboos: How, then, can it be that they are integrated into adults’ lives? The child is first of all protected from scandal by the very absurdity he discovers: he finds there is no sense to what he hears around him, what
he reads, what he writes; everything seems unreal to him. In Carson McCullers’s charming book
The Member of the Wedding
, the young heroine surprises two neighbors in bed nude; the very anomaly of the story keeps her from giving it too much importance:
It was a summer Sunday and the hall door of the Marlowes’ room was open. She could see only a portion of the room, part of the dresser and only the footpiece of the bed with Mrs. Marlowe’s corset on it. But there was a sound in the quiet room she could not place, and when she stepped over the threshold she was startled by a sight that, after a single glance, sent her running to the kitchen, crying: Mr. Marlowe is having a fit! Berenice had hurried through the hall, but when she looked into the front room, she merely bunched her lips and banged the door … Frankie had tried to question Berenice and find out what was the matter. But Berenice had only said that they were common people and added that with a certain party in the house they ought at least to know enough to shut a door. Though Frankie knew she was the certain party, still she did not understand. What kind of a fit was it? she asked. But Berenice would only answer: Baby, just a common fit. And Frankie knew from the voice’s tones that there was more to it than she was told. Later she only remembered the Marlowes as common people.
When children are warned against strangers, when a sexual incident is described to them, it is often explained in terms of sickness, maniacs, or madmen; it is a convenient explanation; the little girl fondled by her neighbor at the cinema or the girl who sees a man expose himself thinks that she is dealing with a crazy man; of course, encountering madness is unpleasant: an epileptic attack, hysteria, or a violent quarrel upsets the adult world order, and the child who witnesses it feels in danger; but after all, just as there are homeless, beggars, and injured people with hideous sores in harmonious society, there can also be some abnormal ones without its base disintegrating. It is when parents, friends, and teachers are suspected of celebrating black masses that the child really becomes afraid.
When I was first told about sexual relations between man and woman, I declared that such things were impossible since my parents would have had to do likewise, and I thought too highly of them to believe it. I said that it was much too disgusting for me ever to do it.
Unfortunately, I was to be disabused shortly after when I heard what my parents were doing … that was a fearful moment; I hid my face under the bedcovers, stopped my ears, and wished I were a thousand miles from there.
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How to go from the image of dressed and dignified people, these people who teach decency, reserve, and reason, to that of naked beasts confronting each other? Here is a contradiction that shakes their pedestal, darkens the sky. Often the child stubbornly refuses the odious revelation. “My parents don’t do that,” he declares. Or he tries to give coitus a decent image. “When you want a child,” said a little girl, “you go to the doctor; you undress, you cover your eyes, because you mustn’t watch; the doctor ties the parents together and helps them so that it works right”; she had changed the act of love into a surgical operation, rather unpleasant at that, but as honorable as going to the dentist. But despite denial and escape, embarrassment and doubt creep into the child’s heart; a phenomenon as painful as weaning occurs: it is no longer separating the child from the maternal flesh, but the protective universe that surrounds him falls apart; he finds himself without a roof over his head, abandoned, absolutely alone before a future as dark as night. What adds to the little girl’s anxiety is that she cannot discern the exact shape of the equivocal curse that weighs on her. The information she gets is inconsistent, books are contradictory; even technical explanations do not dissipate the heavy shadow; a hundred questions arise: Is the sexual act painful? Or delicious? How long does it last? Five minutes or all night? Sometimes you read that a woman became a mother with one embrace, and sometimes you remain sterile after hours of sexual activity. Do people “do that” every day? Or rarely? The child tries to learn more by reading the Bible, consulting dictionaries, asking friends, and he gropes in darkness and disgust. An interesting document on this point is the study made by Dr. Liepmann; here are a few responses given to him by young girls about their sexual initiation:
I continued to stray among my nebulous and twisted ideas. No one broached the subject, neither my mother nor my schoolteacher; no book treated the subject fully. Little by little a sort of perilous and ugly mystery was woven around the act, which at first had seemed so natural to me. The older girls of twelve used crude jokes to bridge
the gap between themselves and our classmates. All that was still so vague and disgusting; we argued about where the baby was formed, if perhaps the thing only took place once for the man since marriage was the occasion for so much fuss. My period at fifteen was another new surprise. It was my turn to be caught up, in a way, in the round.
… Sexual initiation! An expression never to be mentioned in our parents’ house!… I searched in books, but I agonized and wore myself out looking for the road to follow … I went to a boys’ school: for my schoolteacher the question did not even seem to exist … Horlam’s work,
Little Boy and Little Girl
, finally brought me the truth. My tense state and unbearable overexcitement disappeared, although I was very unhappy and took a long time to recognize and understand that eroticism and sexuality alone constitute real love.
Stages of my initiation: (1) First questions and a few vague notions (totally unsatisfactory). From three and a half to eleven years old … No answers to the questions I had in the following years. When I was seven, right there feeding my rabbit, I suddenly saw little naked ones underneath her … My mother told me that in animals and people little ones grow in their mother’s belly and come out through the loins. This birth through the loins seemed unreasonable to me … a nursemaid told me about pregnancy, birth, and menstruation … Finally, my father replied to my last question about his true function with obscure stories about pollen and pistil. (2) Some attempts at personal experimentation (eleven to thirteen years old). I dug out an encyclopedia and a medical book … It was only theoretical information in strange gigantic words. (3) Testing of acquired knowledge (thirteen to twenty): (
a
) in daily life, (
b
) in scientific works.
At eight, I often played with a boy my age. One day we broached the subject. I already knew, because my mother had already told me, that a woman has many eggs inside her … and that a child was born from one of these eggs whenever the mother strongly desired it … Giving this same answer to my friend, I received this reply: “You are completely stupid! When our butcher and his wife want a baby, they go to bed and do dirty things.” I was indignant … We had then (around twelve and a half) a maid who told me all sorts of scandalous tales. I never said a word to Mama, as I was ashamed; but
I asked her if sitting on a man’s knees could give you a baby. She explained everything as best she could.
At school I learned where babies emerged, and I had the feeling that it was something horrible. But how did they come into the world? We both formed a rather monstrous idea about the thing, especially since one winter morning on the way to school together in the darkness we met a certain man who showed us his sexual parts and asked us, “Don’t they seem good enough to eat?” Our disgust was inconceivable, and we were literally nauseated. Until I was twenty-one, I thought babies were born through the navel.
A little girl took me aside and asked me: “Do you know where babies come from?” Finally she decided to speak out: “Goodness! How foolish you are! Kids come out of women’s stomachs, and for them to be born, women have to do completely disgusting things with men!” Then she went into details about how disgusting. But I had become totally transformed, absolutely unable to believe that such things could be possible. We slept in the same room as our parents … One night later I heard take place what I had thought was impossible, and, yes, I was ashamed, I was ashamed of my parents. All of this made of me another being. I went through horrible moral suffering. I considered myself a deeply depraved creature because I was now aware of these things.