Submitted by Smart Bitch Sarah
The reason the book is so often challenged is due to the scenes in which Deenie talks about massaging a “special spot,” and when her life gets stressful, she ends up rubbing that spot every night so she can get to sleep. Add to that a scene with a gym teacher giving very straight facts about periods, jilling off, and other touchy stuff and you have a book that gets a lot of knickers in a twist. And it’s a shame because the realism and thoughtfulness of Deenie is a potentially comforting read for many young women.
Deenie is not just about masturbation and menstruation, however, and sadly that’s lost in the protests. Deenie, whose mother wants to engineer a modeling career for her whether she likes it or not, is diagnosed with scoliosis and has to wear a Milwaukee brace to treat her spine. Deenie’s mother also lays the pressure on Deenie’s sister Helen, who, while not as stunning and beautiful as Deenie, is wicked smart, and of course should be a doctor or a lawyer.
Deenie is not a story about stoking your own fires at an early age. It’s a story about a girl whose defining characteristic, her beauty and physical perfection, is compromised by scoliosis and by having to wear a back brace, and who therefore has to figure out who she is and who she wants to be.
The masturbation scenes are a fraction of the story, and serve a logical purpose: to develop Deenie’s growing awareness of her own body, both in a sexual sense and a medical sense. She’s not in control of how her spine grows, but she is in control of her own self-pleasure and satisfaction. The scenes aren’t gratuitous in the least, and if the reader didn’t really know what masturbation was in the first place, it wouldn’t necessarily be obvious from the descriptions, either. I know whereof I speak: I read this book at an age when masturbation was unknown to me and I had no idea what Deenie was doing with that washcloth. I thought it was some sort of back rub.
The idea that this book is challenged so frequently makes me profoundly sad, because I never thought of it as “the masturbation book.” I thought of it as “the scoliosis book,” and it was certainly the only one I read that dealt with the subject. Isolating a book from a readership of women who already feel isolated because of a scene that comprises a tiny, tiny part of the entire narrative strikes me as unbelievably short-sighted, because I’d bet every last dollar I can tuck in a stripper’s g-string that those who protest are regular wankers themselves.
Submitted by Darlene Marshall
My sons are now 20 and 24, one’s gay, one’s straight, both are pretty normal members of society. I would highly recommend this text for parents of sons, and I have no doubt the one for daughters is equally valuable.
Behold: the prize for the best Banned Book Review for 2007: your choice of the children’s or adult’s Banned Book bracelet. You too can sport a miniature cover of To Kill a Mockingbird or Captain Underpants on your delicate wrist.
So far we have a very few entries (not including mine, which isn’t eligible) so if you’d like a shot, please send your review of one of the top 100 most challenged books from 1990-2000 to me asap.
Submitted by Charlene
The book was an immediate bestseller. Shocked parents, educators, and ministers bought the book, hoping that Alice’s lessons would persuade young people under their care not to succumb to temptation. Unfortunately for the adults involved, many young people had immediate strong doubts about Alice’s story. For instance, Alice’s explanation of how she became addicted to speed is literally impossible, and the counterculture lifestyle is portrayed as a nest of hippies, liberals, and people of colour (in other words, People Not Like Us) whose main point in life appears to be to defile helpless innocent white girls. The prose is beyond melodramatic (and beyond the capacities of most teenaged girls, for that matter) and Alice never misses the chance to moralize. All in all it appeared to many teens to be nothing but clunky, heavy-handed propaganda, and was often scorned and parodied.
The young weren’t the only ones with questions, though. Doubts surfaced very early among critics as to whether the book was a true transcript of Alice’s diary. For one thing, it doesn’t read like something written by a teenager. Alice barely mentions her friends or boys, instead devoting enormous amounts of space to long-winded, largely inaccurate descriptions of the effects of drugs that read as if they had been plucked from a church youth handbook. “Editor” Beatrice Sparks admitted in 1979 that the book was not a transcript of her patient’s diary but only based on it, but the release of numerous very similar (and equally factually suspicious) books by Sparks which also purported to be “true diaries” has increased the suspicion that Go Ask Alice is fully fictional. Later research by Mark Oppenheimer and others has supported the theory.
Go Ask Alice was removed from many libraries after conservative parents complained about the book’s graphic depictions of sex, drug use, and violence. Although it has never been banned for being a fraud, it has in recent years been moved - to the fiction section, where it belongs.
Please don’t forget to send in your Banned Book Review, wherein you review one of the top 100 most challend books from 1990-2000. We’ll vote on the best ones - so be creative - and I promise awesome asskicking prizes. Email your reviews to and asap!
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