Borderline...Jüdin

Kein Sieger darf missbrauchen seinen Sieg. - Euripides - ......„All children endeavor to experience the world with their eyes, their hands, and more intimately their mouths and stomachs: but at the awkward age, the girl takes particular pleasure in exploring what is indigestible and repugnant. Very often, she is attracted by what is “disgusting.” One of them, quite pretty and attractive when she wanted to be and carefully dressed, proved really fascinated by everything that seemed “dirty” to her: she touched insects, looked at dirty sanitary napkins, sucked the blood of her cuts. Playing with dirty things is obviously a way of overcoming disgust; this feeling becomes much more important at puberty: the girl is disgusted by her too-carnal body, by menstrual blood, by adults’ sexual practices, by the male she is destined for; she denies it by indulging herself specifically in the familiarity of everything that disgusts her. “Since I have to bleed each month, I prove that my blood does not scare me by drinking that of my cuts. Since I will have to submit myself to a revolting test, why not eat a white worm?” This attitude is affirmed more clearly in self-mutilation, so frequent at this age. The girl gashes her thigh with a razor, burns herself with cigarettes, cuts and scratches herself; so as not to go to a boring garden party, a girl during my youth cut her foot with an ax and had to spend six weeks in bed. These sadomasochistic practices are both an anticipation of the sexual experience and a revolt against it; girls have to undergo these tests, hardening themselves to all possible ordeals and rendering them harmless, including the wedding night. When she puts a slug on her chest, when she swallows a bottle of aspirin, when she wounds herself, the girl is defying her future lover: you will never inflict on me anything more horrible than I inflict on myself. These are morose and haughty initiations in sexual adventure. Destined to be a passive prey, she claims her freedom right up to submitting to pain and disgust. When she inflicts the cut of the knife, the burning of a coal on herself, she is protesting against the penetration that deflowers her: she protests by nullifying it. Masochistic, since she welcomes the pain caused by her behavior, she is above all sadistic: as autonomous subject, she beats, scorns, and tortures this dependent flesh, this flesh condemned to submission that she detests but from which she does not want to separate herself. Because, in all these situations, she does not choose authentically to reject her destiny. Sadomasochistic crazes imply a fundamental bad faith: if the girl indulges in them, it means she accepts, through her rejections, her future as woman; she would not mutilate her flesh with hatred if first she did not recognize herself as flesh. Even her violent outbursts arise from a situation of resignation. When a boy revolts against his father or against the world, he engages in effective violence; he picks a quarrel with a friend, he fights, he affirms himself as subject with his fists: he imposes himself on the world; he goes beyond it. But affirming herself, imposing herself, are forbidden to the adolescent girl, and that is what fills her heart with revolt: she hopes neither to change the world nor to emerge from it; she knows or at least believes, and perhaps even wishes, herself tied up: she can only destroy; there is despair in her rage; during a frustrating evening, she breaks glasses, windows, vases: it is not to overcome her lot; it is only a symbolic protest. The girl rebels against her future enslavement through her present powerlessness; and her vain outbursts, far from freeing her from her bonds, often merely restrict her even more.“ (Beauvoir)