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.”
