Girls experience their bodies as sexless plenitude, not as lack.

Evidence

The girl’s lot is very different. Mothers and wet nurses have neither reverence nor tenderness for her genital parts; they do not focus attention on this secret organ of which only the outside envelope can be seen and that cannot be taken hold of; in one sense, she does not have a sex. She does not experience this absence as a lack; her body is evidently a plenitude for her; but she finds herself in the world differently from the boy; and a group of factors can transform this difference into inferiority in her eyes. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 683

Categorization

• DEFINE: Foundational to the reader’s stated goal: establishes Beauvoir’s reframing of the female body as plenitude rather than deficiency, which anchors her existentialist-feminist account.
• XREF: Directly counters Freudian/Lacanian ‘castration’ framework; connects to later second-wave feminism and to Irigaray’s critique of phallocentrism. — connects to: Girls who pursue transcendence avoid seeing their menstruating bodies as mutilated. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 761; Females uniquely experience their own bodies as alienated otherness — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 110; Girls lack precise bodily signs linking sexual agitation to genitals, unlike males — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 773

Broader Connections

• Females uniquely experience their own bodies as alienated otherness #contradicts (0.95) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 110
• Girls lack precise bodily signs linking sexual agitation to genitals, unlike males #qualifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 773