On the drive home from the doctor’s office, the adult Fenners bicker about which side of the family Deenie inherited her scoliosis from. They’re not at all attuned to their daughter, who herself is emotionally free-falling in the backseat of the car. “I expected Daddy to explain everything on the way home… Instead, he and Ma argued about whose fault it was that I have something wrong with my spine until we pulled into our driveway. It was almost as if they’d forgotten I was there.”
But in the weeks that follow, Frank adjusts to the family’s new normal while Thelma continues to spin. In her eyes, Deenie’s brace clutters up her tidy organization of their family. How can Deenie be the beauty if she’s confined to an ugly piece of medical equipment for the next four years—a period of time she views as critical to Deenie’s burgeoning modeling career? That’s why Thelma treats the brace like a misfortune that’s happening to all of them. “I had to fight to keep from crying,” Deenie says when she first sees it. Meanwhile, Thelma holds nothing back. “Just when I thought I was going to be okay Ma started. ‘Oh my God,’ she cried. ‘What did we ever do to deserve this?’ ” She blames Deenie for slouching, despite the fact that the professionals are clear with the family that idiopathic scoliosis is an inherited disease.
The problem, Blume seems to be telling us, isn’t just that Thelma’s insensitive—she’s immature. The feminine mystique has left her ill-equipped and puerile. She can’t even drive: a symbol of her dependency. Frank has to act as her chauffeur, or she hitches rides with Aunt Rae, her best friend whose kids are grown up and “has nothing better to do” than to cart Thelma around. Aunt Rae—who is not actually related to the Fenners—is almost as invested in Deenie’s modeling as Thelma is. At one point in the book, Deenie comes home and finds Thelma and Aunt Rae doing each other’s hair like schoolgirls.
By the age of thirteen, Deenie is positive about one thing: she wants more. “She spends hours and hours cleaning the place,” Deenie says of Thelma’s role as a homemaker. “One thing I’m sure of is I don’t want to spend my life cleaning some house like Ma.” Deenie confesses that sometimes she’s jealous of Helen’s brain because it means that she’ll grow up to have the kind of demanding job that keeps her too busy for things like washing the floors until you could eat off them, like her mother does. Modeling isn’t a sure thing, nor does it seem like the kind of skill that guarantees lifelong independence, Deenie muses. Toward the end of the novel, she thinks to herself that she might like to become an orthopedist.
The crisis ends up freeing Deenie, loosening her from the grips of a controlling mother. And while Thelma doesn’t quite see it that way, she’s also forced to admit that she’s been living out her own dreams through her girls. Helen and Deenie are hard on her near the close of the book, when it comes out that bookish Helen has been skipping her study dates to go hang out with her secret boyfriend. Helen, it turns out, doesn’t like being labeled, either. “I used to tell myself it didn’t matter if I wasn’t pretty like Deenie because I have a special brain and Deenie’s just ordinary,” Helen sobs. “But that didn’t help, Ma… because it’s not true!”
Thelma doesn’t apologize. She gets defensive. But her defense is revealing of the ways her own regrets have guided her parenting. Her last line in the book serves to let her daughters know exactly why she’s been so meddlesome. “I wanted better for you,” she tells them as Helen and Deenie cry together. “Better than what I had for myself. That’s what I always planned for my girls… is that so wrong?”
“I think of the story as one about parental expectations,” Blume writes in the afterword to the twenty-first-century paperback edition of Deenie. “What happens when a parent pigeonholes their children?” Judy took this question of pigeonholing seriously; Helen and Deenie are birds learning to flee the nest, figuring out who they’ll be when they land. Pigeons even figure into Deenie’s personal journey. The first day she wears the brace to school, the vice principal calls Deenie into her office to tell her that due to her diagnosis, she’s now eligible to ride “the special bus,” which is free. Instantly, Deenie rejects this idea—riding the bus with kids like Gena Courtney would reaffirm that she’s different—and she glances out the window, trying to hide her tears. On the ledge, she sees a pigeon and thinks, “Ma says pigeons are dirty birds with lots of germs and I should stay away from them.” The vice principal gives her a form and tells her to bring it home for her parents to sign.
Deenie conveniently loses the form and two weeks later, the vice principal checks in about it. By then, Deenie’s bad attitude about wearing the brace has lifted. She’s not pleased about it, but she’s willing to withstand it as a temporary burden. “I looked out the window and no pigeons were on the ledge,” Deenie says, nodding to her ability to rise above her mother’s fears and biases.
The pigeons are brief visitors in the manuscript, but Judy was quite proud of them, according to Dick Jackson. Their work together on the book focused on Deenie’s growth away from Thelma, as expressed through her relationship with her two best friends. An early draft of the novel established that Deenie was adopted, which served to distance her from Thelma as Deenie’s biological destiny started to unfurl. But Jackson wasn’t convinced this was the right way to do it. Instead, he and Judy talked it through and decided that Janet and Midge—Deenie’s closest schoolmates—could help to more robustly reflect Deenie’s maturation. Blume then built moments into the novel, including the trio shopping for a nightgown and going to the movies together, that illuminated all the stops on Deenie’s path.
As always, Blume and Jackson were in lockstep when it came to their editorial vision for the project. And interestingly, one aspect of Deenie—by far the book’s most controversial plotline—they barely touched at all.
Chapter Nine Masturbation
“I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”
Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret.
Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word. Deenie has a private ritual, something she does when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t know why, but it makes her feel better. Touching her “special place” helps stave off her worries. Or, as she puts it, “I have this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling.”
Let’s be clear—until Deenie, girls didn’t masturbate in children’s literature. Inventive, now classic characters like Pippi Longstocking and Ramona Quimby were zany and unpredictable, but they certainly never told us where their hands wandered when they were alone. Even now, the mention of self-pleasure in a young adult book is enough to get it yanked from school libraries. Sherman Alexie’s terrific, award-winning 2007 novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian brings up masturbation within the first thirty pages: “If there were a Professional Masturbators League, I’d get drafted number one and make millions of dollars,” the fourteen-year-old narrator Arnold Spirit Jr. jokes.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian has been banned over and over again, across the country, for years. And that’s male masturbation; examples of adolescent female masturbation in books for teenagers are still fewer and far between. Melissa Febos writes about discovering self-pleasure as a pre-teen in 2021’s Girlhood—an essay collection for adults—and even now, her words feel radical. “The first time I slid on my back to the bottom of the tub, propped my heels on the wall aside the faucet and let that hot water pummel me, I understood that to crack my own hull was a glory,” she remembers. “Alone I was both ship and sea, and I felt no shame, only the cascade of pleasure.”
Over the course of Blume’s novel, there are three separate instances where Deenie refers to touching herself. In case there’s any question about what Blume means, she makes it crystal clear in a scene in the middle of the book, when Deenie attends a sex ed class at school. The gym teacher, responding to an anonymous question that Deenie wrote down and dropped in a box on her desk, tells the kids—and the readers—outright.
“Does anyone know the word for stimulating our genitals?” the teacher, named Mrs. Rappoport, asks the class. When a student timidly offers up the answer “masturbation,” Mrs. Rappoport is enthusiastic, encouraging the group to all say it aloud in unison. “Now that you’ve said it,” she goes on, “let me try to explain. First of all, it’s normal and harmless to masturbate.”
Deenie is relieved. After that, she’s happy to touch her special place as a way to de-stress. When she gets a nasty rash from wearing her brace with nothing under it, she takes a bath and tries to make peace with the fact that she’ll have to start wearing an undershirt to school, which she’s been resisting because it seems babyish. “The hot water was very relaxing and soon I began to enjoy it,” Deenie says. “I reached down and touched my special place with the washcloth. I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”
Deenie wasn’t the first of Blume’s books to use the word “masturbation,” but it was the first one to portray it. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t does everything but—Tony Miglione talks about reading dirty novels, spying on his attractive neighbor as she gets changed, having wet dreams, and getting erections, but he doesn’t actually put his hands down his pants. The word comes up in a book, Basic Facts About Sex, that his father gives him after awkwardly bumbling through the sex talk. “There’s a whole section on wet dreams and another on masturbation,” Tony says after leafing through it. “Maybe they do know me after all!”
With Deenie, Blume was pushing the envelope and Jackson allowed it. And why not? It was 1973.
