A powerful insight into female desire and sexuality: Reviewing Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women

I read Three Women when it first came out, but then there was such a flood of reviews and it was such a polarizing book that I knew I needed to wait if I wanted to develop my own thoughts about it.

This is a real-life account of the sexual lives of three women who Lisa Taddeo interviewed over a period of 8 years. Sex doesn’t exist in a vacuum, resulting in an in-depth personal insight into their lives. In this book, we meet:

• Maggie – a troubled young woman who had an affair with her married school teacher (as a teen) and is now struggling with the ramifications of it.
• Lina – gang-raped as a teen, is trapped in a sexless marriage and having an affair with her high-school boyfriend.
• Sloane – beautiful and skinny, has an open marriage with her husband but struggles with self-esteem and the consequences when she is blamed for breaking up another person’s relationship.

My Review

I’ve always heard it said that hurt people hurt others. And this book is a solid example of that. All three women have been through some troubling experiences during their teens, and this shows in the way they behave and their lack of boundaries. It’s telling that all three stories in some way deal with marriage and its breakdown.

Maggie has no trouble at all seducing/getting seduced by a married teacher, without a thought about his wife and kid. As she grows older and develops mental health issues, she slowly begins to understand and process the damage the affair did to her.

Lina loses her high school boyfriend after the rape, but reconnects in midlife. I felt bad reading about her trying to rationalise this relationship as one of lost love, when it is so clear her lover is just using her for sex.

Both these women were so hurt and abused, they found it difficult to understand why their lives were so messed up. While I couldn’t condone the destruction they brought to so many lives, I also could not help but empathise with them and wish them a happier future. Alas! That didn’t really happen, at least not in the scope of this book.

Sloane – the last woman is the most unlikeable of the three. Maybe, because she’s beautiful, rich, and cool. She’s cool with the fact that her husband picks men for her to have sex with while he watches. She’s cool about her husband inviting other women into the bedroom with them. Nothing seems to ruffle Sloane. I couldn’t relate/like her and so I found her sections the weakest in the book.

I also think she was the most reserved and least insightful of the three women. I didn’t really understand the rationale for a swinging lifestyle. While her story was interesting, it needed a lot more introspection and so didn’t feel rounded out. After reading the gut-wrenching passages from Maggie and Lina, Sloane just seemed aloof and clichéd.

So, that was the only nitpick I had with the book. After processing my thoughts, I went and read other reviews of the book – most were negative, and I was a bit surprised by that. I then realised this book is marketed as a book about female sexuality, but the book itself is not really that. It’s more an in-depth look into three specific women and their sexual lives – there is little to no commentary on female sexuality in general.

Also, a lot of this book is pretty depressing. You go in into the book thinking you are in for an empowering read, but that’s not the case. All I learnt is that even now, things are pretty fucked up between the sexes.

I found this book fascinating, frustrating, and utterly absorbing. I read this in coffee shops, and it sparked off so many discussions with random women who walked up to me and spoke to me about it. So definitely it is a book that sparks strong opinions!

Have you read this book? What did you think about it?