Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell

my father and how he trusts me,” she says. “I’ve never really lied to him and I don’t think he’s ever lied to me”—and Deenie changes her mind. She remains steadfast in this decision, even when Buddy Brader pulls her into a dark part of the basement and asks her, “Couldn’t you take off your brace for a little while?” Book Deenie remains the good girl and tells him no, that she must wear it all of the time. Saintly Buddy replies, “Oh, well,” and proceeds to make out with Deenie anyway.
    In the end, the brace—now linked to Deenie’s father’s trust—becomes a chastity belt of sorts. This might sound far-fetched were it not for a scene earlier in the book in which Deenie develops a rash due to the metal of her brace rubbing against her bare skin. She’s told by her doctor that she’ll need to wear an undershirt to protect her from further irritation. Deenie takes this as a slap in the face; undershirts, she thinks, are for babies. “I think what I’ll do is wear my bra under it,” she says. “I’m certainly not going to school without a bra.”
    Frustrated and angry, Deenie takes off her brace and climbs into the tub, which has been treated with a powder that should help clear up her rash. She’s bored at first but eventually finds the hot water “relaxing.” “Soon I began to enjoy it,” she says. “I reached down and touched my special place with the washcloth. I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.”
    Once again, Book Deenie and Movie Deenie have more in common than just a name. In Splendor in the Grass, a key scene shows Deenie bathing and arguing with her mother. In defiance, she stands up in the tub, naked and dripping wet, shocking her mother out of the room. The act is both a challenge and a statement—Movie Deenie’s way of telling her mother she’s no longer a little girl but a woman.
    Book Deenie could certainly relate.

    The scope of teen sexuality changed drastically between the time when Deenie was first published (1973) and when I graduated from high school some twenty years later. Yet adolescent fiction hasn’t matured as quickly as its readers. While it’s definitely more common to read accounts of boys flying solo, relatively precious few novels even allude to girls getting their groove on by themselves. (One notable exception, Meg Cabot’s Ready or Not: An All-American Girl Novel, picks up where Blume left off; in it, Samantha’s older sister Lucy not only instructs her about the pleasures to be found in a showerhead but reiterates that it’s normal to have these urges, period.)
    The stigma still attached to female masturbation makes me sad, not just because I am an author of teen fiction, but also because I am a girl. And let’s admit it: girls don’t talk to one another about beating off because they’re made to feel embarrassed about the act itself. Even today, when middle schoolers are experimenting with blow jobs at the back of their school buses, most teen girls would rather die than confess they do the solo deed. After all, masturbation is supposed to be a boy’s game, isn’t it?
    I guess this is why I always remember Deenie as that book about masturbation, even though proportionally the topic takes up maybe 2 percent of the entire novel. Yet just having that little bit of information—that tiny confirmation that I was far from alone—was so important to me. Not just the ten-year-old me, either. The thirty-year-old me, rereading Deenie for the first time in at least fifteen years, is still comforted by the knowledge that yes, it is normal, and yes, other girls do it, and no, I am not bad, dirty, wrong.
    And I definitely will not go insane.
    Lara M. Zeises writes books for young adults. Her novels Bringing Up the Bones, Contents Under Pressure, and Anyone But You all address various aspects of teenage