Once upon a time, the teenage girls in Judy Blume's stories were "excited to grow up," writes Kat Rosenfield on The Free Press. Starting in the 1970's, girls learned about menstruation, masturbation, dating and sex from Blume's wildly popular tween books.
"Today’s youth may need Blume even more desperately than my cohort did," she writes. "If the path to womanhood was once too taboo to talk about, today’s cultural landscape is flooded with narratives that make the entire enterprise seem like an unmitigated horror."
Rosenfield is reading The Genius of Judy, a new book by Rachelle Bergstein. Blume “taught young readers that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us,” writes Bergstein. And she offered a "road map" through adolescence to maturity.
I'm a little too old for Blume. There was very little young-adult lit in my day, unless you count Little Women. (For sex, we had chapter two of The Group.)
Blume's books feature resilient girls who make choices about their lives, writes Rosenfield. They see puberty as an "exciting sign of maturity."
"Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret at once demystifies the bodily changes associated with the onset of puberty, and approaches the idea of becoming a woman with a sense of wonder," she writes. "Her 1981 novel Tiger Eyes tackles loss, grief, and family upheaval — all of which shape its main character’s identity, but do not shatter her."
Predictably, contemporary critics have derided Blume’s stories for their heteronormativity—but this is just another way of saying that they depict heterosexuality as the norm, which. . . well, isn’t it? . . . In the world of Judy Blume, being a woman is pretty cool, actually.
Blume wrote Forever in 1975 in response to a request from her daughter for a book about teenagers who have sex and don't die.
Gen Z readers see the boyfriend as a predator, Bergstein writes. He's eager for sex. She's uncertain. When she eventually says "yes," they think it's not really her decision.
"Blume rejects the progressive infantilization of women just as surely as she rejected the slut-shaming from the conservative set," writes Rosenfield. "Her stories stand in direct opposition to a world in which the path to womanhood is depicted as a minefield, a misery, a time of alienation from your changing body coupled with the horror of being desired by predatory men."
I vividly remember the Sweet Valley High books, because my daughter read them all. Francine Pascal, who created Sweet Valley, died recently at the age of 92. Jessica Wakefield is blonde, beautiful and perfect. Her identical twin sister is blonde, beautiful and imperfect.
Sally Franson, also a fan, learned about sex from Sweet Valley, she writes. Playing With Fire (Sweet Valley No. 3) is a PG-13 version of Lady Chatterly's Lover. Porsche-driving Bruce Patman unties the strings of Jessica's red bikini while they're swimming in the lake. “He responded by turning his face to hers and kissing her hard, his arms crushing her against him, his mouth demanding what his body wanted to take.”
Elizabeth interrupts before they go "all the way," as we used to say. Nobody dies.
"Until I encountered Jessica Wakefield, I had no idea that a girl could not only have such desires but also act them out to their natural conclusion (sex, mayhem)," writes Franson.
In the 21st century, the average girls has been ahead academically and maturity-wise of the boys since 7th grade. And since students are grouped more by age than ever, that means that the girls begin to see a large segment of boys as losers and inferiors. See Richard Reeves on this. In the age of Blume, if a girl has a boyfriend, he was older but at the same maturity level.
Blume and Pascal probably wanted their characters to have green hair, nose rings, and tattoos, but figured no one wanted to read about such people and thus gave in to late-stage capitalism.
(sarcasm now /OFF)