The day my menstrual cycle started, my mother knocked on the bathroom door and presented me with a pad.
“Congratulations,” she said—and then, because I was still standing there with my hand out: “What’s the matter?”
"Where’s the belt?" I asked.
The year was 1994, I was twelve years old, and sanitary napkins—the old-school kind, which clipped to an elastic belt around the wearer’s waist—had been out of style since well before I was born, replaced by adhesive pads like the one I was holding in my hand. These pads were the only period product I’d ever actually seen, both in the drugstore and advertised on TV. But when it came to menstruation, there was just one source of information I trusted—more than the television, even more than my mother: Judy Blume. And my 1970s paperback edition of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret had taught me two important things: first, that getting your period was an exciting rite of passage. And second, that when it happened, there was some kind of belt involved.
“They don’t make the belts anymore,” my mom said. “The belts were awful.”
I did not entirely believe her, because Judy said otherwise.
The Genius of Judy, a new book by Rachelle Bergstein, suggests that I was not alone in believing that Judy Blume was the ultimate source of knowledge on all things teenage girl. “Her characters and stories were more than just entertainment,” Bergstein writes. “They were a road map.”
Blume’s stories offered a powerful counterpoint to a culture that sought to limit women’s choices by surrounding their bodies and sexuality with shame and stigma—a culture that treated the lives of teenage girls as frivolous and insignificant. She spoke frankly and authentically not only of girls’ struggles but also, crucially, of their survival. She offered a glimpse of how beautiful life could be on the other side.
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. 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. Forever (1975) dares to tell a story about two teenagers who fall in love and have sex—responsibly, and without dire consequences.
Blume “taught young readers,” writes Bergstein, “that we were allowed to expect more from our lives than the women who came before us.”
I was struck, reading Bergstein’s book, that today’s youth may need Blume even more desperately than my cohort did. 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.
Puberty, rather than the exciting sign of maturity experienced by Margaret and her friends, has become a battleground for a gender ideology whose first response to a pubescent girl’s anxiety about her changing body is to suggest that perhaps she’s not really a girl. Meanwhile, the one-two punch of #MeToo followed by the fall of Roe v. Wade has fueled a consensus that to be a woman is to exist in a nightmarish state of perpetual physical vulnerability—if not to the torments of pregnancy and childbirth, then to the predations of men, who are of course written off en masse as “trash” by the pop-feminist commentariat. Dating and sex, in particular, are positioned as a minefield of traumas best avoided in favor of celibacy, which has been rebranded by Zoomers as a trendy new practice known as going “boy sober.”
The result is an entire generation of girls who are not just terrified of becoming women, but actively distressed by narratives that depict the process in a realistic way. One of the more interesting observations from The Genius of Judy is that Gen Z seems to have particular trouble with Blume’s Forever, in which the protagonist, Katherine, is wrestling with the question of when and whether to have sex, while her boyfriend Michael, who is not a virgin, is extremely and vocally in favor. Bergstein describes watching a TikTok in which the young female poster rants that “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in.”
Bergstein sees this as a sign Forever hasn’t aged well. To me, it is a sign of how poorly today’s teenagers have been served by contemporary sexual discourse, and how badly they need Blume’s countervailing narrative. Forever articulates an important set of truths: that every girl approaches sexual readiness on her own timeline, that the desires of two individual people are rarely in perfect alignment, and that many, if not most couples have to negotiate that misalignment in the normal course of a relationship. In Forever, as in the real world, a girl can be at once desirous of sex but not yet ready for it—until, one day, she decides she is.
Like all Blume’s teenage characters, Katherine approaches her coming-of-age with an adventurous spirit. The depiction of her sexual awakening, in which she is not only fully autonomous but also thoroughly enjoying herself, was groundbreaking in its own time for challenging the perception that sex for teenage girls was shameful—and made Forever a magnet for controversy and cancellation by scandalized conservatives. It’s ironic to see it now being canceled by progressives, who have become so relentlessly fixated on whether sex is consensual, they have evidently forgotten it’s also supposed to be fun, even thrilling. To a generation marinated in therapy culture and victimhood narratives, a guy like Michael—one who takes no for an answer, but also continues to ask the question—is coercive and toxic, which must mean that Katherine’s eventual choice to have sex isn’t truly her own.
Current young adult literature boasts a bizarre and tormented relationship with sex. The healthy sexuality of Forever was followed, in the early 2000s, by Twilight—in which the protagonist cannot consummate her relationship because her vampire boyfriend, crazed by lust, could literally kill her. (The romance was heavily influenced by evangelical purity culture.) More recently, writers and readers alike have begun to treat YA novels as vehicles for sexual politics first and entertainment second, with books seemingly tailored for an audience who is very, very horny, but also very, very woke. On forums where readers gather, it’s not unusual to see storytelling assessed according to how many identitarian boxes it checks: “A queer paranormal fantasy with nonbinary, trans, and mlm characters,” “a witchy book full of romance, horror, humor, and BIPOC representation.”
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? This may be one of the stranger side effects of our cultural Great Awokening: stories about the type of relationships that teenage girls are most likely to actually desire are, if not subversive, then at once politically incorrect and profoundly uncool.
The girls in Blume’s books are not just interested in sex, but interested in boys, who are in turn depicted as desirable and interesting and worthy of attention—rather than trash. Blume insists on the humanity of her characters. In Forever. . . , Michael isn’t the world’s greatest boyfriend, and when Katherine ends their relationship, he makes it ugly. But this isn’t because he’s toxically masculine; it’s because he just had his heart broken.
The magic of Blume’s work is that she not only gives her characters the freedom to be flawed without being irredeemable but takes for granted their resilience when it comes to navigating disappointment, social pressure, heartbreak. We know that Michael will be okay eventually—as will Katherine, who has the maturity to give him a little grace. In somewhat tediously painting Blume as a warrior against the political right, Bergstein misses a crucial point: Blume rejects the progressive infantilization of women just as surely as she rejected the slut-shaming from the conservative set. 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.
In the world of Judy Blume, being a woman is pretty cool, actually. Getting your period is something to look forward to. Sex is not without risk, but it’s also a lot of fun—and falling in love, even more so. It’s fine and normal to desire men, and also, men are people with feelings. Regret is survivable, and even valuable, in helping you to make better choices next time.
This is the actual genius of Judy. In a culture defined by the pursuit of perpetual adolescence, the girls in Blume’s stories are nothing less than revolutionary: they are excited to grow up.
Kat Rosenfield is a columnist at The Free Press. Read her piece, “No, Kamala Harris Is Not ‘Brat’ ” and follow her on X @katrosenfield.
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