Young girls suffer secret obsessions about being physically abnormal

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

This naturally had nothing to do with the little sexual pleasures of childhood, the satisfaction I felt, for example, straddling a certain chair in the dining room or caressing myself before falling asleep … The only common characteristic between the feeling and the pleasure is that I carefully hid them both from those around me … My love for this young man consisted in thinking of him before falling asleep and imagining marvelous stories … In Privas, I was in love with all the department heads of my father’s office … I was never very deeply hurt by their departure, because they were barely more than a pretext for my amorous musings … In the evening in bed I got my revenge for too much youth and shyness. I prepared everything very carefully, I did not have any trouble making him present to me, but it was a question of transforming myself, me, so that I could see myself from the interior because I became her, and stopped being I. First, I was pretty and eighteen years old. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709 (#expands, via linked claim)

The little girl approaches it with worry and displeasure. As her breasts and body hair develop, a feeling is born that sometimes changes into pride, but begins as shame; suddenly the child displays modesty, she refuses to show herself nude, even to her sisters or her mother, she inspects herself with surprise mixed with horror, and she observes with anxiety the swelling of this hard core, somewhat painful, appearing under nipples that until recently were as inoffensive as a navel. She is worried to discover a vulnerable spot in herself: undoubtedly this pain is slight compared with a burn or a toothache; but in an accident or illness, pain was always abnormal, while the youthful breast is normally the center of who knows what indefinable resentment. Something is happening, something that is not an illness, but that involves the very law of existence and is yet struggle and suffering. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 738 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Girls’ body disgust can escalate into eating disorders and psychosis — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 739; Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709; Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Puberty’s bodily changes alienate the girl from herself and the world #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 835
• Adolescent girls eroticize imagined self-transformation rather than actual sexual encounters #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 709
• Puberty transforms the girl’s body from familiar self into strange flesh. #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 738
• Concentrated psychological harm is hidden among evidently ordinary young women #corroborates (0.75) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2466
• The girl’s narcissism follows from an early craving to be looked at by others #expands (0.72)