Self-inflicted pain lets girls preemptively nullify the defloration they fear

Evidence

When she puts a slug on her chest, when she swallows a bottle of aspirin, when she wounds herself, the girl is defying her future lover: you will never inflict on me anything more horrible than I inflict on myself. These are morose and haughty initiations in sexual adventure. Destined to be a passive prey, she claims her freedom right up to submitting to pain and disgust. When she inflicts the cut of the knife, the burning of a coal on herself, she is protesting against the penetration that deflowers her: she protests by nullifying it. Masochistic, since she welcomes the pain caused by her behavior, she is above all sadistic: as autonomous subject, she beats, scorns, and tortures this dependent flesh, this flesh condemned to submission that she detests but from which she does not want to separate herself. Because, in all these situations, she does not choose authentically to reject her destiny. Sadomasochistic crazes imply a fundamental bad faith: if the girl indulges in them, it means she accepts, through her rejections, her future as woman; she would not mutilate her flesh with hatred if first she did not recognize herself as flesh. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 899

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense existentialist analysis: the girl’s self-mutilation is simultaneously sadistic assertion of subjecthood and masochistic recognition of herself as destined flesh—two opposite movements locked in a single bad-faith act.
• XREF: Resonates with the immanence/transcendence apparatus: the girl’s violence is spectacular but never effective, never transcends the given order.