His name was Ralph. The penis, that is. The young man that Ralph was attached to was named Michael, not that I or anyone else would remember that decades later. Poor Michael! He seemed nice. Attentive and loving, in a slightly anodyne kind of way. But Ralph? Ralph had a mind of his own. A personality. Ralph was hard to forget.The novel in which Ralph appears, Judy Blume’s Forever …, turns 50 this October. (A TV series loosely adapted from it premiered on Netflix earlier this year, and has been renewed for a second season.) As I’ve written before, I was 12 when I first read the book. I had never dated a boy, much less kissed one—that wouldn’t happen until I was 16—when I came across it, and Ralph.I remember the cover quite clearly: cream-colored, with an illustration of a gold locket, within which was a rendering of a young woman gazing downward as if lost in thought, or sorrow. She had a pert nose, tweezed eyebrows, and long, feathered hair. Very 1970s. “A moving story of the end of innocence,” read the book’s description. Readers were meant to understand that this young woman was the individual whose story was moving, and whose innocence had ended. Inside, we learned that her name is Katherine Danziger. She is a high-school student, and also a virgin.That I “came across” the book sounds misleadingly passive, because in reality, Forever was given to me, just like it was given to—and devoured by—many, many other preteen girls, and not necessarily by our parents. What’s also deceptively passive: the book’s title, particularly that ellipsis, which suggests a pensive ambiguity, maybe even ambivalence. Is this a story about “forever,” or is it not? (Spoiler: It is not.) Not that this matters, because it’s what happens in the book that titillated so many kids: sex, and a fair bit of it.But before the sex comes the (quick) setup: Katherine is a senior who meets Michael, a senior from another school, at a party. She mistakes Michael’s interactions with a different girl as evidence that he’s not interested in her, until he asks her out. They go on a date, then another. They fall in love. Meet each other’s families. Engage in heavy petting. Clothes come off. Excitement is expressed. They proclaim their love for each other. Eventually, about halfway through the book, they have sex.That sex, as is often the case, is initially anticlimactic. Katherine feels a “big thrust, followed by a quick sharp pain.” There is blood—not much, but some. In later scenes, the teens are more successful; Katherine gets so carried away with Michael that she grabs onto him with both hands: “I moved with him, again and again and again—and at last, I came.”For a kid, this sort of passage is mind-blowing. But even into adulthood, very few American women who once read this novel—including the current president of Planned Parenthood—appear to have forgotten it. That seems to be not just because of the sex, but also because of the circumstances in which they first encountered the book. Obtaining, hiding, and reading it—and then sharing it with others—was a rite of passage for many teens who came of age during and after the sexual revolution. Well-worn, dog-eared copies were passed around or hidden in closets, dresser drawers, and backpacks. (Some academics have called this genre “locker lit.”) A New York Times article from 1978 by Joyce Maynard describes how one particular copy wound its way from the hands of a girl named Beth, to those of a girl named Christiane, to those of a girl named Heather, whose mom found it and promptly had a “talk” with her. The reason for the subterfuge was less about the scenes themselves, and more about how they made young women feel. “For teenagers, who are still strangers or newcomers to sex, the bonus physical stimulation of something like Forever,” the critic Lizzie Skurnick wrote in 2018, “can be validating, a way of making pleasure ordinary.”[Read: Judy Blume goes all the way]This, of course, meant that eventually the book attracted controversy. In the United States then, teen sexuality, particularly as experienced and enjoyed by young women, was, if not verboten, unacknowledged. Forever encouraged them to take control—to not be passive recipients of male desire but to be protagonists of their own sexual narratives. To not just learn about sex but perhaps to also be curious about trying it.Now teen girls can get a crash course on sex with a few keystrokes. In 1975, however, there wasn’t much material for an adolescent girl to easily access. Some households had copies of The Joy of Sex. More progressive parents might have passed on the book Our Bodies, Ourselves to their daughters. Nudie magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse may have been circulated illicitly, but those tended to reinforce the idea of women as sex objects, not subjects.That Blume wrote from Katherine’s perspective was, in other words, notable. Sexuality was (and still is) rarely depicted in popular culture from a woman’s vantage point, and seeing everything through Katherine’s eyes put the reader in her position. Most girls my age, I’d wager, had not yet seen male genitalia and would have been hard-pressed to proffer a description. But Blume did so for us, giving Michael’s penis not just a moniker—for the record, I hated the name Ralph—but a personality or, at the very least, a vague description: “ordinary skin.” (Like me, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld remembers Ralph more than she remembers Michael.)The cultural context at the time of the book’s initial publication also matters. In 1975, the birth-control pill had been around for just 15 years. (In the novel, Katherine visits a Planned Parenthood clinic by herself for a pelvic exam and a prescription for the pill.) Because of Roe v. Wade, abortion had recently become legal in all 50 states. Forever also came out two years after Erica Jong’s best-selling Fear of Flying and Nancy Friday’s equally influential My Secret Garden—both books that depicted, with unapologetic realism, the sexual fantasies of American women—and one year before the sex educator Shere Hite released The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality. The latter synthesized thousands of survey responses to paint a picture of women’s experiences of sex and desire that often contradicted male-centered analyses.