It’s not all happily ever after from there. Jody slips up and has a one-night stand with her ex. She picks a fight with Lyle’s ultrareligious older sister. The pair break up but in the end they both take a leap of faith—Lyle invites her to play tennis again and Jody lets herself really feel something. “I wish I could be looking back ten years from now so I could know if Lyle will be someone important, someone who’s still there, or someone whom I’ll just remember because he was the first,” she says. “Not the first in one sense, but the first in terms of being all-out in love.”
All-out love, for Jody, is far more vulnerable than sex. Even though the novel is explicit about lovemaking, It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me is about a young woman setting her heart free. But for a vocal contingent of readers, all they could see was the body parts. And these body parts, they argued, didn’t belong in school libraries.
Chapter Twenty Censorship
“I willed myself not to give in to the tears of frustration and disappointment I felt coming.”
The temperature was unusually mild the day of January 20, 1981, in Washington, DC. For the first time ever, the inauguration was set to take place on the Capitol’s west front, facing the National Mall and providing more room for spectators. There, the newly elected president of the United States stood to take his oath of office. The onetime governor of California placed his left hand on the Bible and repeated after the then–chief justice of the Supreme Court, a white-haired Warren E. Burger. “I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God,” he said.
Reagan then went on to kiss his wife on the cheek—an impeccable Nancy Reagan dressed in a matching red Adolfo dress coat and pillbox hat—and delivered his inaugural address. “As great as our tax burden is, it has not kept up with public spending,” Reagan announced, his folksy, Midwestern rhythms burnished by the years he’d spent as an actor in Hollywood. “For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.”
His hair pomade-slick, Reagan was the picture of the elder statesman. “I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves,” he went on, in response to a quoted passage from the Massachusetts physician Joseph Warren, a Founding Father. The faintest smile played at Reagan’s lips during an otherwise somber delivery. “Ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.”
That afternoon, the country’s fortieth president made his aims clear: “to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden.” This approach aligned with the philosophy of his Republican supporters; Reagan’s suggestion that “with God’s help we can and will resolve the problems which now confront us” called out to the evangelical Christians who helped put him in office.
The government’s priorities were shifting dramatically from the liberal approach of Reagan’s predecessor, President Jimmy Carter. Judy Blume would later cite this as the day that everything changed.
“When we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy,” Blume told the Guardian in 2014, of the challenges against her books that began in the early 1980s. “My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don’t have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don’t do this, we don’t ban books. But then they did.”
The tide against her turned practically “overnight,” as she explained while she was on tour promoting In the Unlikely Event. And it wasn’t just Blume. In December 1981, almost exactly a year after Reagan ascended to office, the New York Times reported that challenges against books had “shot up” since the late 1970s. Moreover, instead of requesting that access to certain books be restricted, complainants insisted that titles should be removed from public libraries altogether. “The reason would-be censors give most often is that a book is unsuitable for minors because of its vulgarity or its descriptions of sexual behavior,” the Times explained. “But the censors also condemn the depiction of unorthodox family arrangements, sexual explicitness even in a biological context, speculation about Christ, unflattering portraits of American authority, criticisms of business and corporate practices, and radical political ideas.”
Among the books being called out were Blume’s novels—the Times described her provocatively as “a best-selling author of sexually explicit books for children and young adults”—as well as Portnoy’s Complaint, Avery Corman’s 1977 divorce novel Kramer vs. Kramer, Our Bodies Ourselves, and Stuart Little, E. B. White’s adventure starring a natty mouse. The article attributed the rise in book challenges to conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, and the Moral Majority, which Jerry Falwell Sr. had recently founded in 1979. These groups were empowered by Reagan’s election, and they were efficient. Once leaders set their sights on certain titles, they were able to drum up passions among their supporters and encourage them to voice their grievances.
Peter Silsbee recalled being on the receiving end of written complaints aimed at Bradbury about Judy’s work. “We began to get letters from these people… It was Jerry Falwell [spearheading it], who had just sort of come on the scene.” Silsbee said it was obvious that the objectors were all following a script. “We came to understand that a lot of the letters were very much the same. It felt to us like it was a campaign that was all across the United States.” Sending angry letters was just one way that these fired-up folks would operate, Silsbee continued. “They’d go after school librarians, they’d go after teachers, and disrupt school board meetings and PTA meetings.”
They accused certain books of promoting Secular Humanism, a once-obscure philosophy that became a conservative buzzword in the 1980s, much like Critical Race Theory today. Dating back to the nineteenth century, Secular Humanism hinged on the notion that humans are capable of behaving morally without the scaffold of religious or theistic dogma. But in the mouths of the Moral Majority and other right-wing groups, the term evolved to mean blatantly anti-religion and anti-God. “Thanks to Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority I went from being called a ‘Communist’ to being labeled a ‘Secular Humanist,’ ” Blume wrote in a 1993 essay for the New York Law School Review called “Is Puberty a Dirty Word?” According to her new Christian fundamentalist critics, Judy’s books were not only “undermining of parental authority”—as she put it in the same article—but undermining the sovereignty of Jesus Christ as well.
You’d think the decision in Island Trees School District v. Pico would be enough to defang today’s most ban-thirsty elected officials and parents. But the Supreme Court’s ruling on that case didn’t go far enough, even according to the lawyer who argued it. “We didn’t create the law that we would have liked,” Pico’s legal rep Arthur Eisenberg told WNYC in 2022. At the time, the Supremes argued that a political or ideological objection to a title isn’t a good enough reason to evict it from schools. Looking back, Eisenberg said he wished that they’d been able to legally enshrine curatorial power over libraries to the librarians. “Just as academic judgements should be left to the academics… decisions about the content of library collections should be left to the librarians.”
Without that, the decision in Island Trees v. Pico still leaves room for the idea that certain books are too objectively vulgar or offensive or obscene for the eyes of children. Governor Ron DeSantis defends his stance on book removals in precisely this way: “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards,” he says on his official website.
In the 1980s, book challenges weren’t coming from government officials like they are now. But in the fall of 1982, one book was effectively banned by the federal government. It was called Show Me!, and it was a Germany-imported sex ed publication that came out in the US in 1975. It billed itself as “A Picture Book of Sex for Children and Parents” and consisted of black-and-white photographs and captions by an American named Will McBride, along with educational passages by European doctor Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt. Covering it for the New York Times, reviewer Linda Wolfe described paging through Show Me! with a mounting and palpable sense of alarm. “The photographs reveal the world of sex through the eyes of two exquisite noble savages of about 5 years of age,” she writes. “We puzzle with them over their bellybuttons and the fact that he has a penis and she a vagina. She turns bottoms-up so he can see close-up what she’s got, and he shows her how he ‘pees’ and ‘poops.’ ”
Up until this point, Wolfe says, she still believed the book could be an asset to families. Then, it got weirder. “But soon these children are pondering the sexual behavior of their adolescent siblings. The boy has seen—and we see through his eyes—his teenage brother and a barely pubescent girlfriend having intercourse. The girl has watched her older sister rub her clitoris, and we see that, too.”
The prose is tempered but it’s clear that Wolfe is so repulsed by Show Me! that the effect is borderline humorous. “One begins to suspect that the photographer enjoys scaring children,” she writes. “And throughout the book one grand and erroneous impression about sex in our society is conveyed: it is that sex is something which happens in public.”
