The Second Sex

by Simone de Beauvoir

  And so I felt the most intense horror when I was indisposed for the first time seeing that the bleeding did not stop after a few minutes. Nevertheless, I did not whisper a word to anyone, not to my mother either. I had just reached the age of fifteen. In addition I suffered very little. Only one time was I taken with such terrifying pain that I fainted and stayed on the floor in my room for almost three hours. But I still did not say anything to anyone.

  When for the first time this indisposition occurred, I was about thirteen. My school friends and I had already talked about it, and I was proud to finally become one of the big girls. With great importance I explained to the gym teacher that it was impossible today for me to take part in the lesson because I was indisposed.

  It was not my mother who initiated me. It was not until the age of nineteen that she had her period, and for fear of being scolded for dirtying her underwear, she buried it in a field.

  I reached the age of eighteen, and I then had my period for the first time.45 I was totally unprepared for what was happening … At night, I had violent bleeding accompanied by heavy diarrhea, and I could not rest for one second. In the morning, my heart racing, I ran to my mother and, weeping constantly, asked her advice. But I only obtained this harsh reprimand: “You should have been aware of it sooner and not have dirtied the sheets and bed.” That was all as far as explanation was concerned. Naturally, I tried very hard to know what crime I might have committed, and I suffered terrible anguish.

  I already knew what it was. I was waiting for it impatiently because I was hoping my mother would reveal to me how children were made. The celebrated day arrived, but my mother remained silent. Nevertheless, I was joyous. “From now on,” I said to myself, “you can make children: you are a lady.”

  This crisis takes place at a still tender age; the boy only reaches adolescence at about fifteen or sixteen; the girl changes into a woman at thirteen or fourteen. But the essential difference in their experience does not stem from there; nor does it lie in the physiological manifestations that give it its awful shock in the case of the girl: puberty has a radically different meaning for the two sexes because it does not announce the same future to them.

  Granted, boys too at puberty feel their body as an embarrassing presence, but because they have been proud of their virility from childhood, it is toward that virility that they proudly transcend the moment of their development; they proudly exhibit the hair growing between their legs, and that makes men of them; more than ever, their sex is an object of comparison and challenge. Becoming adults is an intimidating metamorphosis: many adolescents react with anxiety to a demanding freedom; but they accede to the dignified status of male with joy. On the contrary, to become a grown-up, the girl must confine herself within the limits that her femininity imposes on her. The boy admires undefined promises in the growing hair: she remains confused before the “brutal and finished drama” that limits her destiny. Just as the penis gets its privileged value from the social context, the social context makes menstruation a malediction. One symbolizes virility and the other femininity: it is because femininity means alterity and inferiority that its revelation is met with shame. The girl’s life has always appeared to her to be determined by this impalpable essence to which the absence of the penis has not managed to give a positive image: it is this essence that is revealed in the red flow that escapes from between her thighs. If she has already assumed her condition, she welcomes the event with joy: “Now you are a lady.” If she has always refused it, the bloody verdict strikes her like lightning; most often, she hesitates: the menstrual stain inclines her toward disgust and fear. “So this is what these words mean: being a woman!” The fate that until now has weighed on her ambivalently and from the outside is lodged in her belly; there is no escape; she feels trapped. In a sexually egalitarian society, she would envisage menstruation only as her unique way of acceding to an adult life; the human body has many other more repugnant servitudes in men and women: they easily make the best of them because as they are common to all they do not represent a flaw for anyone; menstrual periods inspire horror in adolescent girls because they thrust them into an inferior and damaged category. This feeling of degradation will weigh heavily on the girl. She would retain the pride of her bleeding body if she did not lose her self-respect as a human being. And if she succeeds in preserving her self-respect, she will feel the humiliation of her flesh much less vividly: the girl who opens paths of transcendence in sports, social, intellectual, and mystical activities will not see a mutilation in her specificity, and she will overcome it easily. If the young girl often develops psychoses in this period, it is because she feels defenseless in front of a deaf fate that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity signifies illness, suffering, and death in her eyes, and she is transfixed by this destiny.

