Female homosexuality

Female homosexuality, as Simone de Beauvoir discusses it, includes adolescent friendships and same-sex love as well as a possible enduring lesbian orientation. Her account places these experiences within the girl’s search for recognition, intimacy, and a future self, and stresses that they cannot be reduced to a single destiny: some become genuine love, some awaken a lasting vocation, and others are temporary stages shaped by the expectations surrounding women’s lives.

Context: The Girl’s Search for a Future

The argument begins from a wider account of the feminine condition. A girl may experience herself in childhood as an autonomous person, but puberty brings the future into the body and, in the book’s formulation, makes youth a period of waiting. She is encouraged to imagine a man as liberator and source of fulfillment. This prescribed destination helps explain why attachments to girls can carry several meanings at once: they offer present intimacy, but may also become a way to imagine the woman the girl will be.

This framework does not make biology a fixed verdict. The book recognizes that bodily experience can be alienating, but insists that the body has lived meaning in a social world and cannot by itself determine a woman’s role. Its account of same-sex experience therefore concerns not just the sex of the beloved, but also the conditions under which a girl can recognize herself, seek affection, and become a subject in relation to another person.

Friendship, Self-Recognition, and Desire

In adolescence, a close girlfriend can help a girl move beyond the maternal circle and explore the world, including its sexual dimensions. The friend is at once someone who draws her beyond herself and someone whose attention confirms her sense of self. Some girls compare their bodies or exchange caresses; the book relates such moments to narcissistic pleasure, describing a mutual fascination with feminine form and with femininity more broadly. It also notes that these early tendencies may be difficult to distinguish from self-admiration.

The attachment may take a confidential, spiritual form or become deeply intimate. Girls exchange confidences and diaries, affectionate names, and ardent letters; in one example, Natasha burns her arm with a heated ruler as proof of love for Sonya. Such gestures make the friendship a space where feeling can be recognized and answered. The account does not treat all these relations as equivalent: some remain innocent and reciprocal, while others develop into passionate attachments or uneven relationships in which one girl dominates the other.

A girl’s desire may also turn toward an older woman who occupies a position of authority and social standing. A teacher or tutor can attract intense admiration, and even an ordinary object associated with a beloved professor—such as used transit tickets or lunch papers—can become prized by schoolgirls. In this pattern, the desired woman is not simply a friend: her professional independence and social position lend her a prestige that makes her a possible model for the girl’s own future.

Intimacy and Its Particular Conditions

The book explains the appeal of women’s intimacy partly through the girl’s prior familiarity with women’s bodies and affection in family life. A beloved older woman can seem to combine qualities associated with both parents: authority and a measure of transcendence on one side, familiar warmth and closeness on the other. The girl may find that tenderness moves toward erotic feeling without the same unfamiliarity she associates with a male partner.

The account also contrasts same-sex intimacy with the girl’s anxiety about male violence and rape. It presents relations between women as capable of offering affection without the forms of threat she fears in heterosexual experience. This does not make them free of emotional conflict: the book observes that jealousy can arise in every human relationship. But the familiar and mutually understood terms of intimacy may allow a girl to experience desire while feeling less alienated from herself.

This discussion belongs to the book’s broader argument that woman is an autonomous freedom who is often made to assume the position of the Other. Its emphasis is on the social meanings attached to desire and on the different possibilities available to the girl, rather than on a claim that anatomy dictates her choices. Same-sex attachment appears as one setting in which she may seek recognition and act on desire, even as the surrounding culture continues to present a male-centered future as the normal destination.

Outcomes: Love, Vocation, or Passage

The book allows that homosexual experience can become true love and give a girl a balance she wishes to preserve. It may be repeated, remain in memory with nostalgia, or awaken or establish a lesbian vocation. These outcomes are distinct from a relationship that is chiefly an identification with an admired older woman: in that case, the girl may be drawn to the future she sees embodied in the beloved, rather than to a durable partnership between equals.

The account also describes many attachments as a stage of development. The admired woman may lose her aura as the younger girl asserts herself and begins to compare the two. Chosen because she is familiar and not too intimidating, the older woman may not remain sufficiently other to command the same devotion. The book contrasts this with the more distant male ideal, whose remoteness helps preserve his prestige in the girl’s imagination. A same-sex relationship may thus be emotionally real while still functioning as an experiment or transition, rather than as a settled orientation.

The decisive distinction is not between authentic and unreal feeling, but among different courses an attachment can take. A girl’s love for a woman can be reciprocal and sustaining, unequal and painful, or a way of exploring a desired adult identity. The book resists treating any one of these patterns as the inevitable result of biology; it locates their significance in the interaction between the girl’s desires, her need for recognition, and the social expectations that organize her future.