Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
It should be said that even coherent instruction would not resolve the problem; in spite of the best will of parents and teachers, the sexual experience could not be put into words and concepts; it could only be understood by living it; all analysis, however serious, will have a comic side and will fail to deliver the truth. When, from the poetic loves of flowers to the nuptials of fish, by way of the chick, the cat, or the kid, one reaches the human species, the mystery of conception can be theoretically elucidated: that of voluptuousness and sexual love remains total. How would one explain the pleasure of a caress or a kiss to a dispassionate child? Kisses are given and received in a family way, sometimes even on the lips: Why do these mucus exchanges in certain encounters provoke dizziness? It is like describing colors to the blind. As long as there is no intuition of the excitement and desire that give the sexual function its meaning and unity, the different elements seem shocking and monstrous. In particular, the little girl is revolted when she understands that she is virgin and sealed, and that to change into a woman a man’s sex must penetrate her. Since exhibitionism is a widespread
perversion, many little girls have seen the penis in an erection; in any case, they have observed the sexual organs of animals, and it is unfortunate that the horse’s so often draws their attention; one imagines that they would be frightened by it. Fear of childbirth, fear of the male sex organ, fear of the “crises” that threaten married couples, disgust for dirty practices, derision for actions devoid of signification, all of this often leads a young girl to declare: “I will never marry.”
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Therein lies the surest defense against pain, folly, and obscenity. It is useless to try to explain that when the day comes, neither deflowering nor childbirth would seem so terrible, that millions of women resign themselves to it and are none the worse for it. When a child fears an outside occurrence, he is relieved of the fear, but not by predicting that, later, he will accept it naturally: it is himself he fears meeting in the far-off future, alienated and lost. The metamorphosis of the caterpillar, through chrysalis and into butterfly, brings about a deep uneasiness: Is it still the same caterpillar after this long sleep? Does she recognize herself beneath these brilliant wings? I knew little girls who were plunged into an alarming reverie at the sight of a chrysalis.
And yet the metamorphosis takes place. The little girl herself does not understand the meaning, but she realizes that in her relations with the world and her own body something is changing subtly: she is sensitive to contacts, tastes, and odors that previously left her indifferent; baroque images pass through her head; she barely recognizes herself in mirrors; she feels “funny,” and things seem “funny”; such is the case of little Emily, described by Richard Hughes in
A High Wind in Jamaica:
Emily, for coolness, sat up to her chin in water, and hundreds of infant fish were tickling with their inquisitive mouths every inch of her body, a sort of expressionless light kissing. Anyhow she had lately come to hate being touched—but this was abominable. At last, when she could stand it no longer, she clambered out and dressed.
Even Margaret Kennedy’s serene Tessa feels this strange disturbance:
Suddenly she had become intensely miserable. She stared down into the darkness of the hall, cut in two by the moonlight which streamed in through the open door. She could not bear it. She jumped up with a little cry of exasperation. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “How I hate it all!” … She ran out to hide herself in the mountains, frightened and furious, pursued by a desolate foreboding which seemed to fill the quiet house. As she stumbled up towards the pass she kept murmuring to herself: “I wish I could die! I wish I was dead!”
She knew that she did not mean this; she was not in the least anxious to die. But the violence of such a statement seemed to satisfy her.
*
This disturbing moment is described at length in Carson McCullers’s previously mentioned book,
The Member of the Wedding:
This was the summer when Frankie was sick and tired of being Frankie. She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad. Besides being too mean to live, she was a criminal … Then the spring of that year had been a long queer season. Things began to change … There was something about the green trees and the flowers of April that made Frankie sad. She did not know why she was sad, but because of this peculiar sadness, she began to realize that she ought to leave the town … She ought to leave the town and go to some place far away. For the late spring, that year, was lazy and too sweet. The long afternoons flowered and lasted and the green sweetness sickened her … Many things made Frankie suddenly wish to cry. Very early in the morning she would sometimes go out into the yard and stand for a long time looking at the sunrise sky. And it was as though a question came into her heart, and the sky did not answer. Things she had never noticed much before began to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited. But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though
she waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was afraid, and there was a queer tightness in her chest …
She went around town, and the things she saw and heard seemed to be left somehow unfinished, and there was the tightness in her that would not break. She would hurry to do something, but what she did was always wrong … After the long twilights of this season, when Frankie had walked around the sidewalks of the town, a jazz sadness quivered her nerves and her heart stiffened and almost stopped.
What is happening in this troubled period is that the child’s body is becoming a woman’s body and being made flesh. Except in the case of glandular deficiency where the subject remains fixed in the infantile stage, the puberty crisis begins around the age of twelve or thirteen.
