Family life education, or FLE, was an approach to sex ed that came out of the 1950s. It tucked all the uncomfortable body stuff into the pocket of a larger, gender normative curriculum about courtship and marriage: chaste dating tips, engagement rituals, even balancing family budgets. Intercourse was a part of that. “Family life education was the first time that American educators actually acknowledged that adults had sex and described it,” Jonathan Zimmerman said. “But they did so with the goal obviously of keeping it within what today we’d call straight marriage.” Any other kinds of sex were treated as depraved and even dangerous. Students were told that premarital sex could result in sickness and unwanted pregnancy, but they weren’t always informed about contraception.
In FLE, contraception was considered a lightning rod topic, along with abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation. “Those were called the ‘Big Four,’ ” Zimmerman said, and by the 1960s and early 1970s, they were taught only in districts where parents and school boards were more or less united in their liberal perspectives, such as in New York, New Jersey, and areas of California. Why? Because the Big Four unhook sex from procreation. Masturbation, according to Zimmerman, is so controversial because “it’s explicitly about pleasure. And only that, it’s not about anything else, it’s not procreative.”
Historically, kids had been taught that fondling themselves led to all manner of issues, some of which get recited in Deenie. Since the Victorian era, children were told that “self-abuse” was shameful and caused problems ranging from dim-wittedness to full-blown insanity. At its heart, the prohibition against masturbation grew from the emphasis on self-control in late-nineteenth-century American culture, Jeffrey Moran writes in Teaching Sex: The Shaping of the Adolescent in the 20th Century. “Once a young man touched himself in that way, he threatened the entire structure of Victorian character. Self-discipline, social responsibility, character—masturbation symbolically toppled all the pillars.”
The idea that a girl might do such a thing was even more outrageous. Early moralists accepted that boys had undeniable sexual urges, and part of the task of becoming a man involved wrestling down the beast. Girls, on the other hand, were assumed to be naturally chaste, and it was a woman’s job to support her man in his ongoing struggle toward virtue. If a young man slipped—whether by touching himself or seeking out sexual intercourse—it was disappointing, but understandable. Young ladies, meanwhile, were given no such freedoms. Within the framework of Victorian morality, “girls who fell prey to self-abuse were clearly aberrant,” Moran writes. Women who gave in to premarital sex deserved everything—whether it was community-wide shunning, disfiguring disease, or unwanted pregnancy—that happened afterward.
These attitudes evolved during the sexual revolution, but they still remained foundational to the American understanding of sex. In a 1965 article about the birth control pill for the New York Times, Cornell political science professor Andrew Hacker unpacked the expectation that easy access to contraception would encourage immorality. “For a long time there has been a certain ritual, not without moral undertones, connected with birth control as practiced by unmarried people,” he wrote. “The young man is ‘prepared’ on a date; the girl is not. If there is a seduction, he takes the initiative; she is ‘surprised’… Vital to this ritual is the supposition that the girl sets off on the date believing that it will be platonic; if it ends up otherwise she cannot be accused of having planned ahead for the sexual culmination.”
In other words, the ritual became more about defending a young woman’s honor than her chastity. Mid-1960s readers had begun to accept that people had premarital sex, but the charade helped maintain a bulwark of the Victorian perspective: that boys still wanted it more than girls. The idea that scores of unmarried women were, of their own initiatives, taking daily medication to prevent pregnancy was a blow to the very structure of cultural mores around sex. The growing popularity of the Pill, much like female masturbation, toppled the premise that women were only interested in sexual intimacy in the context of making babies.
By the early 1970s, some sex ed teachers in public schools, like Blume’s fictional Mrs. Rappoport, really did acknowledge the Big Four, and they did so with SIECUS’s full approval. But they were taking a risk, Zimmerman said. “If [the teacher] does that at PS3 down in the Village, she’ll be teacher of the year, and if she does that in wherever bumfuck Indiana she’ll be canned. One can well imagine on the Upper West Side, this being completely fine, right? But there are lots and lots of places where it wouldn’t be, up until today.”
