I can’t do this newsletter without paid subscribers. For just $5 a month you can help support the work I do here every week. 'I felt alive'The tension between domesticity and eroticism is at play in everything from 'Three Women' to Gillian Anderson's 'Want' to Esther Perel's take on 'All Fours.'
There is so much that does not work about the opening episodes of Three Women, the Starz adaptation of Lisa Taddeo’s bestselling 2019 non-fiction book about women and desire. But one thing that does work, remarkably and spectacularly so, is the way the show conveys the thrumming longing of one of the three women of the show’s title: Lina, an Indiana homemaker married to a man who refuses to touch her. What works is the show’s portrayal of her desperate flight into a passionate affair with her high school sweetheart. It’s a story of erotic aliveness opposite domestic deadness. That seems to be a theme this week. A few days ago, in a drop-whatever-you’re-doing moment, Esther Perel released a podcast interview with Miranda July where they talk about All Fours. During their conversation, Perel, a psychotherapist, likens All Fours to a fictionalized version of her own bestseller Mating in Captivity, which was all about the tension between domesticity and eroticism. It also happens that for the last couple weeks, I’ve been moving through Want, a new collection of women’s anonymous fantasies compiled by Gillian Anderson, and modeled after Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking 1973 book My Secret Garden. From all these fantasies, one thing stands out: many of these women dream of escape from erotically suffocating marriages to men. In fact, some of the fantasies feel like they could have been written by Three Women’s fictional Lina. “I did everything humanly possible to encourage him to engage with me sexually,” reads one entry. “But literally nothing would work.” This woman explains that her married sex life has improved somewhat over the years, but that if she hadn’t developed her own private world of fantasy, “I probably would have ended my life.” Three Women conveys exactly that level of erotic despair. In the first episode, Lina, played by Betty Gilpin, reaches out one morning to touch her husband in bed. Her hand hovers in the air, full of hesitation—and then she’s rejected, twice. Afterward, in the shower alone, she traces an outline of lips on the slick glass wall and then kisses it—tenderly, hungrily. Later, Lina sits in marriage counseling with a priest, explaining that all she wants is for her husband to kiss her on the mouth. But her husband finds kissing yucky. The priest tells her, “You need to let go of the kissing, for him,” and she looks like she might shatter into one million pieces right there on the spot. Lina’s desire and desperation build. She looks up social media photos of her high school ex, Aiden, while in the car with her sleeping child in the backseat. Then she sticks her hand down her pants. Later, she masturbates in the car without her child, as her Jesus air freshener looks on. Lina gets so hot and bothered that in the middle of cooking dinner she absconds to the laundry room with her Hitachi to once again look up pictures of Aidan, who is also married. Meanwhile, a pot of water boils over on the stove and her children barge in, which gives her panic attack. When she later explains the ordeal to a doctor, he asks how it had felt to look up her ex. “I felt alive,” she says. Lina hatches a plan to meet Aidan for drinks while out of town for a friend’s bachelorette party; it’s only an hour from home but she books a hotel room. It’s the first night she’s spent away from her kids and her husband feels unprepared to watch his own children. He’s resentful of even being asked to do so. It reminds me of an entry in Want from a woman who answers the question of what she desires like so: “To have my husband say he’s hired a cleaner. To have my husband say he’s done the grocery shopping. … To have my husband eat me out.” Here, eroticism is tied to cunnilingus, yes, sure, but also to equitable domestic labor—both of these things being all too rare in heteronormative marriage. In her podcast conversation, Perel says that eroticism within marriage means seeing your partner as a “sexual being” rather than “as your partner in Management Inc.,” which can be a tall order in hetero couplings, given these standard domestic disparities, which often require either surrender or ceaseless management (to say nothing of marriage as an institution meant to exploit women’s bodies and labor). Aidan ends up meeting Lina in her hotel room and she finally gets her kiss, and then some. After an appropriate amount of making out, she gets down on her knees, pulls down his pants, and the look on her face suggests that she has found a new altar to worship at. She breathlessly beholds his hard dick, which is fully shown on-screen (it’s a prosthesis, because Hollywood is weird like that). Then Lina warns him that she’s on her period, but he doesn’t care. As they have sex, the camera lingers on her face throughout and Gilpin beautifully portrays shock, delight, and pleasure at this feeling of aliveness. Lina goes from being with a man who refuses to even touch her, who finds kissing to be yucky, to being with a man who nonchalantly wipes her period blood off the both of them after sex. (I’m reminded of that infamous act of intimacy in All Fours, where Davey takes out the protagonist’s tampon for her.) Before getting dressed in his own clothes, Aidan playfully tries on Lina’s tights, making her burst out in laughter. It is a fantastic sex scene. All of this aliveness hits on something Perel says in conversation with July:
When Perel wrote The State of Affairs, a book about infidelity, she explains that there was one thing her interviewees all expressed about cheating: “I felt alive.” July says of the protagonist of her novel: “She has this kind of emotional affair, but the reason why it’s so hard to go home is because once you’ve been alive, it’s really hard to go back… home is not where I feel alive.” It is remarkable, actually, how life-and-death language shows up in Want’s anonymous entries. “I’m happily married. I think,” begins one entry. “My husband is a great guy. … But sometimes I wonder how my life would be if he died.” Damn. This same anonymous woman fantasizes about being a widow and being able to explore sex with a woman from her past. The very negotiable tension between security and adventure in marriage is a best-case scenario, I think. All these converging conversations about women’s desire suggest that the norms and expectations of heteronormativity often trap women in miserable, inequitable, and pleasureless partnerships, while foreclosing sexual exploration and self-discovery. Truly, that is a kind of death, and it’s one intended by design.
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četvrtak, 26. rujna 2024.
'I felt alive'
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