  One example that vividly illustrates these anxieties is that of the patient called Molly described by Helene Deutsch:

  Molly was fourteen when she began to suffer from psychic disorders; she was the fourth child in a family of five siblings. Her father is described as extremely strict and narrow-minded. He criticized the appearance and behavior of his children at every meal. The mother was worried and unhappy; and every so often the parents were not on speaking terms; one brother ran away from home. The patient was a gifted youngster, a good tap dancer; but she was shy, took the family troubles seriously, and was afraid of boys. Her older sister got married against her mother’s wishes and Molly was very interested in her pregnancy: she had a difficult delivery and forceps were necessary and she heard that women often die in childbirth. She took care of the baby for two months; when the sister left the house, there was a terrible scene and the mother fainted. Molly fainted too. She had seen classmates faint in class and her thoughts were much concerned with death and fainting. When she got her period, she told her mother with an embarrassed air: “That thing is here.” She went with her sister to buy some menstrual pads; on meeting a man in the street, she hung her head. In general she acted “disgusted with herself.” She never had pain during her periods, but tried to hide them from her mother, even when the latter saw stains on the sheets. She told her sister: “Anything might happen to me now. I might have a baby.” When told: “You have to live with a man for that to happen,” she replied: “Well, I am living with two men—my father and your husband.”

  The father did not permit his daughters to go out … because one heard stories of rape: these fears helped to give Molly the idea of men being redoubtable creatures. From her first menstruation her anxiety about becoming pregnant and dying in childbirth became so severe that after a time she refused to leave her room, and now she sometimes stays in bed all day; if she has to go out of the house, she has an attack and faints. She is afraid of cars and taxis and she cannot sleep, she fears that someone is trying to enter the house at night, she screams and cries. She has eating spells; sometimes she eats too much to keep herself from fainting; she is also afraid when she feels closed in. She cannot go to school anymore or lead a normal life.

  A similar story not linked to the crisis of menstruation but which shows the girl’s anxiety about her insides is Nancy’s:46

  Toward the age of thirteen the little girl was on intimate terms with her older sister, and she had been proud to be in her confidence when the sister was secretly engaged and then married: to share the secret of a grown-up was to be accepted among the adults. She lived for a time with her sister; but when the latter told her that she was going “to buy” a baby, Nancy got jealous of her brother-in-law and of the coming child: to be treated again as a child to whom one made little mysteries of things was unbearable. She began to experience internal troubles and wanted to be operated on for appendicitis. The operation was a success, but during her stay at the hospital Nancy lived in a state of severe agitation; she made violent scenes with a nurse she disliked; she tried to seduce the doctor, making dates with him, being provocative and demanding throughout her crises to be treated as a woman. She
accused herself of being to blame for the death of a little brother some years before. And in particular she felt sure that they had not removed her appendix or had left a part of it inside her; her claim that she had swallowed a penny was probably intended to make sure an X-ray would be taken.

  This desire for an operation—and in particular for the removal of the appendix—is often seen at this age; girls thus express their fear of rape, pregnancy, or having a baby. They feel in their womb obscure perils and hope that the surgeon will save them from this unknown and threatening danger.

