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

sexuality. Inspired by authors like Judy Blume, Lara strives to tackle taboo subjects in an honest, straightforward manner. She hopes her stories, like Blume’s, help readers feel less alone in the world. You can find Lara at www.zeisgeist.com.

Do Adults Really Do That?
Does Judy Blume Really Do That?
    Laura Caldwell
    Catholic schools are not exactly the model for frank discussion about sex. At the Catholic school I attended in the far suburbs of Chicago, sex was explained in one sentence by my fourth-grade social studies teacher: “When a man and woman fall in love, the man puts his penis inside the woman.”
    Upon hearing this, I glanced around at my classmates. Blank stares. No one seemed impressed, freaked, or intrigued. And I guess I wasn’t, either. I don’t get it, I thought. But no explanation was forthcoming, and the fact was I didn’t get a lot of things. I didn’t get why the state of New York had a city in it with the same name. I didn’t get what it meant that my father was an attorney, although I knew I sounded marginally cool saying that.
    One mysterious morning that same year, the girls in my class were suddenly taken and shuttled into the basement without explanation. I’d recently read a book about the Holocaust, and I remember having the irrational fear that we were being led to the gas chambers. The darkened cafeteria where they herded us didn’t help matters, nor did the way we were silently seated in rows. But then a projector whirred and a movie sprung to life against the cement block wall.
    The film was roughly fifteen minutes long, and it explained menstruation in such a complicated, scientifically sophisticated way, I’m sure it’s the same film med students see during their OB Gyn training. Again, there was no discussion at the end of the film. Again, I thought, I don’t get it. A quick, mumbled conversation on the playground later revealed that none of my friends understood much, either.
    So the girls at my school did exactly what girls around the country were doing in the 1970s—we turned to Judy Blume books for the real scoop. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret taught us about training bras and puberty. Deenie informed us about masturbation. Forever educated us about losing your virginity, and if you believed the book, instantaneous orgasm. We felt informed after reading the books. We felt wiser, older. We understood the world.
    But then the book Wifey was released when I was in seventh grade. Unlike the other Judy Blume books, this one wasn’t targeted for children or teens. It was, as my mother told me, “Absolutely, 100 percent, for adults only.” I had a high-level reading capacity and I’d been reading, “adult” novels since I was in first grade, but I was also the type of kid who followed orders. So I shrugged, said, “Okay,” and forgot about it.
    Until one afternoon in Ms. Hutchinson’s history class, the book was surreptitiously slipped to me like a baggie of cocaine. It was Ms. Hutchinson, by the way, not Miss or Mrs., a distinction that wasn’t lost on me. In retrospect, Ms. Hutchinson was a staunch feminist. This only became important later, when I stopped to wonder why a group of girls were allowed to pass around and read Wifey during class. Surely she’d seen us. We held the book under our desks. We thought we were reading it on the sly, but I can’t imagine we were that successful. So maybe she knew clearly what was going on; maybe she thought, They’ll learn soon enough anyway.
    And did we learn—about body parts and bodily fluids, about sexual positions and sexual deviancies. Wifey tells the story of Sandy Pressman, a deeply dissatisfied housewife in Plainfield, New Jersey. Sandy’s husband, Norman, isn’t interested in her talks about why she’s unhappy, nor is he even remotely interested in changing their sex life. He absolutely requires the