Authors: Simone de Beauvoir
This shame makes the girl act awkwardly, blush at the drop of a hat; this blushing increases her timidity, and itself becomes the object of a phobia. Stekel recounts, among others, a woman who “as a young girl blushed so pathologically and violently that for a year she wore bandages around her face with the excuse of toothaches.”
39
Sometimes, in prepuberty preceding the arrival of her period, the girl does not yet feel disgust for her body; she is proud of becoming a woman, she eagerly awaits her maturing breasts, she pads her blouse with handkerchiefs and brags around her older sisters; she does not yet grasp the meaning of the phenomena taking place in her. Her first period exposes this meaning, and feelings of shame appear. If they existed already, they are confirmed and magnified from this moment on. All the accounts agree: whether or not the child has been warned, the event always appears repugnant and humiliating. The mother very often neglected to warn her; it has been noted that mothers explain the mysteries of pregnancy, childbirth,
and even sexual relations to their daughters more easily than that of menstruation;
40
they themselves hate this feminine servitude, a hatred that reflects men’s old mystical terrors and one that they transmit to their offspring. When the girl finds suspicious stains on her underwear, she thinks she has diarrhea, a fatal hemorrhage, a venereal disease. According to a survey that Havelock Ellis cited in 1896, out of 125 American high school students 36 at the time of their first period knew absolutely nothing on the question, 39 had vague ideas; that is, more than half of the girls were unaware. And according to Helene Deutsch, things had not changed much by 1946. Ellis cites the case of a young girl who threw herself into the Seine in Saint-Ouen because she thought she had an “unknown disease.” Stekel, in
Letters to a Mother
, tells the story of a little girl who tried to commit suicide, seeing in the menstrual flow the sign of and punishment for the impurities that sullied her soul. It is natural for the young girl to be afraid: it seems to her that her life is seeping out of her. According to Klein and the English psychoanalytic school, blood is for the young girl the manifestation of a wound of the internal organs. Even if cautious advice saves her from excessive anxiety, she is ashamed, she feels dirty: she rushes to the sink, she tries to wash or hide her dirtied underwear. There is a typical account of the experience in Colette Audry’s book
In the Eyes of Memory:
At the heart of this exaltation, the brutal and finished drama. One evening while getting undressed, I thought I was sick; it did not frighten me, and I kept myself from saying anything in the hope that it would disappear the next day … Four weeks later, the illness occurred again, but more violently. I was quietly going to throw my knickers into the hamper behind the bathroom door. It was so hot that the diamond-shaped tiles of the hallway were warm under my naked feet. When I then got into bed, Mama opened my bedroom door: she came to explain things to me. I am unable to remember the effect her words had on me at that time, but while she was whispering, Kaki poked her head in. The sight of this round and curious face drove me crazy. I screamed at her to get out of there and she disappeared in fright. I begged Mama to go and beat her because she hadn’t knocked before entering. My mother’s calmness, her knowing and quietly happy air, were all it took to make me lose my head. When she left, I dug myself in for a stormy night.
Two memories all of a sudden come back: a few months earlier, coming back from a walk with Kaki, Mama and I had met the old doctor from Privas, built like a logger with a full white beard. “Your daughter is growing up, madam,” he said while looking at me; and I hated him right then and there without understanding anything. A little later, coming back from Paris, Mama put away some new little towels in the chest of drawers. “What is that?” Kaki asked. Mama had this natural air of adults who reveal one part of the truth while omitting the other three: “It’s for Colette soon.” Speechless, unable to utter one question, I hated my mother.
That whole night I tossed and turned in my bed. It was not possible. I was going to wake up. Mama was mistaken, it would go away and not come back again … The next day, secretly changed and stained, I had to confront the others. I looked at my sister with hatred because she did not yet know, because all of a sudden she found herself, unknown to her, endowed with an overwhelming superiority over me. Then I began to hate men, who would never experience this, and who knew. And then I also hated women who accepted it so calmly. I was sure that if they had been warned of what was happening to me, they would all be overjoyed. “So it’s your turn now,” they would have thought. That one too, I said to myself when I saw one. And this one too. I was had by the world. I had trouble walking and didn’t dare run. The earth, the sun-hot greenery, even the food, seemed to give off a suspicious smell … The crisis passed and I began to hope against hope that it would not come back again. One month later, I had to face the facts and accept the evil definitively, in a heavy stupor this time. There was now in my memory a “before.” All the rest of my existence would no longer be anything but an “after.”
