Adolescent girls lack any cultural bridge linking male anatomy to romantic desire

Evidence

In the fifteen-year-old head, there is often a strange confusion because theoretical knowledge and concrete experiences do not match. She has already felt all the burnings of excitement and desire, but she imagines—like Clara d’Ellébeuse invented by Francis Jammes—that a male kiss is enough to make her a mother; she has a clear idea of the genital anatomy, but when her dancing partner embraces her, she thinks the agitation she feels is a migraine. It is certain that girls are better informed today than in the past. However, some psychiatrists affirm that there is more than one adolescent girl who does not know that sexual organs have a use other than urinary. In any case, girls do not draw much connection between their sexual agitation and the existence of their genital organs, since there is no sign as precise as the male erection indicating this correlation. There is such a gap between their romantic musings concerning man and love and the crudeness of certain facts that are revealed to them that they do not create any link between them. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 773 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Even in women physiologically normal themselves, it has sometimes been asserted that there is a distinction between “clitoral” and “vaginal” women, the former being destined to sapphic love; but it has been seen that all childhood eroticism is clitoral; whether it remains fixed at this stage or is transformed has nothing to do with anatomical facts; nor is it true, as has often been maintained, that infant masturbation explains the ulterior primacy of the clitoral system: a child’s masturbation is recognized today by sexologists as an absolutely normal and generally widespread phenomenon. The development of feminine eroticism is—we have seen—a psychological situation in which physiological factors are included, but which depends on the subject’s overall attitude to existence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1033 (#expands, via linked claim)

When that happens, the male’s sex life is normally integrated into his individual existence: in terms of desire and coitus, his surpassing toward the species is an integral part of the subjective moment of his transcendence: he is his body. Woman’s history is much more complex. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 97 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Girls lack precise bodily signs linking sexual agitation to genitals, unlike males — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 773; Female erotic development is psychological, not anatomically determined. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1033; Male sexuality integrates with individual transcendence while female sexuality does not — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 97

Broader Connections

• Girls lack precise bodily signs linking sexual agitation to genitals, unlike males #corroborates (0.92) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 773
• Female erotic development is psychological, not anatomically determined. #expands (0.78) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1033
• Male sexuality integrates with individual transcendence while female sexuality does not #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 97