And even in areas where topics like masturbation and contraception were allowed, the familiar yarns of conservatism were often knitted through the conversations. The SIECUS curriculum, while comprehensive, still depicted girls as potential victims when it came to their male peers’ wild, raging sex drives. The message to young women was the same as it was back in the Victorian era: male sexuality is a storm. Be strong enough to hold it off until marriage, and then submit to it, passively, ever after.
Professor and researcher Michelle Fine was “shocked” when she went back to high school in New York City in the mid-1980s to investigate why the dropout rates among low-income students were so high, and found that something essential was missing from family life instruction: the existence of female sexuality. Even in the anything-goes Big Apple, she saw that teenage girls were being taught about sex—“ ‘Say No,’ put a brake on his sexuality, don’t encourage”—in a way that stopped them from developing a healthy sense of agency and entitlement in their inevitable sexual encounters.
“This was about, ‘you’re a victim, bad things will happen,’ ” Fine said. There was “no analysis of hetero male sexuality… they didn’t have to say ‘boys will be boys’ although that was in the air.”
While male sexuality was being “normalized,” female sexuality was being erased. Fine, who published her findings in the Harvard Educational Review in 1988, argued that “the missing discourse of desire” contributed to the school’s high rates of teen pregnancy, which ultimately caused young mothers to drop out. She says that cutting a girl off from her own natural desire for pleasure can potentially mute her voice—and her ability to articulate her sexual needs—in harmful, enduring ways. “I just think people can’t say no if they can’t say yes,” Fine said. “Being able to assert a clear sense of desire, yearning, hope, aspiration, enables one to then articulate conditions under which [something is okay]—or a clear no.”
This remains true for so many girls and women, who grow up in a world where “unacknowledged social ambivalence about female sexuality”—per Fine—has contributed to decades-long mixed messages about whether women should be hyper-sexed male fantasies, passive sex objects, or utterly sexless. But Deenie blazed an alternative trail.
“I still go into classrooms where I’ll say the word ‘masturbation’ and kids will say, ‘I thought that’s something only boys do,’ ” said Rachel Lotus, an independent sex educator based in Brooklyn. “And I’m talking about kids who are on the precipice of puberty, who have maybe heard the word or heard the phrase ‘jerking off’ but they still believe that that is limited to people with penises only. So it’s a huge priority for me to name it, to normalize it, to talk about it being everybody’s right. Whether you do or you don’t is up to you, but it’s something that everybody can do and enjoy.”
Lotus, who was forty-two at the time we spoke, recalled reading Deenie as a kid and feeling an enormous weight off her shoulders. “[The book] completely changed my understanding of everything and was a huge relief. I mean, huge. ‘Oh! There’s a word for this, other people do it?’ This isn’t weird or scary or shameful, it doesn’t need to be stigmatized.”
She believes sex educators like her owe Judy an enormous debt. “I don’t think you’ll talk to any sex educator who doesn’t think that Judy Blume is the most badass, radical, incredibly brave author… Deenie is still, however many years later, still so radical for having that scene.”
Chapter Ten Virginity
“Nice girls didn’t go all the way.”
Randy Blume was almost exactly the same age as Judy’s pre-teen characters; she was twelve when Deenie was published. From early on, she had been one of her mother’s most trusted readers. She gave Judy book ideas, pointed out errors, and corrected her dialogue if it missed the mark, especially when the junior high slang came off as inauthentic.
They’d started that routine with Then Again, Maybe I Won’t. An elementary school–aged Randy had insisted on reading an early draft and Judy let her, even though she worried that the subject matter might be too advanced. But much to Judy’s amusement, the puberty stuff went right over Randy’s head. She thought Tony carried the raincoat to cover his face if he got embarrassed and interpreted his nocturnal emissions as him peeing.
As Randy approached her teenage years, she started reading novels that were circulating among kids her age, including 1967’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones and 1969’s My Darling, My Hamburger. In both books, starlit high school romances give way to teen pregnancies—with disastrous consequences. One young woman marries the baby’s father, miscarries, and then her future dissolves into a heavy haze of responsibility and grief. Another girl has an illegal abortion and nearly hemorrhages to death, missing her graduation.
