The virginal innocence demanded of brides is a social artifact manufactured for male enjoyment.

Evidence

With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger … What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?… The young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called “the facts of life” … But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product … so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1278

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s earlier chapter on the girl/myth of femininity as socially constructed, and echoes the analysis of woman as Other who is simultaneously idealized and consumed. — connects to: Virginity myths encode male ambivalence between fear and desire of the feminine — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 342; The male’s need to take and satisfy women depends on deeming them worthless — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 475
• SEED: The ‘frank because she has nothing to conceal’ paradox — where innocence is engineered so it can be destroyed — could anchor an essay on how idealized consumption requires carefully staged ignorance.

Broader Connections

• Virginity myths encode male ambivalence between fear and desire of the feminine #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 342
• The male’s need to take and satisfy women depends on deeming them worthless #expands (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 475