The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  The woman concerned is very intelligent, artistic, active, biologically normal, and not homosexual. She says that the urinary function played a great role in her childhood; she played urinary games with her brothers, and they wet their hands without feeling disgust. “My earliest ideas of the superiority of the male were connected with urination. I felt aggrieved with nature because I lacked so useful and ornamental an organ. No teapot without a spout felt so forlorn. It required no one to instill into me the theory of male predominance and superiority. Constant proof was before me.” She took great pleasure in urinating in the country. “Nothing could come up to the entrancing sound as the stream descended on crackling leaves in the depth of a wood and she watched its absorption. Most of all she was fascinated by the idea of doing it into water” [as are many little boys]. There is a quantity of childish and vulgar imagery showing little boys urinating in ponds and brooks. Florrie complains that the style of her knickers prevented her from trying various desired experiments, but often during country walks she would hold back as long as she could and then suddenly relieve herself standing. “I can distinctly remember the strange and delicious sensation of this forbidden delight, and also my puzzled feeling that it came standing.” In her opinion, the style of children’s clothing has great importance for feminine psychology in general. “It was not only a source of annoyance to me that I had to unfasten my drawers and then squat down for fear of wetting them in front, but the flap at the back, which must be removed to uncover the posterior parts during the act, accounts for my early impression that in girls this function is connected with those parts. The first distinction in sex that impressed me—the one great difference in sex—was that boys urinated standing and that girls had to sit down … The fact that my earliest feelings of shyness were more associated with the back than the front may have thus originated.” All these impressions were of great importance in Florrie’s case because her father often whipped her until the blood came and also a governess had once spanked her to make her urinate; she was obsessed by masochistic dreams and fancies in which she saw herself whipped by a school mistress under the eyes of all and having to urinate against her will, “an idea that gives one a curious sense of gratification.” At the age of fifteen it happened that under urgent need she urinated standing in a deserted street. “In trying to analyze my sensations, I think the most prominent lay in the shame that came from standing, and the consequently greater distance the stream had to descend. It seemed to make the affair important and conspicuous, even though clothing hid it. In the ordinary attitude there is a kind of privacy. As a small child, too, the stream had not far to go, but at the age of fifteen I was tall and it seemed to give one a glow of shame to think of this stream falling unchecked such a distance. (I am sure that the ladies who fled in horror from the urinette at Portsmouth thought it most indecent for a woman to stand, legs apart, and to pull up her clothes and make a stream which descended unabashed all that way.)”16 She renewed this experience at twenty and frequently thereafter. She felt a mixture of shame and pleasure at the idea that she might be surprised and that she would be incapable of stopping. “The stream seemed to be drawn from me without my consent, and yet with even more pleasure than if I were doing it freely17 This curious feeling—that it is being drawn away by some unseen power which is determined that one shall do it—is an entirely feminine pleasure and a subtle charm … There is a fierce charm in the torrent that binds one to its will by a mighty force.” Later Florrie developed a flagellatory eroticism always combined with urinary obsessions.