The alternative to these stories were Maureen Daly’s 1942 classic Seventeenth Summer and Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen from 1956, which veered too far in the other direction, filled with aww shucks soda fountain dates and gee whiz sentimentality. Randy suspected that there was more to teenage relationships than what she read in these page-turners-cum-morality-tales. In passing, she told her mother that she wanted a book where a young couple has sex—but nobody dies and their lives aren’t ruined. She also told Judy that she hated the way the male and female characters were being stereotyped. “In these books, the boys had absolutely no feelings, and the girl ‘did it’ not because she was excited sexually, but because she was mad at her parents,” Blume said in Presenting Judy Blume. “And she was always punished for it.”
Judy agreed that the classic teen romance was ripe for an update and got to work. She dug into the emotional nuances that would lead a pair of lovestruck high schoolers to have sex. Forever, about seventeen-year-olds Michael Wagner and Katherine Danziger, emerged from there. “I set out to teach very few things in my books,” Blume explained. “But I did set out in Forever to show that boys can love just as hard, feel just as much pain.”
Are You There God?, Deenie, and Forever form a triptych, with eleven-year-old Margaret, thirteen-year-old Deenie, and seventeen-year-old Katherine creating a progressive portrait of the new American girl. All three are smart, spunky, and in touch with their bodies. They’re all white, middle class, and from the suburbs—Judy wrote what she knew—but together, they embody an ideal for Blume that transcended race or class. The trio offers a vision of how the up-and-coming generation could digest the feminist and sexual revolutions. They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures.
By the time she wrote Forever, Judy was no longer pulling directly from her own experiences. She had come of age in the 1950s, when premarital sex represented a barrier that “nice girls” just didn’t cross. “When I was growing up, we had very firm rules about how far to go,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “Nice girls didn’t go all the way. We were supposed to be virgins until we were safely married.” Although she knew girls who slipped up, Judy played within the lines, more or less. As she told a reporter for the Independent in 1999, “[I] was a virgin until I got married, or at least until I got engaged. But not even early in my engagement. Very late in my engagement,” she said.
However, she was no stranger to sexual exploration. She was the envy of her friends because her parents trusted her to have her boyfriends over to their house in Elizabeth, where she’d make out with them in the sunroom. This gave her “years of kissing experience,” as she told a reporter in 1976. Blume later elaborated in the Independent, explaining that her mother and father allowed this because they were nervous about the dangers of “parking,” in which unsupervised high schoolers fooled around in dark cars. There were rumors of distracted kids getting attacked by bloodthirsty strangers. Just once, Judy decided to try it anyway. “I wanted to know what it would feel like to make out in a car,” she said. “No sooner had we pulled off the road than a cop was there at the window with a flashlight.”
The policeman warned them that necking in the shadows was a recipe for getting assaulted. “He said, ‘Don’t do this—this is dangerous!’ ” Blume recalled. “And I said, ‘I know! I’ve never done it!’ ”
She found other ways to sneak around the “nice girl” fence. “My friends and I played sexual games, sexual games between girlfriends, ending in orgasm,” she said in the same article. “I played with one friend—she and I took turns being the boy.” (Blume’s main characters in Wifey and 1998’s Summer Sisters have a similar history of same-sex exploration; like Judy, both protagonists grow up to sleep with and eventually marry men.)
By the time Judy was a mother herself, the world had changed, as had her own perspective. Her marriage to John “lacked intimacy,” she told the Independent years after their divorce, and she found herself wondering what she had missed out on by settling down at an all but virginal age of twenty-one.
She didn’t want Randy to have the same regrets. She knew that abstinence before the altar wasn’t realistic anymore, nor was it necessarily a recipe for an erotically fulfilling partnership. And so, Judy started imagining the new teenage girl: one who was nice—but also free.
Forever is a traditional teenage love story with a twist, and that twist has a name: Ralph. Ralph is what the male character calls his penis. Boy and girl meet; boy and girl get swept off their feet—and then, oh hello, Ralph has joined the party. Forever was the first book of its kind to show a young couple’s sexual journey.
