the buzz on desire

Every summer a couple of books are published that take over conversation, at least among the Extremely Online and bookish girl circles I participate in or eavesdrop on. This year, two nonfiction books seem to be everywhere — they’re sitting at #2 and #4 on the New York Times bestseller list right now — “Trick Mirror,” by Jia Tolentino, and “Three Women,” by Lisa Taddeo.

I mainlined both of these books in the past few weeks, because what is summer if not for lying by bodies of water and pumping buzzy prose into your blood until you forget your skin is burning? But I’m not sure I would call either of them breezy summer reads. Both of them made me feel vaguely grimy, as if they made me see that my skin is covered in something that couldn’t be washed off when I jumped in the lake or the pool or the ocean.

Of course, I think you should definitely read them both.

Taddeo’s book, reported over the course of eight years, is — according to its publisher, at least — an investigation of women’s appetites for pleasure, told through deeply intimate stories of three American women. “As a buried force in our lives, desire remains largely unexplored—until now,” the book’s promotional copy reads, adding later that the book is “the deepest nonfiction portrait of desire ever written.”

What I did not pick up from any of the promotional material was how profoundly depressing I would find the book. If these three stories are emblematic of ordinary American women’s sexual desires, then we’re in trouble. (The book prompted a Buzzfeed writer to wonder in a headline, “Are Straight Women OK?”)

The first of the book’s three women — the only identified by her real name — is Maggie Wilken, a 23-year-old who came forward with accusations that her high school English teacher had instigated a sexual relationship with her when she was 17. The second, Lina, is an Indiana housewife who — after being roofied, gang-raped, and subsequently slut-shamed as a teenager — marries a man who finds it disgusting to kiss her on the lips and then leaves him to pursue a turbulent affair with her now-married high school boyfriend, who is clearly not as invested in the relationship as she is. The third, Sloane, is a wealthy, beautiful New England restauranteur whose emotionally detached family turned a blind eye to her eating disorder and who marries a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men (and sometimes women) he’s selected for her.

The conclusions are rough. In the New York Times, Toni Bentley summarizes: “Mother Nature has heavily handicapped women…A female orgasm releases a tsunami of neurochemicals, suctioning us to that fallible Joe who happens to be in the vicinity, every climax another knot in our involuntary bondage. And so we continue, despite more than 200 years of feminism culminating in Andrea Dworkin’s glorious rage, to be inept voyagers in search of ‘love,’ repeatedly abandoning our own ship to board some dude’s dinghy.”

I mean, good grief. Those are certainly not the conclusions I would come to about generalized female sexual desire. The mind-fuck of this book, though, is that I also kept wondering, what if Taddeo is right?

Taddeo claims desire as her subject, but as it turns out, she’s really writing about one kind of desire: “desire…that could not be controlled, when the object of desire dictated the narrative.” In other words, she’s interested in desire filtered through profoundly unequal power dynamics.

Those unequal power dynamics manifest themselves in many ways. As the writer Stephanie Danler notes in the Sewanee Review, the book’s “subject is also sexual trauma, in its micro and macro forms, and how some women have tried to define themselves through sex” — definitions, I would argue, that they turn to because other definitions seem unavailable to them.

A number of reviews of “Three Women” have noted that its lens on women’s desire is myopic: all of her subjects are heterosexual, cisgender white women under the age of 50, so Taddeo is excluding many, many women’s varieties of desires from the start.

As I read the book, I wondered if it was limited in another way as well — if its view that women’s desire is fundamentally shaped by and filtered through trauma, as all of its subjects’ desires are in some way, could possibly be true.

Surely not all American women’s most intimate needs and wants are built in reaction to or to accommodate some kind of sexual trauma, I kept thinking. But then, I kept doubting myself — which is part of what made the book so interesting. Are our desires shaped by our traumas? Must they be? In an interview with GQ, Taddeo says that every single woman she interviewed to potentially include in the book “had something—either one giant thing or 75 small things.” She continues: “With each story, I was always trying to figure out what the most formative thing was.”

Reading that interview, I was reminded of the debate around the trope of a past rape as a character motivation for, ugh, almost every “strong woman character” in television and movies you can think of. On the one hand, sexual violence or its threat is something that every woman lives with, and so it’s not like those storylines are necessarily unrealistic. But it’s tiresome — and inaccurate — to reduce women’s characters, their complicated emotional responses to their lives and loves, to the one giant bad sexual trauma or 75 small bad sexual traumas that happened to them.

“Throughout history, men have broken women’s hearts in a particular way,” Taddeo writes, for example. “Meanwhile, women wait.”

But do we, always? I’ve been on both sides of the window in the emotional waiting room at different times and in different relationships, and I suspect that space is only truly gendered insofar as cultural narratives keep repeating that men are the actors and women are the acted-upon. My life, and the lives of most women and men I know, are much more complicated.