  This case is very interesting because it throws light on several elements of the child’s experience. But of course there are particular circumstances that confer such a great importance upon them. For normally raised little girls, the boy’s urinary privilege is too secondary a thing to engender a feeling of inferiority directly. Psychoanalysts following Freud who think that the mere discovery of the penis would be sufficient to produce a trauma seriously misunderstand the child’s mentality; it is much less rational than they seem to think, it does not establish clear-cut categories and is not bothered by contradictions. When the little girl seeing a penis declares, “I had one too” or “I’ll have one too,” or even “I have one too,” this is not a defense in bad faith; presence and absence are not mutually exclusive; the child—as his drawings prove—believes much less in what he sees with his eyes than in the signifying types that he has determined once and for all: he often draws without looking, and in any case he finds in his perceptions only what he puts there. Saussure, who emphasizes this point, quotes this very important observation of Luquet’s: “Once a line is considered wrong, it is as if inexistent, the child literally no longer sees it, hypnotized in a way by the new line that replaces it, nor does he take into account lines that can be accidentally found on his paper.”18 Male anatomy constitutes a strong form that is often imposed on the little girl; and literally she no longer sees her own body. Saussure brings up the example of a four-year-old girl who, trying to urinate like a boy between the bars of a fence, said she wanted “a little long thing that runs.” She affirmed at the same time that she had a penis and that she did not have one, which goes along with the thinking by “participation” that Piaget described in children. The little girl takes it for granted that all children are born with a penis but that the parents then cut some of them off to make girls; this idea satisfies the artificialism of the child who glorifies his parents and “conceives of them as the cause of everything he possesses,” says Piaget; he does not see punishment in castration right away. For it to become a frustration, the little girl has to be unhappy with her situation for some reason; as Deutsch justly points out, an exterior event like the sight of a penis could not lead to an internal development. “The sight of the male organ can have a traumatic effect,” she says, “but only if a chain of prior experiences that would create that effect had preceded it.” If the little girl feels powerless to satisfy her desires of masturbation or exhibition, if her parents repress her onanism, if she feels less loved or less valued than her brothers, then she will project her dissatisfaction onto the male organ. “The little girl’s discovery of the anatomical difference with the boy confirms a previously felt need; it is her rationalization, so to speak.”19 And Adler also insisted on the fact that it is the validation by the parents and others that gives the boy prestige, and that the penis becomes the explanation and symbol in the little girl’s eyes. Her brother is considered superior; he himself takes pride in his maleness; so she envies him and feels frustrated. Sometimes she resents her mother and less often her father; either she accuses herself of being mutilated, or she consoles herself by thinking that the penis is hidden in her body and that one day it will come out.

  It is sure that the absence of a penis will play an important role in the little girl’s destiny, even if she does not really envy those who possess one. The great privilege that the boy gets from it is that as he is bestowed with an organ that can be seen and held, he can at least partially alienate himself in it. He projects the mystery of his body and its dangers outside himself, which permits him to keep them at a distance: of course, he feels endangered through his penis, he fears castration, but this fear is easier to dominate than the pervasive overall fear the girl feels concerning her “insides,” a fear that will often be perpetuated throughout her whole life as a woman. She has a deep concern about everything happening inside her; from the start, she is far more opaque to herself and more profoundly inhabited by the worrying mystery of life than the male. Because he recognizes himself in an alter ego, the little boy can boldly assume his subjectivity; the very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of autonomy, transcendence, and power: he measures the size of his penis; he compares his urinary stream with that of his friends; later, erection and ejaculation will be sources of satisfaction and challenge. But a little girl cannot incarnate herself in any part of her own body. As compensation, and to fill the role of alter ego for her, she i
s handed a foreign object: a doll. Note that the bandage wrapped on an injured finger is also called a poupée (“doll” in French): a finger dressed and separate from the others is looked on with amusement and a kind of pride with which the child initiates the process of its alienation. But it is a figurine with a human face—or a corn husk or even a piece of wood—that will most satisfyingly replace this double, this natural toy, this penis.

  The great difference is that, on the one hand, the doll represents the whole body and, on the other hand, it is a passive thing. As such, the little girl will be encouraged to alienate herself in her person as a whole and to consider it an inert given. While the boy seeks himself in his penis as an autonomous subject, the little girl pampers her doll and dresses her as she dreams of being dressed and pampered; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.20 Through compliments and admonishments, through images and words, she discovers the meaning of the words “pretty” and “ugly”; she soon knows that to please, she has to be “pretty as a picture”; she tries to resemble an image, she disguises herself, she looks at herself in the mirror, she compares herself to princesses and fairies from tales. Marie Bashkirtseff gives a striking example of this infantile coquetry.* It is certainly not by chance that, weaned late—she was three and a half—she fervently felt the need at the age of four or five to be admired and to exist for others: the shock must have been violent in a more mature child, and she had to struggle even harder to overcome the inflicted separation. “At five years old,” she writes in her diary, “I would dress in Mummy’s lace, with flowers in my hair, and I would go and dance in the living room. I was Petipa, the great dancer, and the whole house was there to look at me.”

