Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume Read Free

up. And these girls had read it only because they had been encouraged by their moms, for whom it had been an unforgettable rite of passage.
    Yes, what my mom had once forbidden was now a source of mother/daughter bonding. When I shared this irony with my audience, they were dumbfounded. “What was so scandalous?” asked a particularly blunt sophomore. “Katherine didn’t even give him a blow job.” They were even more surprised when I told them that Forever remains one of the most banned books by parents and educators. Of course, these conflicting attitudes regarding teen sexuality are reinforced in the media, which depicts our nation’s youth as being equally torn between public purity pledges and private rainbow parties.
    I’m on the more liberal side of the ideological divide, so I picked up Forever that day in the library thinking it would be nothing more than a nostalgic hoot. A quaint throwback to the era of fondue parties, “queers,” and VD. And yes, as I read it for the first time in its entirety, I chuckled at the seventies-style Public Service Announcements I had originally skipped over in favor of more salacious material. Like when Katherine’s grandmother—her grandmother!—sent pamphlets from Planned Parenthood and encouraged her to go on the pill. Or when her mother wanted to have a heart-to-heart talk about a newspaper survey on the subject of sexual liberation. And when Katherine’s acquaintance, Sybil—the nympho genius from the infamous first sentence—got pregnant because she made the most heinous error of all: sex without love.
    And yet despite the infrequent lapses into corniness, Judy Blume’s perspectives on teen sex were indeed more progressive than I had expected. Here was a seventeen-year-old female narrator who knew her desires were natural and didn’t deny them to herself or her boyfriend. In an era when even pro-sex advocates focus more on Girls Gone Wild -style provocation than actual pleasure, Katherine’s candor and unapologetic lust struck me as revolutionary. Specifically, here’s what I had missed about Forever:
    1. Katherine described losing her virginity as a “letdown.”
    2. Katherine “came.” Without foreplay, from intercourse alone. Multiple times.
    3. Katherine checked out Ralph-the-Penis not because Michael pressured her to but because she wanted to.
    Now, all these years later, I realized getting up close and personal with the contents of my first boyfriend’s tightie-whities had been totally out of the question. I know this sounds bizarre—and it is—but in three years of dating, I never so much as sneaked a peek, let alone studied B.’s penis with scientific interest. And yes, this means that I never performed that certain sexual act that the oh-so-jaded millennial sophomore took for granted. Never. Not before, during, or even after we did it. Which we did, after more than two years of dating, a few weeks after both of our seventeenth birthdays, on an overnight retreat for peer leaders at a religious campground. (Sorry, Mom and Dad.) While the actual act turned out to be less than what I’d hoped for, at least my devirginization at a faith-based gathering was steeped in irony.
    I can identify with Katherine’s anticlimactic deflowering. And yet while she was honest about how it was more of a relief to have it over and done with than anything else, I lied to myself (and one or two confidantes) by turning my first time into an exquisite body-and-soul transforming experience that it never was and wouldn’t be until years later with the man I married.
    It wasn’t because I was inhibited by the classic virgin/whore dilemma or the threat of a bad reputation. And despite my filmstrip indoctrination, I wasn’t worried about pregnancy (or STDs for that matter) because I was vigilant about protection. Nor was I still haunted by that first hilarious glimpse at Mr.