It’s clear that Erica has come around to the right way of thinking about teenage sex. Forever makes a case for the wrong way, too. The novel opens with a shocker of a phrase: “Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys.” Sybil is Erica’s cousin, who hosts the New Year’s Eve fondue party where Michael and Katherine first meet. We learn that Sybil is fat and Erica thinks she sleeps around to make up for her low self-esteem.
For the most part, Sybil exists as an off-screen character. She shows up in Artie’s school play looking “fatter than ever” and then disappears from the action, until Erica tells Katherine that Sybil is pregnant. Nobody knows who the father is and she’s too far along to get an abortion, which means she’ll have to carry the baby to term. Sybil has decided to go the adoption route and is looking forward to having the baby “for the experience.”
The birth goes well, and Erica and Katherine visit Sybil in the hospital. Sybil seems nonchalant—she describes labor and delivery as “no big deal”—but a few things she says imply otherwise. She’s disappointed that she won’t be able to attend her high school graduation. She talks about the girl baby’s full head of hair in a way that suggests feelings well beyond indifference, and admits that she hopes the adoptive parents will name her Jennifer.
Sybil’s life isn’t ruined by the slipup—she tells her friends that she plans to go to Smith College in the fall, with a brand-new IUD. But later, Erica informs Katherine that Sybil won’t talk about the baby, and that the “whole experience was more than she bargained for.”
In Presenting Judy Blume, Blume explains that with Sybil’s character, she wanted to show “that a girl like Sybil might have a genius IQ but she has no common sense.” Put another way, Sybil is tripped up by her hunger. She’s brilliant but oh, her appetites.
Katherine, on the other hand, thinks things through. She has a good head on her shoulders thanks in part to her female role models: her mother and her grandmother. Her mom, named Diana, is the foremost children’s librarian at the nearby public library. When Katherine starts talking to her about sex, Diana doesn’t shut her down. “Were you a virgin when you got married?” Katherine asks one morning in the car on the way to school. Her mother answers her honestly, admitting she was a virgin until Katherine’s father, Roger, proposed and that if she were to do it all over again, she probably wouldn’t have gotten married so young, at age twenty.
Then, she delivers the most concrete piece of advice about sex that the book has to offer. “You have to be sure you can handle the situation before you jump into it,” Diana tells her daughter. “Sex is a commitment… once you’re there you can’t go back to holding hands.”
Diana goes on to say that whatever decision Katherine makes, she just hopes she’ll behave responsibly. Later, she saves a column from the New York Times and brings it up to Katherine’s bedroom. The article—which is real—is called “What About the Right to Say ‘No’?” and was an op-ed written by a Yale professor and doctor, Richard V. Lee, published on September 16, 1973. It argued that the sexual revolution put too much pressure on adolescents to have sex before they were ready and created shame around virginity, rather than sexual experience, for girls as well as boys. In an unexpected cultural twist, teen and twentysomething virgins were being treated by both their peers and adults like uptight losers. “The new ideology is that sex is good and good sex means orgasm and any body can,” Lee wrote. “The result has been to turn the pleasures of sex into a duty. Along with all this goes the ‘knowledge’ that if you don’t have intercourse, you’ll go crazy—and that virginity is a hang–up.”
Lee provided four questions that teenagers could ask themselves to help assess if they were truly prepared for intercourse, including “Is sexual intercourse necessary for the relationship?” and “Have you thought about how this relationship might end?” Reading along in Forever, Katherine gets prickly around the latter. In her mind, her feelings for Michael are permanent—thus the “forever” of it all.
Still, she’s open when Diana brings up the article at breakfast the next morning. They have a quick, pleasant conversation in which Katherine—who has already lost her virginity, unbeknownst to her mother—doesn’t feel judged. In Diana, Blume gives readers an example for positive parent-child rapport over a sensitive subject. “Not that I don’t identify with Katherine, but I could see myself as Katherine’s mother,” Blume once said. “And I like her.”
She also clearly likes Katherine’s grandmother. Hallie Gross is a lawyer who once had an unsuccessful run for US Congress. At almost seventy, she’s still working, while also dealing with her longtime husband’s deteriorating health and volunteering for Planned Parenthood and NOW. Ever since he had a stroke, Katherine’s grandfather has trouble walking and talking, but you’d never know it from the patient and loving way Hallie treats him. She’s an active feminist who also adores her family; one time, we learn, she drove to her apartment in New York City and back just to grab the exotic spices needed to try out a new recipe.
Like Diana, Hallie isn’t afraid to talk about sex. After first meeting Michael, she tells Katherine that “he’s a nice boy,” but she should “be careful.” When Katherine asks her why, Hallie is matter-of-fact. She wants her granddaughter to be mindful of catching a venereal disease or getting pregnant. Katherine, more than a little surprised, tells Hallie that they aren’t even sleeping together.
“Yet,” Hallie replies.