  This narcissism appears so precociously for the little girl and will play so fundamental a part in her life that it is readily considered as emanating from a mysterious feminine instinct. But we have just seen that in reality it is not an anatomical destiny that dictates her attitude. The difference that distinguishes her from boys is a fact that she could assume in many ways. Having a penis is certainly a privilege, but one whose value naturally diminishes when the child loses interest in his excretory functions and becomes socialized: if he retains interest in it past the age of eight or nine years, it is because the penis has become the symbol of a socially valorized virility. The fact is that the influence of education and society is enormous here. All children try to compensate for the separation of weaning by seductive and attention-seeking behavior; the boy is forced to go beyond this stage, he is saved from his narcissism by turning his attention to his penis, whereas the girl is reinforced in this tendency to make herself object, which is common to all children. The doll helps her, but it does not have a determining role; the boy can also treasure a teddy bear or a rag doll on whom he can project himself; it is in their life’s overall form that each factor—penis, doll—takes on its importance.

  Thus, the passivity that essentially characterizes the “feminine” woman is a trait that develops in her from her earliest years. But it is false to claim that therein lies a biological given; in fact, it is a destiny imposed on her by her teachers and by society. The great advantage for the boy is that his way of existing for others leads him to posit himself for himself. He carries out the apprenticeship of his existence as free movement toward the world; he rivals other boys in toughness and independence; he looks down on girls. Climbing trees, fighting with his companions, confronting them in violent games, he grasps his body as a means to dominate nature and as a fighting tool; he is proud of his muscles, as he is of his sex organ; through games, sports, fights, challenges, and exploits, he finds a balanced use of his strength; at the same time, he learns the severe lessons of violence; he learns to take blows, to deride pain, to hold back tears from the earliest age. He undertakes, he invents, he dares. Granted, he also experiences himself as if “for others”; he tests his own virility, and consequently, trouble ensues with adults and friends. But what is very important is that there is no fundamental opposition between this objective figure that is his and his will for self-affirmation in concrete projects. It is by doing that he makes himself be, in one single movement. On the contrary, for the woman there is, from the start, a conflict between her autonomous existence and her “beingother”; she is taught that to please, she must try to please, must make herself object; she must therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a living doll, and freedom is denied her; thus a vicious circle is closed; for the less she exercises her freedom to understand, grasp, and discover the world around her, the less she will find its resources, and the less she will dare to affirm herself as subject; if she were encouraged, she could show the same vibrant exuberance, the same curiosity, the same spirit of initiative, and the same intrepidness as the boy. Sometimes this does happen when she is given a male upbringing; she is thus spared many problems.21 Interestingly, this is the kind of education that a father habitually gives his daughter; women brought up by a man escape many of the defects of femininity. But customs oppose treating girls exactly like boys. I knew a village where girls of three and four years old were persecuted because their father made them wear trousers: “Are they girls or boys?” And the other children tried to find out; the result was their pleading to wear dresses. Unless she leads a very solitary life, even if parents allow her to have boyish manners, the girl’s companions, her friends, and her teachers will be shocked. There will always be aunts, grandmothers, and girl cousins to counterbalance the father’s influence. Normally, his role regarding his daughters is secondary. One of the woman’s curses—as Michelet has justly pointed out—is that in her childhood she is left in the hands of women. The boy is also brought up by his mother in the beginning; but she respects his maleness and he escapes from her relatively quickly, whereas the mother wants to integrate the girl into the feminine world.22

