three women
by lisa taddeo
There are two works I recommend as companion pieces to Three Women: Cat Person from The New Yorker fiction section and The Crane Wife from The Paris Review. I’ll link to them a few times in context later on, but if you’re skimming positive reviews for Three Women and you haven’t read either of those, start there and come on back.
It is one thing to “what if” about women being protagonists in sexual scenarios. It often involves a lot of linguistic theory, and it tends to follow a particular pattern.
First, decry the masculine default of the English-speaking world’s sexual vocabulary. Second, craft a litany of examples supporting your conclusion: (1) the ad hoc definition of sex is inherently penetrative; (2) sexual agency is focused on male desire; (3) sex begins and ends with male ejaculation. “Bone,” “screw,” “drill,” and “nail” are euphemisms for sex that underscore the unspoken assumption that men “fuck,” and women “get fucked.”
These are all valid concerns and unexamined language is often used to sustain our unequal world. But like most cogent academic theories that confront the status quo, the accuracy of the criticism ceases to matter when confronted by entrenched male privilege, unconsidered habituated mistreatment, and outmoded cultural hypocrisy.
Three Women does not play a “what if” game or try to “flip the script” on female sexual agency. It does something wholly different. While a goal of centering women in stories of sexuality is laudable, this is not that. By her own account the author “thought [she’d] be drawn to stories of men. Their yearnings. The way they could overturn an empire for a girl on bended knee.” There is no intention to jolt the reader into recognizing how tepid stories of women’s desires often are. It is simply an honest account of what three particular women thought, said, and did surrounding the landmark sexual scenarios that shaped their lives.
This is the first time I’ve read—and granted, I am a heterosexual male—this is the first time I’ve read about women’s sexuality and fully be able to internalize it.
I do not mean that I see myself as the titular three women. I do not. But I see myself from the other side—see my actions toward women I’ve dated—and for the first time it is clear that each relationship has two starring roles. The weight of the same culture that told me I could do whatever I wanted—date younger women; have one-night stands; ghost after intense courtship—relegates women to the sidelines. The same social pressures that force women to keep smiling while they’re being treated like props in someone else’s story historically keep the spotlight on male wants and needs. Imagine literature as a great mirror that is held up to society; what does it typically reflect? Male sexual desire shines with intense vibrancy, while desires borne by women are muted, if represented at all. I don’t know if I’ve read many women that are both protagonist and sexual aware; unless it involves chastely pining for someone so as to remain pure in the eyes of society, in both the book and in the real world.
“The message is clear. Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types.”
NY Times, April 7, 1991, §6, p22
The men’s stories began to bleed together. In some cases, there was prolonged courting; sometimes the courting was closer to grooming, but mostly, the stories ended in the stammering pulses of orgasm. And whereas the man’s throttle died in the closing salvo of orgasm, I found that the woman’s was often just beginning. There was complexity and beauty and violence, even, in the way the women experienced the same event. In these ways and more, it was the female parts of an interlude that, in my eyes, came to stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like.
What Three Women does is write about women like they are people, complex people, rather than someone whose most important adjective is “female.” It centers them without aligning them against a masculine center. And it is jarring, because it is so uncommon.
A cursed image, burned into the collective brain.
Photograph by Elinor Carucci for The New Yorker
Cat Person, in late 2017, gave interiority to the sexual life (gasp) of a young (double gasp) woman (triple gasp) who has flaws (swoon):
But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.
Many, many words have been written about Cat Person. I say, without reservation, that it is good and you should read it. It relates to Three Women only vaguely: its narrator filters events through the eyes of the female protagonist, and we are allowed to see agency within her mind even as social convention and polite civility slowly crush her actions into an unenviable—and apparently entirely recognizable to women who lived through their twenties—series of interactions with an older man.
A sense of consequenceless experimentation effervesces off each page of Cat Person, while Three Women sags with the weight of reality.
I will leave it at that.
When I first read The Crane Wife—only a few days before I started Three Women—it took me nearly twenty paragraphs to realize the author was a woman.
Squirrel Nutkin was also my favorite. The hubris!
First person narrative?
Sexual agency?
Self-identification with Squirrel Nutkin?
Surely these are the hallmarks of a male writer.
I’m not being flippant, and I do not like admitting I fell for the I can’t operate on him, for he is my son “riddle” in real life, but here we are. I watch out for exactly this type of unconscious bias and I still messed it up. Mea culpa.
I did expect The Crane Wife to go as viral as Cat Person. That it did not is perhaps because it is narrative non-fiction, written in a confessional format that has come to be associated with writing for, and by, women. Cat Person—referred to as an “article” or “essay” by its more vocal internet detractors—is literary fiction. Which, perhaps you can already guess, has historically been the purview of male voices.
I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.
These were small things, and I told myself it was stupid to feel disappointed by them. I had arrived in my thirties believing that to need things from others made you weak. I think this is true for lots of people but I think it is especially true for women. When men desire things they are “passionate.” When they feel they have not received something they need they are “deprived,” or even “emasculated,” and given permission for all sorts of behavior. But when a woman needs she is needy. She is meant to contain within her own self everything necessary to be happy.
That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it.
Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett
https://danielgraybarnett.com/
The Crane Wife is masterfully (mistressfully?) written, but it still obliges a social justification for a woman wanting something. The fiancé is comical in his villainy—cheap, cheating, loveless—and thus easily dismissed: “He gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.” No one begrudges the writer for breaking off the engagement. She is aghast at what she almost settled for. So we can be, too.
It is not Three Women.
What is Three Women, then? Within, there are no “It happened to me” essays, no unbelievable circumstances or cartoonish scenarios. There are villains on the page as surely as there are in all of our lives, evil deeds and gut-wrenching moments. Sloane, Maggie, Lina are all three written like people. Full, rich with depth and interiority. They are complete in a way women on the page are not allowed to be. Never does the focus drift off their minds, their wants, their needs. Each have adjectives beyond “female.” And their actions are sui generis rather than representational of gender: They make choices that don’t work out, they prioritize things that are in retrospect quite stupid. But they are never displaced by an ever-present cultural standard that so often seems to remind women, “Yeah, sure, you can write about sex, but don’t forget: you are the passive object. The thing that gets fucked.”
It is tragic, I think, that I have never read anything quite like Three Women. If you don’t believe this book is for you, then it most certainly is.