Hallie makes it her business to educate her granddaughter about sex, too. One afternoon, Katherine arrives home to a package from Hallie and tears into it, thinking it might be an early birthday present. Instead, she finds a quick note and a stack of pamphlets from Planned Parenthood. Katherine is annoyed by Hallie’s presumption and calls her up at work to tell her so. But Hallie doesn’t back down. “Sometimes it’s hard for parents to accept the facts,” she says in her own defense, implying that at her age, she’s evolved enough to face the realities of her granddaughter’s awakening sexuality. As Hallie writes in her note that came with the pamphlets: “I don’t judge, I just advise.”
And Katherine eventually takes Hallie’s advice to heart. She has strong mentors in Diana and Hallie, and Katherine, ever sensible, becomes a diligent student.
Throughout history, a girl’s virginity has been everybody’s business. For Victorian parents, an explicit part of the contract of marrying off one’s daughter included the assurance that she was “pure,” meaning that she’d never had sex. Doctors were employed to check the state of a would-be bride’s hymen; Kate Millett described this practice trenchantly as “a sign of property received intact.” A young woman who strayed brought shame upon her family, and “ruined” herself.
By the Jazz Age this had started to change, with flappers cutting their hair and embracing their sexual freedom, like men. But flappers weren’t “nice” girls. They gave up their claim to niceness in exchange for the thrill of shadowy corners in speakeasies, illicit liquor fueling the fire in their bellies. Up through the mid-century, there were two kinds of girls: those who went “all the way” and those who didn’t, as Katherine recounts. The ones who didn’t had an easier time getting hitched. As Diana tells her daughter: “There were double standards then… boys were supposed to get plenty of experience before marriage,” while good girls were still expected to keep their legs closed.
Then, in the 1960s, the importance of female virginity started to wane. This dovetailed, interestingly, with a development in women’s health: the widespread acceptance of tampons. The first commercially available tampons appeared on the market in 1936, under the brand name Tampax, which were invented by a male doctor named Earle Cleveland Haas. Three years later in 1939, Tampax was featured at the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, in the Hall of Pharmacy. The exhibit boasted the world’s largest medicine chest, demonstrations of pharmaceutical chemistry, and an area devoted to “the drug store of tomorrow.” Married women—in other words, those who were “appropriately” sexually active—embraced the product easily, appreciating the efficacy and discretion of tampons as opposed to bulky sanitary pads.
But the idea of tampon use among teens remained much more controversial. Would Tampax interfere with virginity? Would adolescent girls be more inclined to masturbate if they got comfortable inserting something into their bodies? Physicians were invited to weigh in. Referencing a 1945 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes that a doctor named Robert Latou Dickinson used a sketch to show “that a tampon took up no more room than a standard nozzle for douching and it was smaller than the average penis. As for the old Victorian bugaboo that anything in the vagina had to be ‘stimulating,’ Dickinson said that if there was any erotic stimulus it was both ‘momentary’ and ‘negligible.’ ”
Tampon use among teenagers slowly became more socially acceptable. By the time Blume was writing Forever, the vast majority of high school seniors would have at least tried them. Girls teaching each other how to insert them became a typical right of passage, Brumberg explains. During Katherine’s first pelvic exam, when the gynecologist holds a mirror between her legs to help her get acquainted with her genitals, Katherine notes that it reminds her “of the time that Erica taught me how to use tampons. I had to hold a mirror between my legs then, too, to find the right hole.”
Tampons helped to temper the cultural importance of the hymen. Even with the assurance that a girl could physically remain a virgin while using internal menstrual products, the taboo of penetration started to lose its teeth. This, along with changing social mores and the rise of heavy petting in cars, all meant that by the 1970s, a girl’s virginity had a lot less to do with her eligibility for marriage. To use the parlance of the time: there were still sluts and prudes, but you didn’t need to stay a cherry to land a husband anymore. Katherine and her family come together around the topic not because she’s in danger of ruining herself, but because they care about the safety and sanctity of her first sexual experience. They want to make sure she treats the milestone with the appropriate reverence, that she acknowledges it as special.
Reading Forever through today’s lens, Michael comes off as pushy, or worse. In a TikTok from 2022, a Gen Z–appearing user rants: “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in… Michael was just so nasty.” He’s not as bad as Katherine’s former boyfriend—the one who gives her an ultimatum—but he’s still written as a “typical” horny teenage guy trying to drive their sexual exploration to the finish line as quickly as possible.
After they’ve been seeing each other for a little bit over a month, they split off from a double date with Erica and Artie and start making out in Katherine’s den. When Michael tries to unbutton Katherine’s jeans, she stops him. She doesn’t want to go so far with their friends playing Monopoly in the next room. Michael says he understands but then asks for a minute to himself. “This is really rough,” he tells her.
The next time they’re together, Jamie’s the only other person in the house. Katherine asks for privacy to change her clothes but Michael follows her into her bedroom. Michael—who has only had sex twice, with a girl he met on the beach in Maine—makes a show of testing out the mattress, noting that “soft mattresses are good for making love.” Katherine humors him, but then asks him to leave because she wants to take off her bra. Instead, he tells her he’ll just help her with the hook but then reaches around to cop a feel. “Please Michael… don’t,” Katherine says. Michael pushes back, but then they’re interrupted by Jamie calling from downstairs.
