Judy Blume used to teach young people about the world, now it’s YouTube

Am I normal? It’s a question everyone asks at some point in their life, most urgently during adolescence. When will I get my period? Will I grow facial hair? Why do my parents argue? Can you get pregnant in a hot tub?

Bringing these questions to your mom hardly ever feels natural. Our parents got answers from scout troops, Sunday school, advice columns, Sassy magazine, and friends’ older siblings. But since 1970, one of the most influential sources was author Judy Blume. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret unpacked a sixth grade girl’s anxiety about getting her period. The story offered answers and solace to kids, especially girls, who felt they couldn’t get answers from trusted adults. Blume’s 25 books have reassured young people that they are not alone, that their questions are blissfully (or painfully) “normal.”

“We turned to Judy Blume for the real scoop,” writes essayist Laura Caldwell in Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned From Judy Blume (2009). “We felt informed after reading the books. We felt wiser, older. We understood the world.”

Judy Blume books have sold more than 85 million copies, roughly the population of Germany. She has been dubbed the “woman who invented American adolescence.” Targeting ages 9 to 14, her books cover masturbation, divorce, disability, bullying, virginity, and more. Her most controversial book, Forever, follows a teen girl’s sexual awakening. Though published in 1975, it landed at number 8 on the top most 100 challenged books of the 1990s.

Blume’s first novels coincided with a rise in American book banning in the 1970s, which grew to outright alarm in the 1980s. The number of challenges to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom grew from 100 per year in the early ’70s to nearly 1,000 challenges in 1981. The most cited themes were vulgarity and sexuality — novels like Deenie, which follows a 13-year-old who touches herself in “this special place and when I rub it I get a very nice feeling.” Adults were outraged by Blume’s books and fought to ban them from school libraries all over the country.

Little did they know the birth of the web would soon offer thousands, millions of avenues for advice, and controlling kids’ access was virtually out of the question.

By the mid ’90s parents had more to worry about than Judy Blume’s relatively mild use of the word “fuck.” The web, with its porn and predators, unlocked twisted alleyways and dark corners no parent could prophesy. Now that’s where kids turned for answers.

As mass media entered an unprecedented era of access, young people grew up with more resources (and feedback) than ever. Headlines about chat room pedophiles receded as more people logged on. Between 1990 and 2000, web traffic jumped from roughly 1 terabyte per month to 35,000 terabytes per month. In 2011, the web contained about 5 million terabytes of information. The world’s “global village” had swelled into a vast universe.

In summer 2015, YouTube announced its users uploaded 400 minutes of video every minute, or over 1,000 days per month. Today, young people are watching more YouTube than television. But they aren’t simply catching PewDiePie’s latest vlog. They’re using the platform to seek answers in much the same way their parents once turned to Judy Blume for advice on itchy private parts. When children don’t get adequate answers to that age-old question — “Am I normal?” — they turn to YouTube for help. The video-sharing website offers a package complete with role models, entertainers, educators, and hopefully, other kids just like them.

Among the top six most-subscribed YouTube channels, Smosh is a diverse sketch comedy group that packages humor with teenage angst. Their video “I have a micropenis” has 1.8 million views. Fictional character Miranda Sings’ “How to kiss” video has 10.2 million views. Australian singer and YouTuber Troye Sivian starts conversations like “Is it easier to get AIDS if you’re gay?” to combat misconceptions around sexuality and health. Teens rally around influencers like Sivian, asking follow-up questions and advice in the comments of his videos. The top comment reads: “My biology teacher Troye.”

But there’s a dark side to YouTube standing in as educator/parent/confidante. Proving we haven’t come far since the 1950s, young people are uploading and viewing videos like “How to be popular” and “How to look hot on the first day of school.” Teens are turning to YouTube for mental health answers, and instead finding communities that demonstrate self-harm or eating disorder techniques. In 2012, girls as young as nine posted videos asking complete strangers, “Am I pretty or ugly?”, as they stood on chairs or danced to music. Sexist trolls flung hateful comments, fueling insecurity among an age group that already battles self-confidence issues and seeks acceptance through social validation.

“I was floored,” Naomi Gibson told ABC when she found out her 13-year-old daughter Faye uploaded an “Am I pretty?” video. Before that, Gibson had always made a point to tell her daughter she was beautiful. It wasn’t enough.

It’s terrifying to consider the access to feedback, misinformation, and abuse kids can find online and, yes, through books. (Series like Gossip Girl explore the power dynamics of wealth, sex, normative beauty, rendering Blume monologues about training bras PG by comparison.) But these resources can act as “escape valves,” places to relieve the anxiety of feeling alone, to explore paradoxes they may not feel comfortable bringing up with family.

Blume’s readers asked her “to explain what their parents haven’t,” she said in her 1986 collection of letters, titled Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You. New York Times book reviewer Elizabeth Winship wrote, “The young correspondents don’t want to fall short of their parents’ high expectations, risk losing their respect — or worse, their love. Most of all, they write to Miss Blume because they feel their parents truly don’t listen to them.”

We shouldn’t ban Judy Blume books, and it’s impossible to police every YouTube video. Besides, both have provided a lot of good for young people — and gotten grown ups out of many awkward conversations about pubes.