Even experienced young women treat sexual initiation as a wholly new event

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Female sexual initiation often reads as sacrifice mixed with fear rather than pleasure; Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709

Broader Connections

• Female sexual initiation often reads as sacrifice mixed with fear rather than pleasure #qualifies (0.80)
• Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709