It wasn’t until third grade or so that I grasped the fact that identity could govern our relationship to what we saw and what we read. It happened on one afternoon in particular, when I was sitting on the floor of my dim pink room, next to my pink polka-dot curtains, playing Power Rangers with my friend Allison, who insisted, over and over, that I had to play the Yellow Ranger. I didn’t want to, but she said there was no other way we could play. When I realized she wasn’t kidding—that she genuinely believed this to be something like a natural law—the anger that hit me was almost hallucinatory. She was saying, in effect, that I had failed to understand my own limits. I couldn’t be the Pink Ranger, which meant I couldn’t be Baby Spice. I couldn’t be Laura Ingalls, rocking her bench until she got kicked out of the classroom; I couldn’t be Claudia Kincaid, taking baths in the fountain at the Met. A chasm opened up between us. I told Allison I didn’t want to play anymore. She left, and I sat still, shimmering with rage.

That day marked either the beginning of a period of self-delusion or an end of one. Afterward, I still identified with girls in books, but things were different. And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.

Much of The Second Sex still scans as unnervingly contemporary. De Beauvoir notes that men, unlike women, experience no contradiction between their gender and their “vocation as a human being.” She describes the definitive thrill and sorrow of female adolescence—the realization that your body, and what people will demand of it, will determine your adult life. “If the young girl at about this stage frequently develops a neurotic condition,” de Beauvoir writes, “it is because she feels defenseless before a dull fatality that condemns her to unimaginable trials; her femininity means in her eyes sickness and suffering and death, and she is obsessed with this fate.”

The teenage girl, wrote de Beauvoir, is bound up in a “sense of secrecy,” a “grim solitude.” She is “convinced that she is not understood; her relations with herself are then only the more impassioned: she is intoxicated with her isolation, she feels herself different, superior, exceptional.” So it goes with a certain type of blockbuster YA heroine—the series protagonist who either doubles down on her sense of isolated exceptionalism, if she’s in a dystopian universe, or superficially attempts to reject it before acquiescing, if she’s in a romantic one.

[...] Kate Zambreno, in Heroines (2012), nods to de Beauvoir while writing about the existential horror of traditional gender roles—“the man allowed to go out into the world and transcend himself, the woman reduced to the kind of work that will be erased and forgotten at day’s end, living invisible among the vestigial people of the afternoon.”