Pregnant women’s cravings are culturally cultivated rather than biologically driven

Evidence

Constipation, diarrhea, and expulsion tendencies always express the same mixture of desire and anguish; the result is sometimes a miscarriage: almost all spontaneous miscarriages have a psychic origin. The more importance woman gives these malaises and the more she coddles herself, the more intense they are. In particular, pregnant women’s famous “cravings” are indulgently nurtured infantile obsessions: they are always focused on food, and have to do with the old idea of fertilization by food; feeling distressed in her body, woman expresses, as often happens in psychasthenies, this feeling of strangeness through a desire that fascinates her. There is moreover a “culture,” a tradition, of these cravings as there once was a culture of hysteria; woman expects to have these cravings, she waits for them, she invents them for herself. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1457

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the discourse against biological determinism running throughout The Second Sex — cravings as social construction parallels how womanhood generally is culturally manufactured. — connects to: Girls historically imagined pregnancy as caused by eating certain foods; Pregnancy grants women a socially sanctioned justification for self-absorption and exemption from effort — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1465; Maternal vocation is socially imposed, not instinctually innate — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 693

Broader Connections

• Maternal vocation is socially imposed, not instinctually innate #corroborates (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 693