Girls lack precise bodily signs linking sexual agitation to genitals, unlike males

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

Categorization

• SEED: The asymmetry between male and female bodily self-knowledge — the erection as an unambiguous somatic signal girls lack — could anchor an essay on how physiological legibility shapes epistemic access to one’s own desire.
• XREF: Connects to later Beauvoir chapters on female sexuality, and echoes Freud’s concept of femininity as a ‘dark continent’ / the question of what desires are available to conscious knowledge. — connects to: Adolescent girls lack any cultural bridge linking male anatomy to romantic desire; Girls experience their bodies as sexless plenitude, not as lack. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 683; Female vaginal response is psychophysiological and requires elaborated nervous-system preparation that may never form — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 946 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Repression, not awareness, is what upbringing imposes on girls’ sexual development #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 791
• Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world #exemplifies (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835