  We will see later how complex the relation is between the mother and the daughter: for the mother, the daughter is both her double and an other, the mother cherishes her and at the same time is hostile to her; she imposes her own destiny on her child: it is a way to proudly claim her own femininity and also to take revenge on it. The same process is found with pederasts, gamblers, drug addicts, and all those who are flattered to belong to a certain community, and are also humiliated by it: they try through ardent proselytism to win over converts. Thus, women given the care of a little girl are bent on transforming her into women like themselves with zeal and arrogance mixed with resentment. And even a generous mother who sincerely wants the best for her child will, as a rule, think it wiser to make a “true woman” of her, as that is the way she will be best accepted by society. So she is given other little girls as friends, she is entrusted to female teachers, she lives among matrons as in the days of the gynaeceum, books and games are chosen for her that introduce her to her destiny, her ears are filled with the treasures of feminine wisdom, feminine virtues are presented to her, she is taught cooking, sewing, and housework as well as how to dress, how to take care of her personal appearance, charm, and modesty; she is dressed in uncomfortable and fancy clothes that she has to take care of, her hair is done in complicated styles, posture is imposed on her: stand up straight, don’t walk like a duck; to be graceful, she has to repress spontaneous movements, she is told not to look like a tomboy, strenuous exercise is banned, she is forbidden to fight; in short, she is committed to becoming, like her elders, a servant and an idol. Today, thanks to feminism’s breakthroughs, it is becoming more and more normal to encourage her to pursue her education, to devote herself to sports; but she is more easily excused for not succeeding; success is made more difficult for her as another kind of accomplishment is demanded of her: she must at least also be a woman; she must not lose her femininity.

  In her early years she resigns herself to this lot without much difficulty. The child inhabits the level of play and dream, he plays at being, he plays at doing; doing and being are not clearly distinguishable when it is a question of imaginary accomplishm
ents. The little girl can compensate for boys’ superiority of the moment by those promises inherent in her woman’s destiny, which she already achieves in her play. Because she still only knows her childhood universe, her mother seems endowed with more authority than her father; she imagines the world as a sort of matriarchy; she imitates her mother, she identifies with her; often she even inverses the roles: “When I am big and you are little …,” she often says. The doll is not only her double: it is also her child, functions that are not mutually exclusive insofar as the real child is also an alter ego for the mother; when she scolds, punishes, and then consoles her doll, she is defending herself against her mother, and she assumes a mother’s dignity: she sums up both elements of the couple as she entrusts herself to her doll, educates her, asserts her sovereign authority over her, and sometimes even tears off her arms, beats her, tortures her; that is to say, through her she accomplishes the experience of subjective affirmation and alienation. Often the mother is associated with this imaginary life: in playing with the doll and the mother, the child plays both the father and the mother, a couple where the man is excluded. No “maternal instinct,” innate and mysterious, lies therein either. The little girl observes that child care falls to the mother, that is what she is taught; stories told, books read, all her little experience confirms it; she is encouraged to feel delight for these future riches, she is given dolls so she will already feel the tangible aspect of those riches. Her “vocation” is determined imperiously. Because her lot seems to be the child, and also because she is more interested in her “insides” than the boy, the little girl is particularly curious about the mystery of procreation; she quickly ceases to believe that babies are born in cabbages or delivered by the stork; especially in cases where the mother gives her brothers or sisters, she soon learns that babies are formed in their mother’s body. Besides, parents today make less of a mystery of it than before; she is generally more amazed than frightened because the phenomenon seems like magic to her; she does not yet grasp all of the physiological implications. First of all, she is unaware of the father’s role and supposes that the woman gets pregnant by eating certain foods, a legendary theme (queens in fairy tales give birth to a little girl or a handsome boy after eating this fruit, that fish) and one that later leads some women to link the idea of gestation and the digestive system. Together these problems and these discoveries absorb a great part of the little girl’s interests and feed her imagination. I will cite a typical example from Jung,23 which bears remarkable analogies with that of little Hans, analyzed by Freud around the same time: