Three Women

by Lisa Taddeo

[clementine]

The fact that this is, ultimately, a rather captivating book saves it from a lot of flaws. The title doesn't lie: this is a book about three women's sex lives. Each woman has different things to contend with, but ultimately this is a limited representation of female sexuality. That's not inherently a bad thing, but there is some rather grand framing of the book as an exploration of female desire and the implication that there are universal truths here. Well, not really. This is a book about white women who primarily have sex with men. (That's not to erase Sloane's bisexuality, but her sexuality revolves around her husband, and I think there is a lot to be said about a complete lack of sexual interest in men. So much of the insights in this book simply do not apply to lesbians, and it feels a bit alienating when this is framed as illuminating the ~universal experiences~ of female sexuality.) It's also pretty heavy on the description and not so much on the analysis, and while the prose is quite compelling in its literary style, I'm left feeling like this is certainly not as deep as it purports to be. (I also did find some parts of it a bit try-hard and overwritten.) There's a bizarre lack of positionality here; Taddeo never signals exactly how she is gathering information, and seems to try to erase her presence. It's hard to know what is recollection from years earlier and what is happening more contemporarily. Is she present for Maggie's court proceedings? Does she attend the women's group with Lina? Does the drama with Sloane and Jenny unfold during Taddeo's research, or before?

There's a bit of unevenness, too, with the different stories. Sloane's sections were the least developed and the sparsest overall, while Maggie's interested me the most. In fact, I think the book particularly shone in the sections on Maggie, and I almost wish Taddeo had just written a book about her. Her intervention in this story of sexual abuse, uneven power dynamics, and systemic failure is compassionate and necessary. In general, I appreciated that Taddeo took a completely non-judgmental tone and attempted to understand sexual choices that we may see as unethical or deviant. I think there is quite a generous impulse here. There were certain sentences that made me pause - for example, the idea that teenage girls are "unpopulated" is both untrue (man, teenage girls have some complicated inner lives) and rather dangerous in its implications. Women, even young women, are not empty vessels waiting to be filled up. There was also a line about how Sloane "gave herself an eating disorder", which... yeah. I think there was an interesting throughline of the codependency of these women on the men in their lives and the impulse - but inability - to define their sexualities on their own terms.

This book is compulsively readable and quite compassionate, but I don't think it's nearly as intelligent as it wants us to think.