[Read: Who’s afraid of women’s pleasure?]Blume’s novel was radical in other ways, suggesting that a woman’s sexuality didn’t have to be eternally tethered to one man, subject to shame, or even connected to feelings of love. Indeed, one of the book’s other female characters, Katherine’s best friend, Erica, is of the opinion that sex can be divorced from emotion—that it is a purely “physical thing.” (I’ve always suspected that she is an homage to Jong and her Fear of Flying protagonist’s pursuit of the casual, “zipless fuck.”) Blume’s choice to have a young woman voice such a sentiment feels like a provocation even today, half a century later.Forever wasn’t met with much fanfare—or, at least, didn’t attract immediate controversy—when it was first published. A scan of book reviews from that time suggests that not much was deemed worthy of concern or dispute. The New York Times Book Review included Forever in a “New and Novel” roundup in December 1975, featuring a blurb that summarized the plot (“a convincing date-by-date account of first love”) without any mention of virginity or sex. Kirkus Reviews said the book had “very little heft.” Booklist did gesture at its explicit content, calling it “graphic,” but also found it “lively” and “convincing.”By the late 1970s and early ’80s, that had changed. In 1978, in that Times essay by Maynard, a mother said that she’d rather her daughter read pornography because “at least she’d know that it was wrong.” (Much of Maynard’s essay was focused on adults’ negative impressions of the book.) An amalgam of concerned parents, some librarians, and conservative political and religious groups put the book in their sights, on and off, for the next couple of decades. By 2005, Forever was listed at No. 2 on the American Library Association’s list of “Top 10 Most Challenged Books.” The novel was in the news as recently as 2024, when Utah’s board of education imposed a statewide ban on a number of books, naming Forever among those that it said contained “pornographic or indecent” material. Forever isn’t the only of Blume’s YA books to make sense of adolescence, with its changing bodies and nascent desires. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t broached menstruation and wet dreams, respectively. You could see this trio of books as something of a Judy Blume puberty starter kit—Blume has said that Forever, for one, was meant for 13-to-14-year-olds.It’s interesting to think about the broadsides against this book and others like it, at a time when teenagers and young adults are having less sex than they used to. According to a study that came out in 2021 in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, from 2009 to 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity at all (including masturbation) rose from 29 percent to 44 percent for boys and from 50 percent to 74 percent for girls.Some young folks are also making celibacy a feature rather than a bug, as is the case with young women who deem themselves “boy sober.” Many teens are also more tethered to the free-for-all of social media than vintage YA books, and more keenly aware of the difficulties in navigating issues of consent and power dynamics, which may scare them off from sexual exploration. (Some critics of Forever note that Michael’s eagerness to have sex with Katherine toes the line between expressing enthusiasm and exerting undue pressure.)[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]In any event, Forever, which has now sold more than 4 million copies, wasn’t even all that shocking to some. It was the “prom queen”—the most mainstream—of 1970s novels, Skurnick, the author of the 2009 book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, recently told me: “And I was just much more interested in the wackadoodle stuff.” (Full disclosure: Shelf Discovery was based on a column of Skurnick’s that I published while serving as the editor in chief of the website Jezebel.)There is absolutely nothing wackadoodle about Forever. Except, perhaps, that name again. Ralph. (In the ’70s, to “ralph” was a euphemism for vomiting.) Indeed, both Michael and Katherine are boringly ordinary. I sometimes wonder whether Blume made the latter character into a bit of a cipher, the better for readers to insert themselves into the story. Katherine—unlike, say, Margaret Simon or Sheila Tubman or the utter delight that is Sally J. Freedman—was, according to that Kirkus review, “pretty much a blank.”In this sense, the fact that the initial idea for Forever came from the mind of a teenage girl seems fitting. Blume’s daughter, Randy, was interested in reading a story about two kids who, as she reportedly put it, “do it,” and nothing bad—no pregnancy, no slut-shaming—happens as a result. (Blume, in turn, once said she wanted to write a “realistic love story with nice kids.” )I don’t know who the first owner of my copy of Forever was, but I know where its journey ended: with me. (Apologies to the young woman who was next on the distribution list.) It sits on a shelf in my home office among a bunch of young-adult books by Blume and other writers of her era, including Lois Duncan and Paula Danziger. I’m not sure that I would give it to a preteen today if I had the opportunity, not because it’s too racy, but because in this digital, sex-soaked era, I wonder whether it would feel besides the point. At the same time, because it depicts sex as something that can unfold intimately and intentionally—it takes a while for Blume to develop her story’s arc—I wonder whether the book might be less intimidating for adolescents who feel overwhelmed by what they’re seeing on their computer screens.More likely, I’d direct a young person to the Netflix TV series adapted from it, which updates Blume’s book and sets it in a new era (2018), in a new place (Los Angeles), and with new characters (Keisha and Justin, who also happen to be Black). The show’s 55-year-old, Gen X creator, Mara Brock Akil—who remembers her close reading of the book fondly—has thoughtfully translated Blume’s story for the modern age, adding contemporary nods to the complexities of race, class, technology, and consent. This new rendition of Forever isn’t an expression of nostalgia for a time when conversations about teen sexuality happened in whispers around a paperback book, but an acknowledgment of an era in which depictions of sex—realistic or unrealistic—are everywhere. One thing that remains the same, however: a penis named Ralph, ordinary skin and all.