Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world
Evidence
True, puberty transforms the girl’s body. It is more fragile than before; female organs are vulnerable, their functioning delicate; strange and uncomfortable, breasts are a burden; they remind her of their presence during strenuous exercise, they quiver, they ache. From here on, woman’s muscle force, endurance, and suppleness are inferior to man’s. Hormonal imbalances create nervous and vasomotor instability. Menstrual periods are painful: headaches, stiffness, and abdominal cramps make normal activities painful and even impossible; added to these discomforts are psychic problems; nervous and irritable, the woman frequently undergoes a state of semi-alienation each month; central control of the nervous and sympathetic systems is no longer assured; circulation problems and some autointoxications turn the body into a screen between the woman and the world, a burning fog that weighs on her, stifling her and separating her: experienced through this suffering and passive flesh, the entire universe is a burden too heavy to bear. Oppressed and submerged, she becomes a stranger to herself because she is a stranger to the rest of the world. Syntheses disintegrate, instants are no longer connected, others are recognized but only abstractly; and if reasoning and logic do remain intact, as in melancholic delirium, they are subordinated to passions that surge out of organic disorder. These facts are extremely important; but the way the woman becomes conscious of them gives them their weight. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835
Categorization
- XREF: Resonates with Beauvoir’s immanence/body-as-situation framework and with Sartre’s nausea of facticity; her claim that consciousness of the facts gives them weight prefigures her later argument against biological determinism. — connects to: In Freudian terms a girl’s sexual development can stall into frigidity or homosexuality.; Menarche initiates girls into an irreversible before-and-after divide in selfhood — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 747; Children fear future bodily change as a threat to their own identity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 729 (+13 more)
- DEFINE: Introduces the body as ‘situation’ — a key apparatus for the whole existentialist-feminist analysis.
- DEEPTHINKING: The closing move — ‘the way the woman becomes conscious of them gives them their weight’ — is a compact statement of her anti-biological-determinism thesis: biology matters only as mediated by consciousness.