“Three Women”, Gia and sex with married men

Three years later, I am now sex editor at CosmoI write my own sex column in the same glass tower where I first met Taddeo. Her hugely successful first book is now a television series that makes a (fictionalized version of) the author a character, a fourth woman rather than a narrator whose first-person revelations are confined to the prologue and epilogue.

This is perhaps the biggest departure from the book that the otherwise fairly faithful TV adaptation makes. I was as skeptical as I was curious to see a screen portrayal of Taddeo that went beyond the shadow version of myself I, the reader, had projected onto her—which can happen all too easily when she's carving beautiful, if eviscerating, prose out of your secret fears, most unflattering beliefs, and the harshest realities of sex-filled womanhood. It's tempting to feel like her shadow, or her shadow—just you and Taddeo in the corner, stroking your scales.

Spoiler alert, no matter to what extent you consider something that happens about three and a half minutes into the first episode of a series to be a spoiler: The TV adaptation of Three women begins with writer Gay Talese telling Taddeo's fictional counterpart Gia to sleep with married men, apparently so she can finish her book about sex in America.

A voice-over laughs at this instruction, saying, “Lol, can you believe this guy?!”, but the suggestion of possible infidelity—at least on her part—is never mentioned again.

But while Gia may have managed to “read the entire book without sleeping with anyone who was married,” as she puts it, Taddeo's body of work suggests that she herself may not have emerged quite so unscathed from the lure of an unattainable man. In “Why We Cheat,” Taddeo describes an affair with a self-described “happily married” father — one who texts from her bed, “Yeah, honey, don't worry, I'm having a drink with Brian,” while wrapping one hand around her waist and sending his wife a casual lie with the other.

As “Why We Cheat” in the April 2012 issue of esquirethe unnamed project in which Taddeo was currently “involved” was described in her author biography as “a book about modern sex culture in the style of (Taleses) Your neighbor's wife.”

Obviously, those plans changed at some point in the next seven years. It's a change that is quickly skimmed over in the show – goodbye, Gay Talese; hello, Three women– but Taddeo alludes to it in the book’s prologue, giving us an insight into what the original design might have looked like.

“When I started writing this book, a book about human desire, I thought I would be drawn to the stories of men,” she writes. But at some point, “these stories of male desire become blurred” and always end in the same way: “in the stammering pulses of orgasm.” And where male desire ended, Taddeo found that female desire was just beginning.

As a woman who spent the first three years of her career in men's media, I too once thought I was drawn to men's stories. Perhaps because I thought writing for them, about them, to them would be a shortcut to what I had always so desperately wanted: to be seen by them. And more importantly, to be desired by their gaze.

I wasn't entirely wrong. Writing about men, telling their stories, stroking their egos and keeping their secrets, Is a shortcut to their attention – including their anger and sometimes, yes, their desire.

But being desired by a man rarely means being seen by one. More often, their desire acts like a blinding force that makes you nothing more than their object. Not because it's cruel, but because it's raw – single-celled, one-dimensional.

At some point I too became disillusioned with the transience of male pleasure, with the way it begins with a fleeting glance and ends with ejaculation – a flame that goes out at the moment of orgasm, which I always seem to burn myself with.

There's little in Gia of the sly, cynical shadow self I projected onto Taddeo from Why We Cheat, who admits he feels more comfortable “consorting with the devils” and standing “roughly, smilingly on the side of the winners.”

A ray of sunshine like Shailene Woodley and a mane of Carrie Bradshaw's blonde curls, Gia sometimes seems more like the heroine of a romantic comedy, laughing at the idea of ​​married men and being relentlessly courted by available men who have an instant crush on her.

I wasn't necessarily disappointed. The truth, which gradually crept into my own writings after I married my last husband, is that I don't really recognize my old shadow in myself anymore.

As the first-person narrator of your own life, you become a version of yourself forever trapped in every published work. But like everyone else, writers outgrow their old selves, even if we leave their corpses perfectly preserved in prose.

2015, three years after “Why We Cheat” and four years before Three women Taddeo wrote another essay for esquireIn “There Are Two Kinds of Men,” we get another glimpse of Taddeo in her glamorous, cynical youth, allowing one type of man—available and therefore inherently undesirable—to boost her ego and buy her steak tartare while she pines for the other type.

“Her destiny,” she writes, “is to walk the fine line between the first and the second type of man, not to win the latter or to get involved with the former.”

But this time, this unflinching look into the harsh romantic reality of young womanhood turns out to be a look back – a reflection of the author's old shadow. That is your fate, until one day it isn't. Because, writes the married and pregnant Taddeo, “one day you share a dog, you don't cry for dead parents, you can't eat raw beef because you are building a new life.”

As a 22-year-old who had adopted “Why We Cheat” as a Bible passage, this happy ending once seemed like a betrayal to me—like Gia’s mockery of the suggestion of cheating at first. But now I see it as a snapshot in medias res of the change that always took place when Three women freed himself from the vein of Your neighbor’s wife, Gia now brings the results of that to life on screen. Whatever may or may not have happened when she entered Talese's brownstone is irrelevant; the sleeping with married men chapter is long over.

And mine too. Because you are only your shadow self until you are not. Until one day, somewhere between one essay and the next, you realize that you have crawled out of the corner, shed your snake skin and taken off your thorn-colored glasses.

But sometimes my eyes still need a second to adjust to the light.

Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the deputy sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she writes about all things sex, love, dating, and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens, and probably won't stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.