When Everything was Kinky:
Judy Blume

by Susannah Felts

I am reading Delta of Venus: Erotica by Anais Nin. I bought my copy from a used bookstore for $1.50. Not bad for 250+ pages of a woman's clever and explicit erotic imagination. There aren't even any pages stuck together.

I was ten years old when I had my first experience with with used books. I traded in classics I'd refused to read for three paperbacks: one about a prostitute/addict who's trying to keep her daughter, another about a bunch of 70s kids who sit in a room getting high and discussing their fucked-up lives, and Forever, by Judy Blume, one of the few Blume titles I hadn't already devoured. One that I knew I wasn't supposed to devour at ten. The only one of those first three used books which I read and dutifully marked the sexy parts of for my friends.

Forever doesn't exactly qualify as soft porn. All it is, in fact, is the tepid and rather predictable story of a girl in her first serious relationship with a boy. Girl loses virginity to boy, boy and girl have sex happily for a few months, boy and girl break up, story ends with girl meeting cute new boy at summer camp. But no overly curious ten-year-old is expecting the sensual trysts of Anais Nin. For me, the simple, modest sex scenes were new terrain in the literary world. Better yet, it was forbidden material. I managed to keep my erotic primer a secret until an unfortunate Friday in fifth grade when I brought it to school to show my girlfriends and foolishly left it out on top of my notebook. Nosy, eccentric Mr. Edwards picked it up despite my belligerent protests. He turned to the first page, which would have been okay if the first sentence wasn't, "Sybil Davison has a genius IQ and has been laid by at least six different guys." Mr. Edwards confiscated my book and gave it to my mother. This inevitably led to an embarrassing confrontation, but I got the book back anyway.

I picked up some indispensable sex tips from Forever. For instance, putting aftershave on one's balls may cause painful burning. The concept of the condom was therein first brought to my attention, although it was some years later before I had any idea what one looked like. My pre-pubescent interest was satisfied by the boy telling the girl that his penis' name was Ralph (even if I thought it was a pretty stupid name). Years later, my friends and I would delight in assigning names to our eighth grade male cohorts: Thuderbolt, Spike, Biff. In high school, my boyfriend and I upheld the tradition. I don't even recall his member's name now, but I'll never forget Ralph. In fact, because it was never referred to as anything but Ralph, the guy's penis seemed to develop an identity, however limited, of its own. Perhaps Blume anticipated the book being discovered by avid young readers and thus chose to sublimate the sexual act with corny nomenclature.

My enlightenment via Blume fiction didn't begin with Forever, nor did it end there (I copped the far bawdier Wifey from a friend's mother's bookshelf in eighth grade.) In the quintessential pubescent girl testimonial, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, I read about Gro-Bras and "Teenage Softies" maxipads and began periodically exploring my mother's own stash. After some confusion, I deduced that Margaret must have grown up in a less sophisticated age, seeing as how she had to wear a special belt with her pad. Belts? Even at age eight, I felt grateful for the advent of adhesive strips.

Just as Forever indoctrinated me to expect pain my first time, Margaret was an instrument of societal conditioning. What impressionable little girl can forget Margaret and the other "Pre- Teen Sensations" carefully monitoring their nascent breasts and chanting "We Must, We Must, We Must Increase Our Busts!" while performing corresponding stretches? For the Four PTS's, the arrival of their periods is, of course, paramount - the ultimate triumph of maturity. In this case, the subsequent effect on me was the opposite, perhaps because I was too young. By the time it was my time, I stoically viewed menstruation as an inevitable pain in the ass.

Then there was Blume's quintessential pubescent boy book, Then Again, Maybe I Won't. Since it dealt with the mysterious subject of male development, this book captivated - and confused - me a bit more than Margaret had. One the way home from a family vacation, I asked my parents (against my best understanding) what wet dreams were. They didn't reinforce my vague understanding, needless to say.

But perhaps that was the pleasure of reading these books: my blurry comprehension only made the material that much more provocative. I delighted in discovering matters of sex and arousal prematurely, even if I didn't understand completely. My imagination worked overtime, putting together the pieces, analyzing context, and expanding upon the stuff I did understand. It was less an exercise in sexuality that in fervent curiosity . . . something which I've never outgrown. Reading Delta of Venus today, I almost long for the cloudy comprehension of childhood, when all was unknown and therefore everything was kinky. But then again, Blume vs. Nin . . . there's no comparison.

Go to: Reader Response Romance by Carrie McLaren