Stevie Wonder had radio listeners second-guessing their “Superstition.” There was “Smoke on the Water”—hair-raising, electric—and Marvin Gaye got people singing along to his smooth and sultry bedroom hit “Let’s Get It On” from behind the steering wheels of their cars. “There’s nothing wrong with me loving you. / Baby, no, no,” Gaye crooned—and you believed him. Nixon was still president but nobody trusted Tricky Dick anymore. The wheels of the Watergate scandal were already turning, poised to roll him straight out of the Oval Office.
Popular reading material was getting more explicit. The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Lovemaking was written by an English physician named Alex Comfort, and it was a how-to manual for being more adventurous in bed. Comfort’s inspiration was The Joy of Cooking, the home cook’s go-to that had made elevated recipes more accessible. With his book, Comfort wanted to show how regular couples could also expand their erotic palates. The guide to everything from oral sex to light bondage even included line drawings of different sexual positions, which Comfort and his second wife, Jane Henderson, who had been his longtime mistress during his first marriage, had posed for. Clearly, there was an appetite for this kind of material—after it published in 1972, The Joy of Sex topped the New York Times bestseller list, and remained on it for much of the early 1970s.
Feminists were also doing their part to empower people with knowledge about their sexuality. In 1969, a group of women in their twenties and thirties, who called themselves the Boston Women’s Health Collective, set out to make teaching moments out of topics that had previously been considered unspeakable. They had met at a series of informal consciousness raising groups on the MIT campus, where attendees had gotten to talking about their frustrations with their male doctors. These physicians, they complained, were condescending and couldn’t be bothered to answer questions about their bodies. Finally, they had a safe space to open up about their concerns: What really happened to their insides during pregnancy? Why were they so miserable each month before getting their periods? And was there a trick to enjoying—like, really enjoying—sex?
The group, which was eventually whittled down to twelve women, made a list of topics and started researching them. They wrote up their findings in a booklet, published by the New England Free Press. The first print run of Our Bodies, Ourselves was 1,000 copies, and it sold out quickly. Another printing followed. After they sold over 200,000 books, major publishers started calling. In 1973, Simon & Schuster published an expanded version of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which covered everything from menstruation to abortion to postpartum depression. The illustrated tome, which included detailed drawings of the female anatomy and encouraged women to examine their vulvas and feel inside their own vaginas, was a phenomenon.
Even the informational books written for children were getting less stuffy. Where Did I Come From?, published in 1973, was the Age of Aquarius update on How Babies Are Made, featuring colorful, cartoon-like illustrations. Unlike the 1968 Time-Life staple, Where Did I Come From? scraps all references to the birds and bees and skips right to the important part: naked humans. The book features pictures of two doughy, average-looking adults in the buff, and walks young readers through their relevant anatomical differences. Living up to its promise “to tell the truth,” it spends five full pages explaining the process of sexual intercourse, making reference to erections (“the man’s penis becomes stiff and hard”), ejaculation, and orgasms.
The latter was especially daring, a break from popular wisdom that health education for kids should gloss over the part where sex feels good. This book, while sticking with the idea that heterosexual intercourse is necessarily procreative, broke new ground by acknowledging that sex isn’t just “special” and romantic—it’s pleasurable. “When the man and woman have been wriggling so hard you think they’re both going to pop, they nearly do just that,” author Peter Mayle explains. “All the rubbing up and down that’s been going on ends in a tremendous, big shiver for both of them,” which the book then goes on to compare to “a really big sneeze.”
Where Did I Come From? is often silly, as when it describes sperm as “romantic” and illustrates the point with a drawing of a googly-eyed, tadpole-like creature draped over a heart, sniffing a rose and decked out in black tie. “There’s some joy and fun in that book,” said Cory Silverberg, author of a series of gender- and family-inclusive sex ed books, including Sex Is a Funny Word. “A lot of the sex ed books feel like textbooks for kids, and Where Did I Come From? didn’t, because it was goofy.”
The playfulness of Where Did I Come From? made it innovative. It also signaled a new approach to sex ed that was primed to infuriate conservatives.
Deenie was published in September 1973, and as with Blume’s previous titles, reviews were mixed. The New York Times praised its “touching authenticity” as well as its candor: “It is also comfortably frank about the preoccupations of young teen-agers with sex, and deals in a tactful and reassuring way with such once undiscussable subjects as masturbation.” Kirkus, however, wasn’t keen on Deenie. Dismissing the novel as “bibliotherapeutic,” the trade magazine slammed Blume for the amount of space she devoted to the details of Deenie’s medical journey. Then, it got worse. “Instead of giving Deenie any personality or independent existence beyond her malady, the author throws in the subtopic of masturbation… which only makes the story’s hygienic slant more pronounced,” Kirkus said.