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This crisis begins much earlier for girls than for boys, and it brings about far greater changes. The little girl approaches it with worry and displeasure. As her breasts and body hair develop, a feeling is born that sometimes changes into pride, but begins as shame; suddenly the child displays modesty, she refuses to show herself nude, even to her sisters or her mother, she inspects herself with surprise mixed with horror, and she observes with anxiety the swelling of this hard core, somewhat painful, appearing under nipples that until recently were as inoffensive as a navel. She is worried to discover a vulnerable spot in herself: undoubtedly this pain is slight compared with a burn or a toothache; but in an accident or illness, pain was always abnormal, while the youthful breast is normally the center of who knows what indefinable resentment. Something is happening, something that is not an illness, but that involves the very law of existence and is yet struggle and suffering. Of course, from birth to puberty the little girl grew up, but she never felt growth; day after day, her body was present like an exact finished thing; now she is “developing”: the very word horrifies her; vital phenomena are only reassuring when they have found a balance and taken on the stable aspect of a fresh flower, a polished animal; but in the blossoming of her breasts, the little girl feels the ambiguity of the word “living.” She is neither gold nor diamond, but a strange matter, moving and uncertain, inside of which impure chemistries develop. She is used to a free-flowing
head of hair that falls like a silken skein; but this new growth under her arms, beneath her belly, metamorphoses her into an animal or alga. Whether she is more or less prepared for it, she foresees in these changes a finality that rips her from her self; thus hurled into a vital cycle that goes beyond the moment of her own existence, she senses a dependence that dooms her to man, child, and tomb. In themselves, her breasts seem to be a useless and indiscreet proliferation. Arms, legs, skin, muscles, and even the round buttocks she sits on, all have had until now a clear usefulness; only the sex organ defined as urinary was a bit dubious, though secret and invisible to others. Her breasts show through her sweater or blouse, and this body that the little girl identified with self appears to her as flesh; it is an object that others look at and see. “For two years I wore capes to hide my chest, I was so ashamed of it,” a woman told me. And another: “I still remember the strange confusion I felt when a friend of my age, but more developed than I was, stooped to pick up a ball, I noticed by the opening in her blouse two already heavy breasts: this body so similar to mine, on which my body would be modeled, made me blush for myself.” “At thirteen, I walked around bare legged, in a short dress,” another woman told me. “A man, sniggering, made a comment about my fat calves. The next day, my mother made me wear stockings and lengthen my skirt, but I will never forget the shock I suddenly felt in seeing myself
seen
.” The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality; it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment, she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh.
This disgust is expressed in many young girls by the desire to lose weight: they do not want to eat anymore; if they are forced, they vomit; they watch their weight incessantly. Others become pathologically shy; entering a room or going out on the street becomes a torture. From these experiences, psychoses sometimes develop. A typical example is Nadia, the patient from
Les obsessions et la psychasthénie
(Obsessions and Psychasthenia), described by Janet:
Nadia, a young girl from a wealthy and remarkably intelligent family, was stylish, artistic, and above all an excellent musician; but from infancy she was obstinate and irritable …: “She demanded excessive affection from everyone, her parents, sisters, and servants, but she was so demanding and dominating that she soon alienated people; horribly susceptible, when her cousins used mockery to try
to change her character, she acquired a sense of shame fixed on her body.” Then, too, her need for affection made her wish to remain a child, to remain a little girl to be petted, one whose every whim is indulged, and in short made her fear growing up … A precocious puberty worsened her troubles, mixing fears of modesty with fears of growing up: “Since men like plump women, I want to remain extremely thin.” Pubic hair and growing breasts added to her fears. From the age of eleven, as she wore short skirts, it seemed to her that everyone eyed her; she was given long skirts and was then ashamed of her feet, her hips, and so on. The appearance of menstruation drove her half-mad; believing that she was the only one in the world having the monstrosity of pubic hair, she labored up to the age of twenty “to rid herself of this savage decoration by depilation.” The development of breasts exacerbated these obsessions because she had always had a horror of obesity; she did not detest it in others; but for herself she considered it a defect. “I don’t care about being pretty, but I would be too
ashamed
if I became bloated, that would horrify me; if by bad luck I became fat, I wouldn’t dare let anyone see me.” So she tried every means, all kinds of prayers and conjurations, to prevent normal growth: she swore to repeat prayers five or ten times, to hop five times on one foot. “If I touch one piano note four times in the same piece, I accept growing and not being loved by anyone.” Finally she decided not to eat. “I did not want to get fat, nor to grow up, nor resemble a woman because I always wanted to remain a little girl.” She solemnly promised to accept no food at all; when she yielded to her mother’s pleas to take some food and broke her vow, she knelt for hours writing out vows and tearing them up. Her mother died when she was eighteen, and she then imposed a strict regime on herself: two clear bouillon soups, an egg yolk, a spoonful of vinegar, a cup of tea with the juice of a whole lemon, was all she would take in a day. Hunger devoured her. “Sometimes I spent hours thinking of food, I was so hungry: I swallowed my saliva, gnawed on my handkerchief, and rolled on the floor from wanting to eat.” But she resisted temptations. She was pretty, but believed that her face was puffy and covered with pimples; if her doctor stated that he did not see them, she said he didn’t understand anything, that he couldn’t see the pimples between the skin and the flesh. She left her family in the end and hid in a small apartment, seeing only a guardian and the doctor; she never went out; she accepted her father’s visit, but only with difficulty; he
brought about a serious relapse by telling her that she looked well; she dreaded having a fat face, healthy complexion, big muscles. She lived most of the time in darkness, so intolerable it was for her to be seen or even
visible
.
Very often the parents’ attitude contributes to inculcating shame in the little girl for her physical appearance. A woman’s testimony:
I suffered from a very keen sense of physical inferiority, which was accentuated by continual nagging at home … Mother, in her excessive pride, wanted me to appear at my best, and she always found many faults that required “covering up” to point out to the dressmaker; for instance, drooping shoulders! Heavy hips! Too flat in the back! Bust too prominent! Having had a swollen neck for years, it was not possible for me to have an open neck. And so on. I was particularly worried on account of the appearance of my feet … and I was nagged on account of my gait … There was some truth in every criticism … but sometimes I was so embarrassed, particularly during my “backfisch” stage, that at times I was at a loss to know how to move about. If I met someone, my first thought was: “If I could only hide my feet!”
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