Are The Women Alright?

Sex, reality tv, and wives in America.

Photo by Alexandre Dinaut

HI

Last weekend, I let the winds of the streaming tv algorithm blow me smack into the middle of Utah with a bunch of Mormon wives. Though I rarely watch reality tv, I do spend most of my media consumption time reading, watching, and listening to stories about women’s bodies, minds, desires, pains. I’ve been hotly anticipating the tv adaptation of one of my favorite books, Lisa Taddeo’s seminal nonfiction study Three Women. And my book club is currently galloping through Miranda July’s All Fours, an ode to perimenopausal reality. So I thought…maybe?

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” held my attention loosely, with touches of horror and despair at these wives’ performative TikTok displays of supposed sexual and religious transgression. I enjoyed when one of the women used the phrase “it’s very IDGAF energy” (IDGAF = I don’t give a f*@#) and will try to use this in conversation henceforth. But the end of the premiere resulted in the main wife being arrested for domestic assault while severely inebriated, at which point I knew my time with these women was over. You could cut the misogyny with a knife.

Later in the week, I stumbled on a post from Dan Savage (iconic host of podcast “Savage Love”):

Forget the likely-gay husbands, it was this sentence that got me: “But with one exception, I can’t tell these women apart.” I won’t admit exactly how furious I felt reading this—that the sameness (of appearance, social media obsession, psychoemotional distress, religious confusion, abject patriarchal oppression, and bleach blonde hair) these wives embodied was a selling point for Savage. He obviously wasn’t alone; 3.4K others agreed enough to like the post.

This, I grumbled to myself, is everything that is wrong with America. This desire to flatten and dismiss women’s identities, experiences, needs, traumas, desires. This enjoyment of women as an indistinguishable blur. A mumbling caricature. A monolith worthy of being stereotyped, mocked. A never-ending scroll of TikTok Barbie dolls.

Is it obvious that I’ve never watched a single moment of reality housewife television prior to this moment?

It’s true: I’ve never seen any of The Real Housewives franchises or “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”. While I know there are many brilliant humans who love reality housewife television (do not come for me! I honor you!), I can’t help but wonder what these shows are contributing to the current discourse and climate around gender identity and sexuality.

Reading an interview between Three Women author Lisa Taddeo and actor Shailene Woodley, who plays Taddeo in the screen adaptation, I noticed two words repeated frequently: honesty and alone. “I find that American women generally aren’t as open and honest with each other about their experiences as women in other cultures,” Taddeo observes. “Honesty doesn’t diminish your power—it amplifies it.”

In a culture that does its best to keep women disempowered, often in violent ways, it makes sense that we would often choose dishonesty in order to placate others—and ensure our own safety. In their specificity, their resistance to being flattened, their honesty, the women Taddeo profiles feel revolutionary. And they speak to multitudes.

Three Women was written after Taddeo spent nine years living with and observing women across America. The book weaves a trio of nonfiction narratives: A teenage girl in an illicit relationship with her English teacher, a high-society restaurateur in an open marriage, and a disillusioned housewife having an affair with her high school sweetheart. Fundamentally, each of them feels unseen, trapped by the weight of their past and present identities. I read the book in 2018 when a friend forwarded me an advance PDF, saying it had my name all over it—before it became a number one international bestseller and critical phenom.

Taddeo wrote about women’s desire and sexuality and frustration in prose that made you forget it was nonfiction. These women got under your skin. You understood them. Most likely, you saw yourself in (at least one of) them. You felt less alone because they were absolutely honest.

This same kind of shocking honesty is driving the success of Miranda July’s novel All Fours (just long-listed for the National Book Foundation’s Fiction Award). After posting about the book on Instagram, I received numerous messages from women to the effect of: Everyone I know is reading this! Should I? The answer was yes.

July, a filmmaker, writer, and multimedia artist, began All Fours with the simple desire to make information about perimenopause (the period of hormonal and physiological changes that precedes menopause) more widely available. In an interview with “Death, Sex, and Money”’s Anna Sale, she confesses that at one point she found herself wishing it could just “be a pamphlet”. Instead, the reader embarks on a prismatic adventure following a disenchanted mother, wife, and artist who is determined to do something meaningful for herself. What results is sweaty, indulgent, sensual, bizarre, comforting, and absolutely necessary. Sale calls it a “perimenopausal thriller”. I’m not yet in perimenopause (or am I?), but sign me up.

Like with Three Women, I was often moved to tears reading All Fours—but never so much as when the protagonist shares the responses she received from post-menopausal women about their experience in that phase of life. The response was near resounding: They felt free.

Free.

Free from the expectation that their bodies and minds conform as vessels for making babies or placating the desires of others. Free from the frenzy to appear ever-youthful. Free from the Mormon wife drive to build one’s following on TikTok. Free from the constant concern about how to be desirable to others.

Now that I want. And I know some other women who might be interested, too.

Are women in America—afraid as we are to be honest, to tell it like it is—actually just craving the freedom that post-menopausal women have access to? Is this, perhaps, why American culture is also so good at erasing and devaluing the voices of our women elders?

I’d like to give every one of those Mormon wives a copy of these two books to read, and reshoot the season. See what happens. What kind of revolution, what kind of honesty, might be afoot.

What would happen if we all saw how good it could be later on? With age. With wrinkles. With sagging breasts and uteruses. With greying hair. With honesty.

What if we decided to find out?

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

To recap: Loved this interview between Lisa Taddeo and Shailene Woodley.

If you haven’t yet read Taddeo’s Three Women, you must! And another link for Miranda July’s All Fours.

If you have young kids in your life, get them a copy of my dear Rebecca Walker’s beautiful first children’s book (her tenth book!), Time For Us. I cried reading it, in a good way.

To listen.

Another link to this episode of “Death, Sex, and Money” with Miranda July and Anna Sale.

To watch.

Book-to-screen adaptations of literary favorites can be tough, but here’s hoping the tv version of Three Women delivers!

STAY SANE

It’s wild out there.

Love,

Lily