  It is not only the arrival of her period that signals to the girl her destiny as a woman. Other dubious phenomena occur in her. Until then, her eroticism was clitoral. It is difficult to know if solitary sexual practices are less widespread in girls than in boys; the girl indulges in them in her first two years, and perhaps even in the first months of her life; it seems that she stops at about two before taking them up again later; because of his anatomical makeup, this stem planted in the male flesh asks to be touched more than a secret mucous membrane: but the chances of rubbing—the child climbing on a gym apparatus or on trees or onto a bicycle—of contact with clothes, or in a game or even initiation by friends, older friends, or adults, frequently make the girl discover sensations she tries to renew. In any case, pleasure, when reached, is an autonomous sensation: it has the lightness and innocence of all childish amusements.47 As a child, she hardly established a relation between these intimate delights and her destiny as a woman; her sexual relations with boys, if there were any, were essentially based on curiosity. And all of a sudden she experiences emotional confusion in which she does not recognize herself. Sensitivity of the erogenous zones is developing, and they are so numerous in the woman that her whole body can be considered erogenous: this is what comes across from familial caresses, innocent kisses, the casual touching of a dressmaker, a doctor, a hairdresser, or a friendly hand on her hair or neck; she learns and often deliberately seeks a deeper excitement in her relations of play and fighting with boys or girls: thus Gilberte fighting on the Champs Elysées with Proust; in the arms of her dancing partners, under her mother’s naive eyes, she experiences a strange lassitude. And then, even a well-protected young woman is exposed to more specific experiences; in conventional circles regrettable incidents are hushed up by common agreement; but it often happens that some of the caresses of friends of the household, uncles, cousins, not to mention grandfathers and fathers, are much less inoffensive than the mother thinks; a professor, a priest, or a doctor was bold, indiscreet. Such experiences are found in In the Prison of Her Skin by Violette Leduc, in Maternal Hatred by Simone de Tervagne, and in The Blue Orange by Yassu Gauclère. Stekel thinks that grandfathers in particular are often very dangerous:

  I was fifteen. The night before the funeral, my grandfather came to sleep at our house. The next day, my mother was already up, he asked me if he could get into bed with me to play; I got up immediately without answering him … I began to be afraid of men, a woman recounted.

  Another girl recalled receiving a serious shock at eight or ten years of age when her grandfather, an old man of sixty, had groped her genitals. He had taken her on his lap while sliding his finger into her vagina. The child had felt an immense anxiety but yet did not dare talk about it. Since that time she has been very afraid of everything sexual.48

  Such incidents are usually endured in silence by the little girl because of the shame they cause. Moreover, if she does reveal them to her parents, their reaction is often to reprimand her. “Don’t say such stupid things … you’ve got an evil mind.” She is also silent about bizarre activities of some strangers. A little girl told Dr. Liepmann:

  We had rented a room from the shoemaker in the basement. Often when our landlord was alone, he came to get me, took me in his arms, and kissed me for a long time all the while wiggling back and forth. His kiss wasn’t superficial besides, since he stuck his tongue into my mouth. I detested him because of his ways. But I never whispered a word, as I was very fearful.49

  In addition to enterprising companions and perverse girlfriends, there is this knee in the cinema pressed against the girl’s, this hand at night in the train, sliding along her leg, these boys who sniggered when she passed, these men who followed her in the street, these embraces, these furtive touches. She does not really understand the meaning of these adventures. In the fifteen-year-old head, there is often a strange confusion because theoretical knowledge and concrete experiences do not match. She has already felt all the burnings of excitement and desire, but she imagines—like Clara d’Ellébeuse invented by Francis Jammes—that a male kiss is enough to make her a mother; she has a clear idea of the genital anatomy, but when her dancing partner embraces her, she thinks the agitation she feels is a migraine. It is certain that girls are better informed today than in the past. However, some psychiatrists affirm that there is more than one adolescent girl who does not know that sexual organs have a use other than urinary.50 In any case, girls do not draw much connection between their sexual agitation and the existence of their genital organs, since there is no sign as precise as the male erection indicating this correlation. There is such a gap between their romantic musings concerning man and love and the crudeness of certain facts that are revealed to them that they do not create any link between them. Thyde Monnier relates that she had made the pledge with a few girlfriends to see how a man was made and to tell it to the others:

  Having entered my father’s room on purpose without knocking, I described it: “It looks like a leg of lamb; that is, it is like a rolling pin, and then there is a round thing.” It was difficult to explain. I drew it. I even did it three times, and each one took hers away hidden in her blouse, and from time to time she burst out laughing while looking at it and then went all dreamy … How could innocent girls like us set up a connection between these objects and sentimental songs, pretty little romantic stories where love as a whole—respect, shyness, sighs, and kissing of the hand—is sublimated to the point of making a eunuch?51

