I can neither remember how old I was the first time I read “Forever” nor how many times I’ve reread it since. What I can recall about reading Judy Blume’s seminal 1975 novel for the first time is that — even as a millennial girl growing up in the early aughts — it made me feel less alone with my questions and desires.
In the novel, Katherine details falling in love for the first time with her boyfriend, Michael. Katherine spares no detail. She describes everything from the first kiss to the awkward unclipping of her bra to the realities of touching a penis to the shock of finally (finally!) having an orgasm. As a teen, these were the realities that I wanted to understand. They were the details that I wished my best friends could share, but we were all equally inexperienced.
Instead, Katherine became our guide as we dipped our toes into liking and talking and hooking up. Like generations of girls before us, we passed “Forever” back and forth at our lockers and hid it from our parents and laughed about Michael naming his penis “Ralph.”
Growing up in a conservative southern suburb where my school’s limited sex education was abstinence-only and groups of girls frequently asked each other if they planned to wait until marriage, Blume’s book was our window into a more nuanced and realistic view of teen relationships. It was sex positive before people even used that phrase.
Publishing less than a decade after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Blume was a trailblazer. Her books forged the way for girls like me to grow up in their bodies — bodies that loved and cried and bled and masturbated and orgasmed — without shame. For decades, they have maintained this relevancy, selling more than 90 million copies and becoming beloved stories that have collectively shaped our cultural understanding of girlhood.
This universal aspect of Blume’s storytelling is what appealed to television mogul Mara Brock Akil when she was 12 and read “Forever” for the first time.
“Even though she did not have a lot of Blackness — or any Blackness — in her books, she wrote with such humanity that I could project myself into the story and see myself, and understand,” Akil told Vulture.
Now, more than 40 years later, Brock has created a modern adaptation of “Forever” about two Black teenagers — Justin (Michael Cooper Jr.) and Keisha (Lovie Simone) — falling in love in Los Angeles in 2019. The new Netflix show feels as true and universal as Blume’s book while also diving into the specific realities of being a Black teen today. It captures both the feeling of falling in love for the first time and the modern pressures that teens face, especially the pressures of technology and of getting into a competitive college.
However, even though the show captures the universal essence of Blume’s storytelling, it misses the mark on the one thing that makes “Forever” such a ground-breaking book.
When Blume first published “Forever” in 1975, it was because her daughter, Randy, asked her to write “a story about two nice kids who have sex without either of them having to die.” In the novels that her daughter read, the girls who had sex were punished. They got pregnant, were forced to move, or had a gruesome abortion. Some even died. With Katherine and Michael, Blume wanted to show two teens falling in love for the first time and make a joint decision to have sex responsibly. She didn’t want to focus on the potential negative consequences.
This is why there isn’t much conflict in the novel. Instead, the tension comes from the everyday anxieties of being a teen girl, and while it’s enough to carry Katherine’s story, it isn’t enough for eight 50-minute television episodes. To adapt “Forever” for the small screen, Brock had to add conflict.
One of the ways she does this is through Keisha’s past. Before meeting Justin, Keisha’s ex-boyfriend, Christian (Xavier Mills), shares a sexual video of the two of them, and in a double-standard tale as old as time, those consequences are deeply felt for her but not for him. His future basketball career is unharmed, but she becomes socially isolated and must move schools. The trauma also impacts her mental health. Keisha has never told her mom what happened, so in addition to public scrutiny and social isolation, she is also struggling with the anxiety of her mom finding out and being disappointed in her choices.
While this is an experience that far too many girls have had, it is a storyline that is the modern equivalent of “dying” after sex, and I imagine that it’s the kind of consequence that Blume’s daughter, Randy, would be tired of seeing if she were a teen now.
Today’s teens are already navigating a return of purity culture and are far too familiar with the potential consequences of their sexual acts, real or fictitious. In February, Mary Kate Cornett, a teenage freshman at Ole Miss, went viral and became the target of mass public ridicule after “The Pat McAfee Show” and users on social media amplified a spurious claim that she slept with her boyfriend’s dad.
Teens are hearing horrific stories like Cornett’s while living in a world in which they don’t have bodily autonomy. The consequences of sex for girls in one of the 12 states with a total abortion ban or 29 states with bans based on gestational age is shockingly similar to the social realities of teens in the years immediately before Blume wrote “Forever” (Roe v. Wade was decided just two years before it was published). It is also becoming increasingly harder for them to access reproductive health care, including birth control pills and emergency contraception (prescriptions have fallen in the states with the most restrictive abortion bans).
One of the realities of this new social climate is that teens are less likely to be in a relationship. They’re also less likely to have sex.
Also, unlike myself and the decades of girls who could turn to “Forever” to answer our questions, stories that depict sex are becoming more difficult for teens to access because of book bans across the country. For example, Utah has not only banned Blume’s book from every public school library in the state, but it also forbids students to bring books on the “No Read List” to school, so there is no sharing of “Forever” between classes.
This means that not only are teens less likely to be in a relationship or have sexual experiences, but also they don’t have as much access to sex positive stories like “Forever” that depict them. For these reasons, the social scripts they read in books or see depicted onscreen matter even more.
Akil told Vanity Fair that Blume allowed her to substantively change the story as long as she maintained its essence “to allow young people to explore their feelings and curiosity around sexuality in a healthy way, and not jeopardize one’s future.”
Akil’s “Forever” accomplishes this as it pertains to falling in love, which is what the show is really about, but it doesn’t capture a consequence-free portrayal of sex. Keisha is constantly dealing with the ramifications of her sexual choices with her first boyfriend.
The consequences of sex and the politicization of their bodies are already the dominant narrative regarding girls’ sexuality right now, especially in states like mine. Now more than ever, teens need characters like Katherine to show them the good that can come from relationships. Unfortunately, Katherine’s modern mirror, Keisha, has a past that is another example of the risks of trusting someone else.
The story would have been truer to Blume’s original intention without it, and it would have given viewers the gift of another girl to show them the way.
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