Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters

Evidence

This naturally had nothing to do with the little sexual pleasures of childhood, the satisfaction I felt, for example, straddling a certain chair in the dining room or caressing myself before falling asleep … The only common characteristic between the feeling and the pleasure is that I carefully hid them both from those around me … My love for this young man consisted in thinking of him before falling asleep and imagining marvelous stories … In Privas, I was in love with all the department heads of my father’s office … I was never very deeply hurt by their departure, because they were barely more than a pretext for my amorous musings … In the evening in bed I got my revenge for too much youth and shyness. I prepared everything very carefully, I did not have any trouble making him present to me, but it was a question of transforming myself, me, so that I could see myself from the interior because I became her, and stopped being I. First, I was pretty and eighteen years old. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘becoming her, not I’ internal transformation anticipates Beauvoir’s later distinction between immanence and transcendence; also connects to objectification theory in feminist psychology. — connects to: A girl’s erotic fantasy is directed at an adult man, not peers — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 708; Children fear future bodily change as a threat to their own identity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 729; Imaginary love affairs defend adolescent girls against feared real sexual contact — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 890 (+7 more)