  Nevertheless, through reading, conversations, theater, and words she has overheard, the girl gives meaning to the disturbances of her flesh; she becomes appeal and desire. In her fevers, shivers, dampness, and uncertain states, her body takes on a new and unsettling dimension. The young man is proud of his sexual propensities because he assumes his virility joyfully; sexual desire is aggressive and prehensile for him; there is an affirmation of his subjectivity and transcendence in it; he boasts of it to his friends; his sex organ is for him a disturbance he takes pride in; the drive that sends him toward the female is of the same nature as that which throws him toward the world, and so he recognizes himself in it. On the contrary, the girl’s sexual life has always been hidden; when her eroticism is transformed and invades her whole flesh, the mystery becomes agonizing: she undergoes the disturbance as a shameful illness; it is not active: it is a state, and even in imagination she cannot get rid of it by any autonomous decision; she does not dream of taking, pressing, violating: she is wait and appeal; she feels dependent; she feels herself at risk in her alienated flesh.

  Her diffuse hope and her dream of happy passivity clearly reveal her body as an object destined for another; she seeks to know sexual experience only in its immanence; it is the contact of the hand, mouth, or another flesh that she desires; the image of her partner is left in the shadows, or she drowns it in an idealized haze; however, she cannot prevent his presence from haunting her. Her terrors and juvenile revulsions regarding man have assumed a more equivocal character than before, and because of that they are more agonizing. Before, they stemmed from a profound divorce between the child’s organism and her future as an adult; now they come from this very complexity that the girl feels in her flesh. She understands that she is destined for possession because she wants it: and she revolts against her desires. She at once wishes for and fears the shameful passivity of the consenting prey. She is overwhelmed with confusion at the idea of baring herself before a m
an; but she also senses that she will then be given over to his gaze without recourse. The hand that takes and that touches has an even more imperious presence than do eyes: it is more frightening. But the most obvious and detestable symbol of physical possession is penetration by the male’s sex organ. The girl hates the idea that this body she identifies with may be perforated as one perforates leather, that it can be torn as one tears a piece of fabric. But the girl refuses more than the wound and the accompanying pain; she refuses that these be inflicted. “The idea of being pierced by a man is horrible,” a girl told me one day. It is not fear of the virile member that engenders horror of the man, but this fear is the confirmation and symbol; the idea of penetration acquires its obscene and humiliating meaning within a more generalized form, of which it is in turn an essential element.

  The girl’s anxiety shows itself in nightmares that torment her and fantasies that haunt her: just when she feels an insidious complaisance in herself, the idea of rape becomes obsessive in many cases. It manifests itself in dreams and behavior in the form of many more or less obvious symbols. The girl explores her room before going to bed for fear of finding some robber with shady intentions; she thinks she hears thieves in the house; an aggressor comes in through the window armed with a knife and he stabs her. In a more or less acute way, men inspire terror in her. She begins to feel a certain disgust for her father; she can no longer stand the smell of his tobacco, she detests going into the bathroom after him; even if she continues to cherish him, this physical revulsion is frequent; it takes on an intensified form if the child was already hostile to her father, as often happens in the youngest children. A dream often encountered by psychiatrists in their young female patients is that they imagine being raped by a man in front of an older woman and with her consent. It is clear that they are symbolically asking their mother for permission to give in to their desires. That is because one of the most detestable constraints weighing on them is that of hypocrisy. The girl is dedicated to “purity,” to innocence, at precisely the moment she discovers in and around her the mysterious disturbances of life and sex. She has to be white like an ermine, transparent like crystal, she is dressed in vaporous organdy, her room is decorated with candy-colored hangings, people lower their voices when she approaches, she is prohibited from seeing indecent books; yet there is not one child on earth who does not relish “abominable” images and desires. She tries to hide them from her best friend, even from herself; she only wants to live or to think by the rules; her self-defiance gives her a devious, unhappy, and sickly look; and later, nothing will be harder than combating these inhibitions. But in spite of all these repressions, she feels oppressed by the weight of unspeakable faults. Her metamorphosis into a woman takes place not only in shame but in remorse for suffering that shame.