Judy dealt with bad reviews by scribbling bad words all over them with a red pencil. She believed, really believed, in what she was doing. “I had never heard the word masturbation when I was growing up,” she wrote in Letters to Judy. “Yet at twelve I knew I had a special place and that I could get that good feeling by touching it. I talked about it with some of my friends… I never found anything relating to my early sexuality in books, so there was some comfort in finding out from my friends that I was not alone.”
She held this line throughout her career. “I wrote the truth, what I knew to be the truth,” Blume reiterated in 2015. “I knew that I would have been very satisfied if I could have a book that said it was okay to masturbate.”
Just like in Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, Deenie’s burgeoning sexuality signals a natural drift away from her mother. Like Tony Miglione, she’s becoming more autonomous, scrutinizing her parents and honing her own values. A point of view that first appears in Are You There God? gets sharpened with Deenie, where female sexuality becomes shorthand for female subjectivity. It’s strongly implied in Blume’s later works—and particularly those intended for adults—that they’re one and the same.
At age thirteen, Deenie is more sophisticated than eleven-year-old Margaret. She’s cavalier about periods—at the start of the book, she says she’s gotten hers exactly once, which doesn’t quite make her an expert, but she’s not a total newbie, either. She’s adept at tracking down information. Deenie explains that she sent out for a booklet about menstruation and read it, so she knows it could be a while before her cycle is regular. When she starts to have questions about boys, she casually asks Helen to loan her her “sex book.”
Deenie and her friends are old enough that their giddy schoolgirl crushes are being noticed and even reciprocated, with all the attendant exploration that entails. Over the course of the novel, she goes from sweatily holding hands with her classmate Buddy Brader at the movies to kissing him in the locker room during the seventh-grade mixer. While Janet and Barbara are out having fun on the dance floor, Deenie stiffens as Buddy starts touching her over her shirt. “I know he was trying to feel me,” she says. “I also knew that Buddy wasn’t feeling anything but my brace, which only made everything worse.”
Even though she likes him, her nerves get the better of her at that point and she darts out of the locker room. But the next time she sees Buddy outside of school, at a party in Janet’s basement, things go smoother. After telling him that she can’t take off her brace, Deenie lets herself relax into the moment—mostly. “This time when he kissed me, I concentrated on kissing him back. I hoped I was doing it right,” she says.
But when it comes to masturbation, Deenie is more or less in the dark. She leaves the question about it in her teacher’s dropbox because she wants to know if what she’s been doing is “normal.” After Mrs. Rappoport reads Deenie’s anonymous query out loud, it becomes clear that most of Deenie’s peers are underinformed about it, too. “I wasn’t the one who wrote the question but I’ve heard that boys who touch themselves too much can go blind or get very bad pimples or their bodies can even grow deformed,” one classmate offers. That last possibility sends waves of fear—and embarrassment—through Deenie. “Maybe that’s why my spine started growing crooked!” she thinks, while her face gets hot. “Please, God… don’t let it be true, I prayed.”
Mrs. Rappoport is quick to correct this line of speculation. First, she tackles the suggestion that it’s only boys who explore their own bodies. “It’s very common for girls as well as boys, beginning with adolescence,” she says. “Nobody went crazy from masturbating, but a lot of young people make themselves sick from worrying about it.”
Deenie—who, under different circumstances, might have spent the next four years choking down portions of shame and self-disgust—instantly feels relieved. She’s grateful to have had the class discussion and looks forward to the next one. Unfortunately, plenty of real American kids weren’t quite so lucky.
Judy spoke directly to her readers in her books, and sometimes that meant writing an adult character who represented an ideal: a mouthpiece for how Blume believed things should be. Mrs. Rappoport is the model sex ed teacher, tackling Deenie’s question without awkwardness or judgment. Yet in classrooms all across the country, put-upon teachers were stumbling through their school’s health or “family life”—the de rigueur title for sex ed in the 1970s—curriculums. The contents of these classes varied from place to place. Depending on where an educator worked, he or she might be open and informative or tight-lipped and moralizing. They might also be scared of getting fired for saying the wrong thing.