Wolfe was not alone in her impression of Show Me! Although the title was lauded in Germany, even SIECUS hesitated to recommend it. The September 1975 issue of the SIECUS Report opens with a cover story reiterating its position of sex education as a basic human right. But just pages later, Dr. E. James Lieberman’s review of McBride’s book implies that, human rights notwithstanding, there is still such a thing as bad sex ed. “This book poses a problem for enlightened parents and sex educators because those who oppose it presumably wear the black hat of sexual repression,” Lieberman begins. Yet he goes on to argue that in this case, negative reactions to Show Me!—with its explicit, close-up photos of everything from fellatio to childbirth—are probably justified. “There is no need to hustle children into an appreciation of adult sexuality, any more than we need to introduce caviar or Kantian philosophy at an early age,” he writes. “This delicious-looking book is indigestible, an oxymoronic oddity of rawness overdone: it is blandly erotic, childishly adult, somberly silly, elegantly gross.”
Almost as soon as it was published in the States, Show Me! was challenged and subject to claims of obscenity. But it wasn’t until 1982, when the Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold a New York State law barring child pornography, that St. Martin’s Press, the book’s US publisher, decided to withdraw it. In the New York Times, St. Martin’s then-president Thomas McCormack stated that they were doing so to protect themselves as well as the booksellers who could get in trouble for stocking it. “Until the Supreme Court decision of July, it was not against the law to sell the book,” he explained. “Now, the court has said in so many words that it is.”
Which is to say, the accusation that it was in poor taste wasn’t the death knell for Show Me! However, once the federal government confirmed that it was illegal to show minors engaged in sexual acts on film, in pictures, or on stage, the book—which at that point had sold about 150,000 copies in the US, according to a New York Times story about it—was effectively banned. Today, you can buy a copy of Show Me! from a specialty online bookseller for upwards of $700, but you can’t get it from Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.org or even the New York Public Library. As a culture, we’ve decided that the First Amendment doesn’t protect child pornography, and the vast majority of people agree this is the correct stance. But what counts as pornography isn’t always instantly apparent.
“I distinguish pornography in terms of intent,” Cory Silverberg said. “Pornography is material that is intended to sexually arouse someone. That is the point of it, so that’s why Forever is not pornography, because that’s not why she wrote the book.”
Silverberg’s definition dovetails with the existing legal one, established by the Supreme Court in 1973. Before that, the closest thing America had to a definition amounted to a gut check. In 1964, Justice Potter Stewart delivered his famous but ultimately unhelpful line about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it. Then came Miller v. California. The case started when a restaurant owner in Newport Beach received a number of sexually graphic brochures in the mail. The pamphlets were traced to Marvin Miller, who sent them out to drum up interest in his mail-order porn store.
Miller’s case found its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled against him, determining that the First Amendment did not protect the distribution of obscene material. As part of their decision, the judges created the “Miller Test” for obscenity, which is still used today. In order to qualify as legally obscene, a product has to fit all three of these criteria. One: that the average person would say it “appeals to the prurient interest,” according to contemporary standards. Two: that it depicts or describes sexual or excretory behavior—in other words, crude bodily functions. Three: that it lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
That last bit is pretty subjective, don’t you think?
In 1981, the tenor of conversation around children’s books was getting so heightened that for the first time in her career, Judy got pushback from her own publisher about a sexually inflected passage in one of her drafts. The original version of Tiger Eyes included a short scene where Davey—awakening from an oppressive grief after her father’s murder—masturbated.
The scene took place right after a sequence that made it into the published novel. Davey spends an unpleasant night out with her new friend in Los Alamos, Jane. They meet up with two boys in a parking lot, and Jane and the guys pass around a bottle of vodka. Davey doesn’t drink, so she’s still completely sober when Jane and one of the boys start drunkenly making out. After a little while, Jane throws up on a car, and Davey has the unfortunate job of walking her sloppy friend home. With Jane passed out in her bed, Davey nods off on a nearby bedroll. She dreams of an older guy who she met while out hiking, named Wolf.
In the draft, Davey wakes up and starts touching herself. Her climax unleashes her tears about the night, about Los Alamos—everything. But that’s not how it goes in the finished book. Instead, the section reads like this: “I get Jane undressed down to her shirt and her underpants, pull the covers up around her, then climb into the bedroll her mother has set out for me. I fall asleep quickly and dream about Wolf. About the two of us together in our cave. It’s not the first time I have dreamed about him.”