More and more, I resent narratives that excavate women’s emotional lives — ostensibly a feminist undertaking, placing women’s own voices front and center — only to come to conclusions that reinforce cliche notions of how women “are”: emotionally tumultuous, needy, passive basket cases for love, defined by our pain. Sometimes, in my relationships, I’ve felt like men have assumed those ideas as true and used them against me, even when their behavior has been just as irrational or demanding; I’m certainly not the only woman I know who has asked for something that seems totally reasonable and in response been told we’re behaving like needy basket cases.

On the other hand, I never doubted the emotional truth of Taddeo’s depiction of Lina’s story, or Maggie’s or Sloane’s.

I’m sure Lina, for example, did truly feel that her entire life depended on how the man she’s having an affair with responds to her text messages. Lina has pressurized her feelings and desires for so long that they’ve exploded, and the level of intensity and focus Lina allows herself to train on her sexuality is so new — she’s in some ways discovering herself just as a teenager would — that it strikes other adults in her life (and, frankly, many readers) as pathetic. It also feels excruciatingly true, in just the same way adults cringe at movies about teenagers.

But I also wonder whether Lina’s emotions would have felt so dramatic, so life-or-death, if anyone in her life — her husband, her lover, even her therapist (who tells her that her husband’s refusal to even kiss her is completely normal, something she should accommodate in her marriage) — had recognized that her desire for affection and care was reasonable, a fine thing to want, a normal reason to end a marriage if it’s something you’re being denied.

Taddeo’s book has been praised as a remarkable act of witnessing, and I think it is. I just wonder if Taddeo was the witness any of these women truly needed, at least originally. Part of the reason Maggie — whose story is the most developed and the most upsetting of the three — participated in the book was because she wanted her side of the story to be told after lawyers successfully smeared her as a loose, troubled teenager out to get a nice family man, the North Dakota teacher of the year. I’m so glad that Taddeo bore witness to her story. But I wish someone else had witnessed Maggie first — before her emotions had to get so unruly, before her emotional responses began to hew so closely to bad cultural stereotypes of out-of-control women driven mad by the drug of lust.

In her essay on Taddeo, Danler notices that in addition to the trauma all three women share, they’re also all, in one way or another, the “other woman” in some relationship — Maggie’s English teacher is using her to cheat on his wife; Lina is cheating on her husband with a married lover; Sloane is, in the end, confronted by the wife of one of her partners her husband has selected for her. “I wondered if Taddeo had a choice in this curation,” Danler writes. “Is this the lens through which she decided to view sex? Or are these the women who most desperately wanted to speak?” I wondered that too, in a slightly different form — are these women, whose traumas have warped them into the worst molds society provides for women, the ones who need to assert themselves, that their stories aren’t as sad or pathetic as you might think?

I first came to Taddeo’s writing through her short stories, and in fact it took me a while to realize, reading “Three Women,” that I already knew her work. I thought her short story “A Suburban Weekend,” which won a Pushcart Prize this year, was one of the most perfectly structured and surprisingly affecting pieces I’ve ever read, even as I was mostly grossed out by it.

But mostly, the three short pieces of fiction I’ve read of Taddeo’s had one thing in common, which is that their protagonists are all shells of humans who somehow behave in only the most cliche, shallow ways, but who are also still scrounging for some kind of connection.

Take her story “Forty-Two,” which also won a Pushcart Prize. In it, a 42-year-old woman named Joan is heading to the wedding of a 32-year-old man named Jack, whom Joan is quietly in love with, for reasons mostly seeming to be related to Jack’s hotness and not any qualities of personality. “Jack, at thirty-two, was the perfect age to settle down,” Taddeo writes. “He hadn’t rushed like his friends who pulled the trigger at twenty-five for girls who they were definitely going to cheat on with women like Joan, who you could tell from their lipstick would give wet, pleading blow jobs.”

Jack is getting married to Molly, who is 26, “the perfect age to be engaged for a girl,” the story says.

“Everything with Molly was great. She didn’t even nag,” Taddeo writes. “Actually, Molly’d asked him when they first moved in if he could vacuum the plank floor but he hadn’t done that yet, so he knew Molly vacuumed then washed the floors herself. He knew that if her father knew she was cleaning so much he’d be pissed, but he also knew Molly wanted her father to like him, more than she herself needed to like him.”

This type of story makes me kind of resent the world, or at least the affluent-class capitalistic world I live in, in a way that is either a testament to Taddeo’s skills as a writer or a damning indictment of her reductionism. Everyone in these stories is constantly assigning everyone else a mean, cynical type, and it makes me feel neurotic because I can never tell whether their observations are “relatable” because they’re repeating trite things that people say all the time of whether they’re relatable because they’re true.

That unsettling feeling — do I hate this because it’s true and awful or do I hate this because it’s cliche and awful? or is it both? — is, I think, part of the “trick mirror” that Jia Tolentino’s book aims to unpack.

Tolentino’s subject, broadly, is how we shape our identities, especially as women, in late capitalism, which has commoditized everything so the last thing available to sell is ourselves, which in turn has created a world in which taking care of yourself, making yourself an optimal human, is the most important human endeavor. She also, crucially, pays close attention to the pleasures that making yourself into an optimal human can bring, the ways those pleasures make us complicit in the systems that are contorting us.

