Forbidden physical violence denies girls the capacity to affirm and shape the world
Evidence
Violence is the authentic test of every person’s attachment to himself, his passions, and his own will; to radically reject it is to reject all objective truth, it is to isolate one’s self in an abstract subjectivity; an anger or a revolt that does not exert itself in muscles remains imaginary. It is a terrible frustration not to be able to imprint the movements of one’s heart on the face of the earth. … In the same way, for the adolescent boy who is allowed to manifest himself imperiously, the universe has a totally different face from what it has for the adolescent girl whose feelings are deprived of immediate effectiveness; the former ceaselessly calls the world into question, he can at every instance revolt against the given and thus has the impression of actively confirming it when he accepts it; the latter only submits to it; the world is defined without her, and its face is immutable. This lack of physical power expresses itself as a more general timidity: she does not believe in a force she has not felt in her body, she does not dare to be enterprising, to revolt, to invent; doomed to docility, to resignation, she can only accept a place that society has already made for her. She accepts the order of things as a given. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 836
Categorization
- XREF: Beauvoir’s analysis of the girl’s passivity and ‘accepting the given’ connects to existentialist concepts of bad faith and to her later treatment of women internalizing the given order; also echoes her own earlier discussion of woman as Other. — connects to: Girls’ bodily vulnerability in public space blocks their self-assertion where boys gain sovereignty. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950; Forbidding girls spatial exploits instills a felt sense of inferiority — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 697; Women who claim freedom reject being reduced to their bodies as passive flesh — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1041 (+2 more)
- DEFINE: Defines ‘defiance’ as two freedoms confronting each other with a hold on the world, contrasted with passive comparison between girls.
- BMF: The girl who loses confidence in her body and assurance and is led to ‘feminize herself, to realize herself as passivity’ evokes Naqvi’s Home Boy protagonist’s relation to masculine self-assertion dissolving when external validation is stripped — a cross-domain parallel on self-trust anchored in the body’s power.
Broader Connections
- Girls’ bodily vulnerability in public space blocks their self-assertion where boys gain sovereignty.
#corroborates(0.90) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950 - Forbidding girls spatial exploits instills a felt sense of inferiority
#expands(0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 697 - Female narcissism invents a hidden self because action in the world is denied
#expands(0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1808 - Women who claim freedom reject being reduced to their bodies as passive flesh
#complicates(0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1041 - Girls’ adolescent revolt is symbolic and self-restricting, never effective like boys’
#corroborates(0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 899