When Judy arrived at Bradbury to consult with Jackson about her pages, he had the masturbation passage circled. Jackson, her longtime friend and collaborator, put down his pencil and looked her straight in the eye. He told her that from a character perspective, the scene made perfect sense, and as a writer she’d handled it gracefully. But he thought she should take it out.
“We want this book to reach as many readers as possible, don’t we?” Jackson said.
Judy was shocked. After all, this was the same editor who had published Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Deenie, and Forever. Aside from his decision to market the last as a novel for adults, he’d never expressed reservations before about the sexual content in her writing. She tried to explain why the moment belonged in Tiger Eyes.
Jackson listened sympathetically, then argued that times had changed. “If you leave in those lines, the censors will come after this book,” Blume recalls him saying in a 1999 essay published in American Libraries magazine. “Librarians and teachers won’t buy it. Book clubs won’t take it. Everyone is too scared.”
His words hit Judy hard. “I felt my face grow hot, my stomach clench,” Blume wrote. “I willed myself not to give in to the tears of frustration and disappointment I felt coming.”
In his interview in 2001 with School Library Journal, Jackson admitted that yes, he did keep the difficulties of book challenges in mind when he edited his authors. He didn’t mention Blume but described an incident with another writer where he convinced her to change the word “devil” to “imp” in her work in progress. “Why deprive kids in some parts of the country of what is, essentially, a story of a dog who cleverly helps her master,” he said of making the choice to “sidestep the religious issue.” The writer agreed, begrudgingly. “So, is this censorship? One might say it’s making an adjustment to reality,” he went on, while admitting that this specific reality was one he wished he didn’t have to accommodate.
But he was right that by the time Tiger Eyes was on his desk, the political climate had become untenable for books that acknowledged teen sexuality. In January 1981, the New York Times published a long polemic by journalist Marie Winn, called “What Became of Childhood Innocence?” Winn’s piece was expansive, railing against everything from television to X-rated movies to working mothers to Mad magazine to Kentucky Fried Chicken. All of these things, she claimed, contributed to a tasteless, extravagant culture where children were growing up too quickly. “Without a doubt, the upheavals of the 1960s—from divorce and the breakdown of the family to women’s liberation and increased employment—weakened the protective membrane that once sheltered children from precocious experience and knowledge of the adult world,” she wrote.
Winn’s take on the past was suspiciously rosy; she described medieval child labor as a folksy prelapsarian dream. “Children’s integration into adult work in the past becomes understandable when one remembers that the work, in those preindustrial days, often consisted of those very arts and crafts offered today… for children’s amusement: spinning, weaving, pottery, basket making.” She pined for the moment in history that she called “The Age of Innocence… [when] children really believed that all adults were good, that all Presidents were as honest as Abe Lincoln, that the adult world was in every way bigger and better than their own world.”
She name-checked Blume, Norma Klein, and My Darling, My Hamburger author Paul Zindel as writers whose success was caused by the phenomenon of shrinking childhoods. Winn implied that their popularity was not altogether desirable, but that was understandable given the zeitgeist. “Today, parents often forget that, despite the end of the Age of Innocence, some children remain vulnerable longer than others,” she wrote. “In avoiding the past excesses of secrecy and overprotectiveness, adults in our society often abdicate their responsibilities for dealing with children’s special needs.”
The editorial was a call to arms. Winn challenged adults to speak out and save children from a sad state of affairs where mothers were too busy working to provide home-cooked dinners and deferred responsibility for teaching important life lessons to the likes of JudyBlume. And Judy was beginning to understand that this was the way an increasingly vocal contingent was beginning to think of her.
So, she gave in to Jackson. She took the masturbation scene out of Tiger Eyes. “Ultimately, I was not strong enough or brave enough to defy the editor I trusted and respected,” she wrote.