Things happen in a similar way for most little girls. Many of them are horrified at the idea of sharing their secret with those around them. A friend told me that, motherless, she lived between her father and a primary school teacher and spent three months in fear and shame, hiding her stained underwear before it was discovered that she had begun menstruating. Even peasant women who might be expected to be hardened by their knowledge of the harshest sides of animal life are horrified by this malediction, which in the countryside is still taboo: I knew a young woman farmer who washed her underwear in secret in the frozen brook, putting her soaking garment directly back on her naked skin to hide her unspeakable secret. I
could cite a hundred similar facts. Even admitting this astonishing misfortune offers no relief. Undoubtedly, the mother who slapped her daughter brutally, saying, “Stupid! You’re much too young,” is exceptional. But this is not only about being in a bad mood; most mothers fail to give the child the necessary explanations, and so she is full of anxiety before this new state brought about by the first menstruation crisis: she wonders if the future does not hold other painful surprises for her; or else she imagines that from now on she could become pregnant by the simple presence or contact with a man, and she feels real terror of males. Even if she is spared these anxieties by intelligent explanations, she is not so easily granted peace of mind. Prior to this, the girl could, with a little bad faith, still think herself an asexual being, she could just not think herself; she even dreams of waking up one morning changed into a man; these days, mothers and aunts flatter and whisper to each other: “She’s a big girl now”; the brotherhood of matrons has won: she belongs to them. Here she takes her place on the women’s side without recourse. Sometimes, she is proud of it; she thinks she has now become an adult and an upheaval will occur in her existence. As Thyde Monnier recounts:
Some of us had become “big girls” during vacation; others would while at school, and then, one after the other in the toilets in the courtyard, where they were sitting on their “thrones” like queens receiving their subjects, we would go and “see the blood.”
41
But the girl is soon disappointed because she sees that she has not gained any privilege and that life follows its normal course. The only novelty is the disgusting event repeated monthly; there are children that cry for hours when they learn they are condemned to this destiny; what adds to their revolt is that this shameful defect is known by men as well: what they would like is that the humiliating feminine condition at least be shrouded in mystery for them. But no, father, brothers, cousins, men know and even joke about it sometimes. This is when the shame of her too carnal body is born or exacerbated. And once the first surprise has passed, the monthly unpleasantness does not fade away at all: each time, the girl finds the same disgust when faced by this unappetizing and stagnant odor that comes from herself—a smell of swamps and wilted violets—this less red and more suspicious blood than that flowing from children’s cuts and scratches. Day and
night she has to think of changing her protection, watching her underwear, her sheets, and solving a thousand little practical and repugnant problems; in thrifty families sanitary napkins are washed each month and take their place among the piles of handkerchiefs; this waste coming out of oneself has to be delivered to those handling the laundry: the laundress, servant, mother, or older sister. The types of bandages pharmacies sell in boxes named after flowers, Camellia or Edelweiss, are thrown out after use; but while traveling, on vacation, or on a trip it is not so easy to get rid of them, the toilet bowl being specifically prohibited. The young heroine of the
Psychoanalytical Journal
described her horror of the sanitary napkin;
42
she did not even consent to undress in front of her sister except in the dark during these times. This bothersome, annoying object can come loose during violent exercise; it is a worse humiliation than losing one’s knickers in the middle of the street: this horrid possibility sometimes brings about fits of psychasthenia. By a kind of ill will of nature, indisposition and pain often do not begin until the initial bleeding—often hardly noticed—has passed; young girls are often irregular: they might be surprised during a walk, in the street, at friends’; they risk—like Mme de Chevreuse—dirtying their clothes or their seat; such a possibility makes one live in constant anxiety.
43
The greater the young girl’s feeling of revulsion toward this feminine defect, the greater her obligation to pay careful attention to it so as not to expose herself to the awful humiliation of an accident or a little word of warning.
Here is the series of answers that Dr. Liepmann obtained during his study of juvenile sexuality:
44
At sixteen years of age, when I was indisposed for the first time, I was very frightened in seeing it one morning. In truth, I knew it was going to happen, but I was so ashamed of it that I remained in bed for a whole half day and had one answer to all questions: I cannot get up.
I was speechless in astonishment when, not yet twelve, I was indisposed for the first time. I was struck by horror, and as my mother limited herself to telling me drily that this would happen every
month, I considered it something disgusting and refused to accept that this did not also happen to men.
