How Judy Blume’s Deenie Helped Destigmatize Masturbation

“I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”
*

Article continues after advertisement

Remove Ads

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 Judy Blume’s 1973 novel 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.”

__________________________________

From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us by Rachelle Bergstein. Copyright © 2024 by Rachelle Bergstein. Published by Atria/One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.