Male superiority is instilled through adult attitudes, not spontaneously felt

Evidence

Many boys, frightened by the harsh independence they are condemned to, thus desire to be girls; in times when they were first dressed as girls, they cried when they had to give dresses up for long pants and had to have their curls cut. Some obstinately would choose femininity, which is one of the ways of gravitating toward homosexuality: “I wanted passionately to be a girl, and I was unconscious of the grandeur of being a man to the point of trying to urinate sitting down,” Maurice Sachs recounts. However, if the boy at first seems less favored than his sisters, it is because there are greater designs for him. The requirements he is subjected to immediately imply a higher estimation. In his memoirs, Maurras recounts that he was jealous of a cadet his mother and grandmother doted upon; his father took him by the hand and out of the room. “We are men; let’s leave these women,” he told him. The child is persuaded that more is demanded of boys because of their superiority; the pride of his virility is breathed into him in order to encourage him in this difficult path; this abstract notion takes on a concrete form for him: it is embodied in the penis; he does not experience pride spontaneously in his little indolent sex organ; but he feels it through the attitude of those around him. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness on the for-itself and recognition through others’ gaze; also to the reader’s broader existentialist reading on how identity is conferred. — connects to: In primitive hordes male superiority was lived but not institutionalized — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 160; Observed male-female differences reflect social situation, not fixed essence — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 608; Romantic interdependence makes both sexes invested in preserving gender hierarchy (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Beauvoir’s central principle in nuce: phallus as socially constructed ‘transcendence’ marker rather than innate privilege.

Broader Connections

• Romantic interdependence makes both sexes invested in preserving gender hierarchy #complicates (0.80)
• Adult social attitudes remain changeable through new learning and experiences #expands (0.75) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1107