If you’ve read any of Tolentino’s work in the New Yorker, you’re familiar with her theme — at the end of 2017, for example, she wrote an essay about how people use skin care as a means of coping with the instability of the Trump administration that I still think about every time I put on moisturizer, which is to say, twice a day, every day. “Traditionally, skin care represents an attempt to deny the inevitability of the future,” Tolentino wrote. “For me, right now, it functions as part of a basic dream in which the future simply exists.”

I read “Three Women” and “Trick Mirror” almost back to back, and it was impossible not to think of Taddeo’s women as I read Tolentino’s analysis of how the internet has shaped how we think about ourselves as women and thought about her mixed feelings about its requirements.

“The ideal woman has always been generic,” Tolentino writes in an essay called “Always Be Optimizing” (excerpted in the Guardian here). “I bet you can picture the version of her that runs the show today. She’s of indeterminate age but resolutely youthful presentation. She’s got glossy hair and the clean, shameless expression of a person who believes she was made to be looked at.” You usually see her in pictures, Tolentino notes, especially in pictures of her at leisure, at resorts or in Joshua Tree or surrounded by tasteful interior design and beautiful friends. “She has a personal brand, and probably a boyfriend or husband: he is the physical realization of her constant, unseen audience, reaffirming her status as an interesting subject, a worthy object, a self-generating spectacle with a viewership attached.” Probably, now, she is using that viewership to make at least a small amount of money.

None of Taddeo’s women, except for maybe the rich, thin, swinging restauranteur Sloane, are superficially anything like this ideal woman. But I was struck by how much the ideal woman Tolentino describes, Taddeo’s women, and maybe all of us, are shaped by the terms of the world we live in, trying mostly unsuccessfully to distinguish between what we really want and what we’re told we should be.

“Figuring out how to ‘get better’ at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project — a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism,” Tolentino writes. “In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”

Tolentino cogently describes the way contemporary, market-based feminism is complicit in this trap — as a public-facing, online woman perfects herself, as she makes herself pleasing to her audience, she often celebrates her empowerment, how successful she is. “She can believe — reasonably enough, and with the full encouragement of feminism — that she herself is the architect of the exquisite, constant, and often pleasurable type of power that this image holds over her time, her money, her decisions, her selfhood, and her soul,” Tolentino says.

I’m in power of my image — I can make it whatever I want — but if I’m going to be successful, that image has to conform to what Instagram wants to make popular. Similarly, the women of Taddeo’s book think they know what they want, but at some point each (along with their readers) ends up questioning whether they have any power at all, whether their desires are fundamentally formed by forces they didn’t control.

“This is where catchall terms like ‘feminism’ and ‘empowerment’ water down the conversation,” Danler writes in her essay about the book. “Distilling what’s ‘emboldening’ and what’s ‘degrading’ becomes impossible amidst the tumult of what some women want to believe and how they actually feel.

“Over and over again as I read ‘Three Women,’” Danler continues, “I couldn’t stop thinking of how often we believe we’re asserting our tase when in fact we’re regurgitating an inherited and damaging norm and calling it power.”

That’s why both these books made me feel contaminated somehow — the thought that everything I want or feel or desire is mediated, might be warped by shitty things men have done to me or even just by the realization that everything I do is constrained by the way men with power or men in general or people in general see me, what they want from me. And that, in spite of it all, I still find pleasure, and sometimes still feel in control of it, and believe in that control even though on some level I know it’s illusory.

Last week, my friend Sarah and I were texting about Tolentino’s work. I told Sarah that it
“always makes me feel kind of suffocated by the world we live in, which I think is her point.”

“I kind of like breathing this shitty air though,” Sarah replied.

“Yeah [Tolentino] does too,” I wrote, “which is her other point.”

“There is enormous pleasure in individual success,” Tolentino writes. “It can feel like license and agency to approach an ideal, to find yourself — in a good picture, on your wedding day, in a flash of identical movement — exemplifying a prototype. There are rewards for succeeding under capitalism and patriarchy; there are rewards for even being willing to work on its terms. There are nothing but rewards, at the surface level. The trap looks beautiful. It’s well-lit. It welcomes you in.”

But underneath the surface level, there’s just dread, which is what I got out of Taddeo’s book. But then again, do I believe any of her conclusions are universal? Do they apply to me? To you? Or are the conclusions all just as generic as the ideal lady of Instagram? I don’t know the answer to that, and neither of these books provide them, which is, I think, why I’d recommend them.

Tell me why you want to read

I’m just recommending these two books this week, but especially for my friend, the indomitable Sarah Glen, who wrote to me that she wants “to question everything I know to be true//feel all the feels.” That’s a great reason to want to read, I think. And I hope it’s clear that these two books made me question a lot and feel a great many kinds of feels.

Thank you as always for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor.

And as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.