 In later chapters Beauvoir provides a phenomenology of the body as lived throughout the different stages of a woman’s life. Here she is explicitly offering her narrative as an account of lived experience, the body in situation. In childhood the young girl’s body is experienced in a different way from that of the young boy. She is trained into a different way of inhabiting it. He is encouraged to climb trees and play rough games. She is encouraged to treat her whole person as a doll, “a passive object … an inert given object” (1949 [1982: 306–307]). The consequence is an inhibited intentionality, her spontaneous movements inhibited, “the exuberance of life … restrained” (1949 [1982: 323]), “lack of physical power” leading to a “general timidity” (1949 [1982: 355]). The account which Beauvoir is offering here is one in which girls undergo something like a training in bodily habits which structure the possibilities for interaction with their world.