Forbidding girls spatial exploits instills a felt sense of inferiority

Evidence

In spite of these compensations, she does not accept her assigned destiny without regret; growing up, she envies boys their virility. Sometimes parents and grandparents poorly hide the fact that they would have preferred a male offspring to a female; or else they show more affection to the brother than to the sister: research shows that the majority of parents wish to have sons rather than daughters. Boys are spoken to with more seriousness and more esteem, and more rights are granted them; they themselves treat girls with contempt, they play among themselves and exclude girls from their group, they insult them: they call them names like “piss pots,” thus evoking girls’ secret childhood humiliations. In France, in coeducational schools, the boys’ caste deliberately oppresses and persecutes the girls’. But girls are reprimanded if they want to compete or fight with them. They doubly envy singularly boyish activities: they have a spontaneous desire to affirm their power over the world, and they protest against the inferior situation they are condemned to. They suffer in being forbidden to climb trees, ladders, and roofs, among other activities. Adler observes that the notions of high and low have great importance, the idea of spatial elevation implying a spiritual superiority, as can be seen in numerous heroic myths; to attain a peak or a summit is to emerge beyond the given world as sovereign subject; between boys, it is frequently a pretext for challenge. The little girl, to whom exploits are forbidden and who sits under a tree or by a cliff and sees the triumphant boys above her, feels herself, body and soul, inferior. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 697

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adler’s psychology of inferiority complexes and to the ‘high/low’ symbolism that recurs in myth criticism and in Beauvoir’s own transcendence/immanence axis. — connects to: Low expectations for girls produce their own inferiority complex — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1938; Self-perceived inferiority in girls arises from destined subordination, not vice versa — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 842; Girls’ bodily vulnerability in public space blocks their self-assertion where boys gain sovereignty. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950 (+5 more)
• ADDENDUM: The tree-climbing prohibition and ‘attaining a peak as sovereign subject’ resonates with ‘Grafting & Growth’ on trees as underused worldbuilding — vertical space here is gendered geography worth exploring in fiction.

Broader Connections

• Low expectations for girls produce their own inferiority complex #corroborates (0.95) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1938
• Women’s so-called inferiority complexes stem from real, objective restrictions #corroborates (0.88) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1037
• Girls’ bodily vulnerability in public space blocks their self-assertion where boys gain sovereignty. #exemplifies (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1950
• Seeing male dominance, not genital difference, alters a girl’s self-consciousness #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 698
• Self-perceived inferiority in girls arises from destined subordination, not vice versa #qualifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 842