The writing is explicit, for sure; there are descriptions of nudity, orgasms, and semen. But Judy was careful to avoid pitfalls that would make Forever easily dismissible as smut. For one thing, the emotional relationship between the pair is just as nuanced as their physical connection. Equally important, Blume is intentional in the way she presents the two main characters. They aren’t rebels or burnouts or outsiders, sneaking around in the streets after dark.
They’re sweet, wholesome kids.
Michael and Katherine are seniors in high school: she’s from Westfield, New Jersey, and he’s from the neighboring town of Summit. They meet at a mutual friend’s fondue party—the tamest possible teenage get-together—where they flirt and banter. The next day, they go on a drive and talk about their interests. They’re both athletes, with Michael a skier and Katherine an avid tennis player. The colleges on their wish lists are competitive: Penn State, University of Vermont, Middlebury. Michael’s favorite food is literally spinach! Katherine tells Michael that she volunteers at the local hospital once a week as a candy striper.
Katherine in particular is family oriented. Her dad is her most frequent tennis partner; the first thing she does after her date with Michael is go home and tell her mom about him. Her younger sister, Jamie, is a precociously talented artist and cook, but Katherine doesn’t let her own insecurities get in the way of their sisterly bond. Other details, offered early in the novel, telegraph Katherine’s level-headedness. She has a “92 average” in school, and she’s thin. “We are exactly the same size—five-feet-six and 109 pounds,” she says of her and her mother. It’s one of the few times Blume provides a physical description as specific as a character’s weight. You get the sense that she’s using Katherine’s svelte body as a shorthand for self-control, which wouldn’t fly now but was par for the course in the diet-obsessed 1970s.
When it comes to sex, Katherine is equally disciplined. She’s still a virgin and broke up with her last boyfriend, she tells us, because he pressured her in bed. “He threatened that if I wouldn’t sleep with him he’d find somebody else who would,” she says. “I told him if that was all he cared about he should go right ahead.”
Like Judy, Katherine has been warned by her parents about the dangers of parking. After her second date with Michael, she invites him back to her house, where they make out in the den. Michael wants to go farther, but Katherine holds him off, dutifully performing her role as the good girl. “Let’s save something for tomorrow,” she says when he tries to reach up under her sweater.
In the chapters that follow, the pair engage in the familiar, gendered pas de deux, with Michael angling for more action and Katherine keeping him at bay. What makes her—and Forever—so interesting is that she’s actually enticed by the idea of sex. As their relationship unfolds, it becomes less about if for her, than when.
“In the old days girls were divided into two groups—those who did and those who didn’t,” Katherine muses. “Nice girls didn’t, naturally. They were the ones boys wanted to marry.” She continues to say that just because the rules have changed, it doesn’t mean that her entire generation takes sex lightly. “It’s true that we are more open than our parents but that just means we accept sex and talk about it. It doesn’t mean we are all jumping into bed together.”
Katherine isn’t jumping into bed with anyone—but in her town, teenage hanky-panky is hardly rare. Her best friend, Erica, lives on a hill, where “she’s always finding used rubbers in the street.” Erica herself is sassy, extroverted, and less sentimental about sex than Katherine is. “I’ve been thinking,” Erica tells her one day, “that it might not be a bad idea to get laid before college.” When Katherine balks because Erica doesn’t have a boyfriend, Erica is unfazed. “We look at sex differently,” she says. “I see it as a physical thing and you see it as a way of expressing love.”
In the months that follow, Erica gets involved with Michael’s friend Artie: a promising high school actor who thinks he might be gay. Erica is more than happy to help him figure himself out, though he’s mostly interested in her as a formidable board game opponent. She gets frustrated with him but there’s also a sense that in the world of the book, she and Artie are doing right by each other. By giving Artie the space to understand his sexuality—a plotline that turns tragic when he tries to take his own life—Erica slows down enough to realize that she cares more about sex than she thought she did. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and have decided I don’t want to fuck just for the hell of it,” she writes in a letter to Katherine near the end of the novel. “I want it to be special.”