This adventure made my mother decide to initiate me, without forgetting menstruation at the same time. I then had my second disappointment because as soon as I was indisposed, I ran joyfully to my mother, who was still sleeping, and I woke her up, shouting “Mother, I have it!” “And that is why you woke me up?” she managed to say in response. In spite of everything, I considered this thing a real upheaval in my existence.
And so I felt the most intense horror when I was indisposed for the first time seeing that the bleeding did not stop after a few minutes. Nevertheless, I did not whisper a word to anyone, not to my mother either. I had just reached the age of fifteen. In addition I suffered very little. Only one time was I taken with such terrifying pain that I fainted and stayed on the floor in my room for almost three hours. But I still did not say anything to anyone.
When for the first time this indisposition occurred, I was about thirteen. My school friends and I had already talked about it, and I was proud to finally become one of the big girls. With great importance I explained to the gym teacher that it was impossible today for me to take part in the lesson because I was indisposed.
It was not my mother who initiated me. It was not until the age of nineteen that she had her period, and for fear of being scolded for dirtying her underwear, she buried it in a field.
I reached the age of eighteen, and I then had my period for the first time.
45
I was totally unprepared for what was happening … At night, I had violent bleeding accompanied by heavy diarrhea, and I could not rest for one second. In the morning, my heart racing, I ran to my mother and, weeping constantly, asked her advice. But I only obtained this harsh reprimand: “You should have been aware of it sooner and not have dirtied the sheets and bed.” That was all as far as explanation was concerned. Naturally, I tried very hard to know what crime I might have committed, and I suffered terrible anguish.
I already knew what it was. I was waiting for it impatiently because I was hoping my mother would reveal to me how children were made.
The celebrated day arrived, but my mother remained silent. Nevertheless, I was joyous. “From now on,” I said to myself, “you can make children: you are a lady.”
This crisis takes place at a still tender age; the boy only reaches adolescence at about fifteen or sixteen; the girl changes into a woman at thirteen or fourteen. But the essential difference in their experience does not stem from there; nor does it lie in the physiological manifestations that give it its awful shock in the case of the girl: puberty has a radically different meaning for the two sexes because it does not announce the same future to them.
Granted, boys too at puberty feel their body as an embarrassing presence, but because they have been proud of their virility from childhood, it is toward that virility that they proudly transcend the moment of their development; they proudly exhibit the hair growing between their legs, and that makes men of them; more than ever, their sex is an object of comparison and challenge. Becoming adults is an intimidating metamorphosis: many adolescents react with anxiety to a demanding freedom; but they accede to the dignified status of male with joy. On the contrary, to become a grown-up, the girl must confine herself within the limits that her femininity imposes on her. The boy admires undefined promises in the growing hair: she remains confused before the “brutal and finished drama” that limits her destiny. Just as the penis gets its privileged value from the social context, the social context makes menstruation a malediction. One symbolizes virility and the other femininity: it is because femininity means alterity and inferiority that its revelation is met with shame. The girl’s life has always appeared to her to be determined by this impalpable essence to which the absence of the penis has not managed to give a positive image: it is this essence that is revealed in the red flow that escapes from between her thighs. If she has already assumed her condition, she welcomes the event with joy: “Now you are a lady.” If she has always refused it, the bloody verdict strikes her like lightning; most often, she hesitates: the menstrual stain inclines her toward disgust and fear. “So this is what these words mean: being a woman!” The fate that until now has weighed on her ambivalently and from the outside is lodged in her belly; there is no escape; she feels trapped. In a sexually egalitarian society, she would envisage menstruation only as her unique way of acceding to an adult life; the human body has many other more repugnant servitudes in men and women: they easily make the best of them because as they are common to all they do not represent a flaw for anyone; menstrual periods inspire horror in adolescent girls because they thrust them into an inferior and damaged category. This
feeling of degradation will weigh heavily on the girl. She would retain the pride of her bleeding body if she did not lose her self-respect as a human being. And if she succeeds in preserving her self-respect, she will feel the humiliation of her flesh much less vividly: the girl who opens paths of transcendence in sports, social, intellectual, and mystical activities will not see a mutilation in her specificity, and she will overcome it easily. If the young girl often develops psychoses in this period, it is because she feels defenseless in front of a deaf fate that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity signifies illness, suffering, and death in her eyes, and she is transfixed by this destiny.