Social expectation alone can manufacture intense physical craving

Evidence

These cares and kind attentions increased the discomfort, nausea, nervousness, and thousands of sufferings that almost always accompany first pregnancies. I found it so … It was my mother who started it one day when I was having dinner at her house …”Good heavens,” she cried suddenly, putting down her fork and looking at me with dismay. “Good heavens! I forgot to ask what you especially craved.” … And so there were my two mothers in consultation. And there was Junot, afraid I would bear him a child with a wild boar’s head … asking me every morning: “Laura, what do you crave?” My sister-in-law came back from Versailles and added her voice to the choir of questions, saying that she had seen innumerable people disfigured because of unsatisfied longings … I finally got frightened myself … I tried to think of what would please me most and couldn’t think of a thing. Then, one day, it occurred to me when I was eating pineapple lozenges that a pineapple had to be a very excellent thing … Once I persuaded myself that I had a longing for a pineapple, I felt at first a very lively desire, increased when Corcelet declared that … they were not in season. Ah, then I felt that mad desire which makes you feel that you will die if it is not satisfied. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1458

Categorization

• SEED: The duchesse d’Abrantès’s account of inventing a pineapple craving under family pressure is a perfect anecdote for an essay on how social suggestion, not biology, manufactures even bodily desires.
• CANDY: A duchess talked into craving pineapples because everyone insisted she must crave something is a delicious, tweetable historical anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Sexual attraction arises from socially conditioned images, not raw nature; Small first-strike temptations can compound into attack through interacting expectations alone — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 462; Most consumer goods satisfy psychological cravings rather than felt deprivations — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 389

Broader Connections

• Small first-strike temptations can compound into attack through interacting expectations alone #corroborates (0.80) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 462