Years ago a friend of mine working as a teacher in a large, mixed comprehensive drew the short straw and had to take one of the pubescent year groups for their big sex talk.
My teacher friend got the girls, and duly stood before them rolling out the reproductive basics and issues like getting pregnant and ruining your life (though again, they don’t call it that these days) and then inviting questions from the floor. She took a few, then a few more about the strange world of sex. Then she narrowed her eyes at her audience, leaned forward and said “You…you do realise you’re supposed to enjoy it, don’t you?”
There was a ripple round the room as this new idea, this novelty, this heresy was absorbed. And then they all started talking, these 14-15 year olds, about what a sex life with that in mind might look like.
This was just before the internet and social media had truly infested everything. I can only imagine, now that we have had generations steeped in the earliest possible access to the worst possible porn, incel culture and influencers, that if you took the same girls’ class now you would find the same idea received with even more astonishment. As for what would happen in the boys’ class – I dread to think.
A new Netflix teen drama adaption reminded me that we did once have a chance. We had the book Forever by Judy Blume. Published in 1975 in the US – to an immediately barrage of calls for censorship – it took a bit of time to make it over here but I can assure you that by 1988 it had reached WHSmith and from there in samizdat form to every classroom in the land. Everyone read it. It was Harry Potter with genitals.
It was also wonderful. And it remains so now. I re-read it recently for a memoir of childhood books that I was writing and was able to appreciate (consciously) for the first time the extraordinary feat Blume pulled off.
First of all, she makes it a love story with sex woven in, not as the great single, central point the story has to build up to and shape itself round. She makes Katherine and Michael absolute equals, in bed and out of it. She lets them both be excited, be doubtful, be vulnerable, be young but just credibly cautious enough to discharge her responsibilities towards her own young, impressionable readers by whom the characters would inevitably be taken as exemplars.
The pair have conversation and intimacy – built up over many dates – as well as raging hormones. Blume gives us joy slightly tempered by sense and heartbreak that is shown to be survivable without ever condescending to or patronising her readers.
Blume wrote Forever in response to her teenage daughter Randy’s lament that she was tired of books where any young person having sex therein had to die by the last page. So it was written as one of the first books for that audience to have honest and positives messages about sex – particularly so for girls – and not present it as something filthy to be feared.
Reading it now, however, I wonder if it doesn’t serve another purpose these days. For better or worse (I think largely the former, but catch me on a bad, more crone-ish day and you could well persuade me otherwise) we have moved away from the idea that losing your virginity is a huge deal (ideally done in the marital bed) and that sex is by definition dirty and shameful. Forever, in that aspect, is now part of the herd.
What has become rare instead is the depiction of Katherine and Michael’s true intimacy. Their friendship as well as romance. Their tentative, incremental but still wholly enthusiastic approach to discovering each others’ bodies and their likes and dislikes. The time and the care they take with each other. The worries they share instead of siloing themselves or pretending everything’s fine. And the unspoken shared assumption that Katherine’s happiness and pleasure matters just as much as Michael’s. Just a given, never harped on.
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If this is now lacking in our books, it is perhaps for the worst reason of all – that is so lacking in the world outside. Does a non-porn-addled boy like Michael still exist? Can he? And if not, are we at all surprised to find schools full of teenage girls who have no idea that sex should be pleasurable for them too and – by extrapolation – probably not much idea that any relationship with a boy should be about improving your life in some way, not just his. You are supposed to enjoy it all.
In short, then, in the 50 years since Forever was published we have vanquished its then foe: the stigma around sex for young people. But that has come to seem like the easy part. And the pendulum, under the irresistible force of the internet, has swung far beyond the envisaged neutrality and tolerance of sex to make it seem like something young people should be doing and pushing the boundaries of all the time.
Intimacy, now, is the rarity. This is the thing we should be seeking to promote amongst our young people. These are the pages we should mark up in secret copies of Forever and leave them in playgrounds for the early adopters to find.
Otherwise we’re soon going to have a generation of teenagers – if we’re not there already – who see each other as an assemblage of orifices to be filled instead of people you can like and love (and still get to know an orifice or two that your favourite owns).
Ralphs may even find their experience improved overall when enlivened and enriched by emotions. And if you don’t get this reference, you must be young and very confused by this whole column. I apologise. But go and read the book. It may just change your life forever.
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