The need for affection can make a girl fear growing up.

Evidence

Nadia, a young girl from a wealthy and remarkably intelligent family, was stylish, artistic, and above all an excellent musician; but from infancy she was obstinate and irritable …: “She demanded excessive affection from everyone, her parents, sisters, and servants, but she was so demanding and dominating that she soon alienated people; horribly susceptible, when her cousins used mockery to try to change her character, she acquired a sense of shame fixed on her body.” Then, too, her need for affection made her wish to remain a child, to remain a little girl to be petted, one whose every whim is indulged, and in short made her fear growing up … A precocious puberty worsened her troubles, mixing fears of modesty with fears of growing up: “Since men like plump women, I want to remain extremely thin.” Pubic hair and growing breasts added to her fears. From the age of eleven, as she wore short skirts, it seemed to her that everyone eyed her; she was given long skirts and was then ashamed of her feet, her hips, and so on. The appearance of menstruation drove her half-mad; believing that she was the only one in the world having the monstrosity of pubic hair, she labored up to the age of twenty “to rid herself of this savage decoration by depilation.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 740

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to modern literature on anorexia nervosa’s link to arrested development and rejection of adult female body — Hilde Bruch’s clinical work on eating disorders. — connects to: In Freudian terms a girl’s sexual development can stall into frigidity or homosexuality.; Love is what humans need most and fear most — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America…, 323

Broader Connections

• Love is what humans need most and fear most #expands (0.75) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 323