A Coming-of-Age Movie That Doesn’t Sexualize Preteen Girls

When it comes to movies and TV shows about coming of age, sex and sexuality are usually the domain of high schoolers. From Juno to Easy A to Sex Education to Never Have I Ever to Yes, God, Yes to Euphoria, adult actors as old as 30 play characters no younger than 15. At least in contemporary entertainment, high school is generally the cutoff for when it is acceptable to depict characters engaging with sex. The sexuality of middle schoolers, who occupy that precarious age where curiosity has set in but puberty has not quite caught up, is a rarer and more challenging phenomenon to depict onscreen.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a film adaptation of Judy Blume’s famous book from 1970, arrived in theaters on Friday. Like its source material, the film is explicitly interested in how it feels for middle school girls to encounter puberty and sexuality for the first time.

Sixth grader Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Forston) goes shopping for bras, keeps track of her crushes, gets her first kiss, and tries to make her boobs grow faster. The climactic scene occurs when her friend Nancy Wheeler (Elle Graham) gets her period at a restaurant after months of anxiously anticipating it. At every turn, the story is dialed into the bodily milestones of middle school and the emotional ups and downs they entail.

Read more at The Daily Beast.