Katherine draws a firmer line after another date. They’re fooling around in the den again and this time, Michael reaches down her pants. “I’m not ready, Michael,” she says after he tells her how much he wants her. When he points out that she seems turned on, she clarifies that she’s not “mentally ready… a person has to think… A person has to be sure.” Michael concedes that they can satisfy each other without intercourse and Katherine agrees—just not right then. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were a tease,” Michael says, before dismissing her assurance that she isn’t as “Promises… promises.”
Katherine tells Michael that taking it slow “isn’t easy for [her] either,” and she means it. From her internal monologue, it’s clear that she’s genuinely engaging with the question of whether or not to have sex. After Michael accuses her of being a tease, she lies in bed that night contemplating what it would feel like to lose her virginity. “Sometimes I want to so much,” she admits. “But other times, I’m afraid.”
This is how Blume carefully modulates the nice girl. As an author, she acknowledges Katherine’s very real sexual urges, but imbues her with the self-confidence, and self-control, that allow her to hold off Michael long enough to make peace with her own desires. She’s waiting for love, for one thing. The first time Michael tells her he loves her, on a ski trip to Vermont with his sister and brother-in-law, Katherine isn’t sure she wants to say it back. “I was thinking, I love you Michael. But can you really love someone you’ve seen just nineteen times in your life?”
By the end of the ski weekend—and after Katherine has officially met, and touched, Ralph—she’s ready to reciprocate. She tells Michael that she loves him, too, and when she arrives back home to her parents, they ask if she and Michael are going steady. Katherine gets annoyed as her mom and dad start reminiscing about their own high school steadies and the love tokens they’d treasured at the time. Diana shares that she once wore a classmate’s class ring around her neck on a chain; Roger talks about how he gave a fellow tenth grader his ID bracelet.
For Katherine, these comparisons to her own relationship are invalidating, but she stays quiet. “I didn’t tell them that with Michael and me it’s different,” she says. “That it’s not just some fifties fad, like going steady. That with us it is love—real, true honest-to-god love.”
She doesn’t see the similarity when Michael gives her a silver necklace for an eighteenth birthday present. He’s had the round pendant engraved with both of their names and the word “forever.”
“In my whole life nothing will ever mean more to me,” Katherine says with tears in her eyes.
By the time she’s sporting Michael’s gift around town, Katherine is no longer a virgin. One afternoon, Michael surprises her with the key to his sister’s empty apartment in nearby Springfield, New Jersey. Katherine says she isn’t sure she wants to go and Michael assures her they don’t have to “do anything”; they can “just talk.” Katherine knows better but it’s all part of the dance—Michael is giving her plausible deniability. By the rules of the day, no matter what happens next, Katherine’s moral position is upheld by the pretense that it wasn’t her idea.
The first time Katherine sees the apartment, she and Michael follow the same old script: just talking leads to just kissing, which ends in them satisfying each other with their hands. But the next day, something has changed. Katherine feels ready. They’re at the apartment again, and Katherine says that “when we were naked, in each other’s arms, I wanted to do everything—I wanted to feel him inside of me.” She’s conscientious of course; she asks Michael if they can move from his sister’s bed to the floor, because she’s worried about stains. She also insists that he wear a condom, even though she’s just finished her period. “I’m thinking about getting pregnant,” Katherine tells Michael when he assures her that he doesn’t have a sexually transmitted disease. “Every woman had a different cycle.”
That night, they have intercourse twice. Both times, Michael comes immediately. Katherine is disappointed, but she doesn’t let it show. On her way home from the apartment, she’s buzzing with her new reality—she’s no longer a virgin. “Still, I can’t help feeling let down,” she muses, because it wasn’t so pleasurable for her. “Everybody makes such a big thing out of actually doing it. But Michael is probably right—this takes practice.”
And practice is exactly what Katherine resolves to do. This is where Blume steers Forever off the preexisting road map, where the novel goes from merely explicit and bold to something revolutionary.
Chapter Eleven Pleasure
“Can we do it again?”
Around the same time that Forever was published in the fall of 1975, the New York Times printed a brief op-ed called “Recreational—and Procreational—Sex.” The writer was Dr. John Money, a New Zealand–born sexologist (that’s right, sexologist) who founded the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1966. In his essay, Money argued that a “new ethic” was required for sex, in response to a massive paradigm shift surrounding intercourse and its purposes.
“Our old ethic is, like Venice, sinking imperceptibly into the sea,” he wrote colorfully. “We have succeeded neither in shoring up the old customs and morality of sexual relationships nor in restructuring them to meet the new tide of history.”
The new tide was one in which the rules around sex were in flux. There have always been two approaches to intercourse—recreational and procreational—and traditionally, the latter was righteous while the former was sinful. The ethics of sex were built around this long-accepted binary: pleasure was bad; making babies was good. But now, Money said, the whole framework needed restructuring. The upcoming generations were no longer buying into it, thanks in part to changes in life expectancy. “Men and women both, therefore, may plan years of recreational sex together during which they are either too young or too old to embark on parenthood,” he wrote.
