How author Judy Blume transformed teenagers’ lives - by demystifying sex

Mention Ralph to most women of my generation and they will instantly remember when they first made his acquaintance. For me, it happened in 1987 at the back of the school bus that took me from my tiny rural village to my secondary school in Sussex.

Someone must have got hold of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel Forever…, perhaps from an older sister (it certainly wasn’t a GCSE text), and several of us would furtively pass it around, guiltily rereading the page in which high school teen Michael teaches his virgin girlfriend Katherine how to touch his penis – nicknamed Ralph – as quickly as we could before handing it on.

That the route to school passed through a wooded area so densely packed that large parts of the road were in perpetual shadow added to our sense of the illicit nature of what we were doing. We were 13, and before we read Forever… most of us had only the haziest idea of what sex actually was.

I’d wager that Forever…, in which two high school teens fall for each other, fumble around, and fail to have sex because Katherine has her period before eventually managing it on the living room floor, changed the life of every teenage girl who read it.

My reading material up to that point had consisted of Elinor M Brent-Dyer’s 1930s-set Chalet School books and the US escapist fiction franchise Sweet Valley High, with the odd detour into Louisa May Alcott.

From the Chalet School books, about a girls’ school initially located next to an Austrian sanatorium, I learned a lot about tuberculosis; from Sweet Valley High, about the high school scrapes of the impossibly perfect Wakefield twins. I learned how desirable it was if you were female to have a size six waist and wide-set blue-green eyes. From Louisa May Alcott, I learned how important it is to feed your pets.

Books on display at a Q&A and reception with Judy Blume celebrating Prime Video's 'Judy Blume Forever' at Annabelle's Book Club LA on April 17, 2023 in Studio City, California. Photo / Getty Images

Naturally, sex and its attendant paraphernalia of periods, birth control pills, condoms and premature ejaculation, not to mention the whole scary glory of it, never came up in any of them – although the Wakefield twins had plenty of cute little crushes.

Yet, ask most women of my age what they remember about Forever… and it won’t be Katherine attempting to have sex (or even the fact that Katherine finds the first time disappointing – crucially, the book is told from her point of view). Rather, it’s more likely to be the book’s careful depiction of two teens navigating the high-stakes emotional landscape of the bedroom.

The book remains a game-changer not just because it busted the taboo about sex in teenage literature (there had been sex in teenage novels before, but it was Blume who took it mainstream), but because it depicts sex as a perfectly normal teenage rite of passage that’s as much about trust and communication as it is about physical intercourse.

Furthermore, its most radical aspect is that Katherine realises that love might not be forever and, at the end of the book, she coolly leaves Michael for someone else. Before I read it, sex had taken the shape of a strange, secretive, shameful shadow which I knew existed but barely understood; what’s more, I intuited it to be something that gave boys all the power.

Judy Blume. Photo / Dimitrios Kambouris / WireImage

Thanks to those clandestine reading sessions on the school bus, I realised it was none of these things, but something teenagers could do, even should do, and that within its mysterious transactional dynamic, girls could and should be equal partners.

Of course, conservative America reacted with horror. Forever… has famously been a near-permanent member of the list of books banned in US schools ever since it was published because of its frank depiction of sex and birth control, and was recently one of the titles removed from high school shelves in Florida.

Stories about safe, consensual, loving sex between teenagers have no place, it seems, in Ron de Santis’ terrifying new America, and Blume remains a contentious figure (though not as contentious as JK Rowling – Blume was recently dragged into the debate on the Harry Potter author).

Forever... was, however, never banned in the UK. Indeed, such was its influence – and those of Blume’s other evergreen novels, including her 1970 classic Are You There God? Its Me, Margaret, about an anxious adolescent girl who gave girls the world over the immortal refrain “I must, I must increase my bust” – that Blume rapidly revolutionised young adult literature in Britain.

You can trace a line to Patrick Ness and his honest accounts of gay teenage life in novels such as Release. There are also the novels of Melvin Burgess, including Junk (1996), which confronted drug addiction, and Doing It (2003), about underage sex.

Thanks to Blume, YA fiction is now full of unflinching stories about protagonists who are abused, depressed or who simply feel different.

And therein lies the irony. Blume is undergoing a revival in popularity – a documentary examining her influence featuring talking heads from Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald was a recent hit at Sundance; a film adaptation of Are You There God?..., starring Kathy Bates, is out next month. Yet, rather than revelling in nostalgia for Blume’s seminal novels, we should perhaps be encouraging modern teenagers to read them all over again.

Blume has unwittingly ushered in literature for young adults that tends to depict adolescence as terrifying and traumatic, peopled by teenagers with mental health issues or who have suffered immense traumas and who are crippled with agonies about personal identity.

Yet novels such as Forever… and Are You There God?..., which reassure readers that puberty and adolescence are not only perfectly easily navigable, but an essential part of growing up, are in alarmingly short supply.

What’s more, the internet means that an alarming number of today’s teenagers get most of their information about sex from pornography. Today, they swap their favourite screenshots on the bus to school, rather than reading about a sweetly inept, very real sexual encounter on the living room floor as I did.