This review discusses sexual violence, abuse, and mentions eating disorders.
Five years after the publication of Lisa Taddeo's bestselling non-fiction book, Three Women, its TV treatment has finally hit the small screen.
Starring She's Gotta Have It's DeWanda Wise, Big Little Lies star Shailene Woodley, GLOW's Betty Gilpin and In My Skin star Gabrielle Creevy, the series — just like Taddeo's book — looks not just at the relatively unexplored and often oversimplified world of female sexuality, but also how women are punished for these desires in a patriarchal world. Taddeo co-wrote the series with Tell Me Lies' Chisa Hutchinson, with House of Cards producer Laura Eason as showrunner.
Similar to the painstaking reportage Taddeo undertook to write her book, Three Women's 10-episode run (each running at roughly an hour) takes a really deep dive into the story, with mixed results.
What is Three Women about?
The series brings to our screens the stories from the near decade Taddeo spent interviewing three American women about their sexual desires, how society has impacted the way they manifest, and how they feel about expressing them.
The book was released in 2019 during the height of the #MeToo movement. Taddeo's incredibly in-depth study into three real women – Maggie, Lina, and Sloane — and their bodily, emotional, and sexual desires aligned perfectly with a wider narrative of women demanding to be heard.
Who plays the Three Women?
Creevy plays Maggie, who reflects on an abusive, coercive relationship between herself and her teacher years prior. The series covers said real-life teacher Aaron Knodel's trial, and the misogyny embedded in the justice system, especially when it comes to crimes of sexual violence. Creevy carries the story with a steely innocence, knowing that what happened to her was wrong but often feeling silenced and bullied in response to her efforts to seek justice.
Wise is striking as Sloane, a restaurant owner and mother who deviates from her husband Richard's (Blair Underwood) rules when it comes to their polyamorous relationship; he predominantly chooses her matches. Sloane struggles with feeling limited without choice, especially when she meets Will (Blair Redford) and forges a new connection — only to be met with slut-shaming comments from different people in her life, including her husband. Wise navigates this performance with warmth, grace, and humour, but balances it with incredibly precise fury when needed — and boy, is it needed. Though Sloane's story is relatively underserved throughout the series, she delivers of the show's most impactful lines about the stigma, guilt and shame around desire: "If [it] makes me a bad person, even if it makes me the worst person, I still want what I want."
The character of Indiana homemaker Lina is brought to life with soft vulnerability by Gilpin. Lina is left wanting due to the lack of intimacy in her marriage, and starts to seek it elsewhere as desire starts to eat at her. Additionally, she harbours intense, complicated feelings for her high school boyfriend, who neglected her after she was raped as a teenager.
Lina's friendship with writer Gia (a character played by Woodley and based on Taddeo, who is expanded upon considerably in the TV series) is fraught, intense, and dysfunctional — a source of support but also codependence. Woodley's Gia is compelling, as she navigates grief from losing her parents at a young age, as well as other fertility and health issues while fighting to finish her book before she runs out of money. Her portrayal of these issues is important, and devastating at points, but ultimately detracts from the stories of the three women that Taddeo so carefully and artfully portrayed in her book.
How does the Three Women TV adaptation hold up?
In the book, Taddeo switches perspectives between chapters to hear from the different women, but in the show, the hour-long episodes make the switching difficult to follow and for the viewer to feel close to each story. Each woman’s account requires time and sensitivity, and these jarring roadblocks don't allow time to sit with the complexities of their sex lives. A key issue with Three Women is honouring the dramatisation of these true stories without veering into documentary territory, or stretching out the narrative too much. Three Women is, unfortunately, at times guilty of the latter.
It makes sense to flesh out more of Taddeo’s book in a 10-episode TV series, but it also results in us spending episodes away from each story, meaning narratives as intense as Maggie's disappear from our screen for too long. Maggie's story explores a much darker area of grooming, consent, and abuse. We witness her teacher's use of love-bombing and manipulation in haunting scenes in episode 8 (fittingly named "Twilight"), where the show explores the role of novels like Stephenie Meyer's romanticise abusive power dynamics.
We also see the appalling ways that survivors are treated when they report such abuse, with Maggie being asked what she wore when she was around Knodel, as well as endless interrogations around her own morality. Like the 2020 TV series A Teacher, which also offered a nuanced portrayal of teacher-student grooming, Maggie's story stands as a poignant example of how feelings of desire can be manipulated.
Three Women covers myriad aspects of female health issues, sexuality, and desire on screen
That being said, while the pacing and characterisation choices might detract from the wider story, and the show is still ultimately limited in whose story gets to be told, Three Women does try to cover more variation on the female sexual experience than shows that precede it.
Through the series' many, many sex scenes, we see examples of stealthing (an act of sexual violence when someone either lies about putting a condom on or removes it without the other person's permission), period sex, as well as masturbation. It brings into sharp relief the acute, overwhelming nature of desire, causing us to reflect on the ways that society often shames women for these feelings. By seeing these cravings up close, as well as the way women are often violated by men's desire, we are confronted with the realities of the female sexual experience – both the liberating and the damaging.
When it comes to the duty Three Women pays to the stories told about women's bodies, we also see the debilitating impact of endometriosis pain and the dismissive nature of both Lina's husband and medical professionals about it. We also see Sloane's grappling with an eating disorder as well as the aftermath of a miscarriage.
So often, the stories told around women’s bodies, as well as on-screen portrayals of female desire, feel either sanitised, romanticised, or one-dimensional, leaving out the nuance, messiness, and guilt that come with living in a patriarchal society. Three Women hits back against this norm.
Three Women is ultimately an empowering watch
What's refreshing about Three Women isn't just its close look at so many areas of the sexual and desire spectrums for women, but also its focus on different women's walks of life. While Sex and the City and Girls, for example, portrayed sexual exploration from a specifically metropolitan, New York City-centric, white point of view, Taddeo's characters are based on real-life women from middle parts of America, including North Dakota and Indiana. The result is a more holistic portrayal of women's sex lives — though it must be pointed out, three of the four lead actors are white women.
Ultimately, Three Women is about feeling heard and hearing others. All three women express the empowerment they feel at telling their story to someone, and Gia is empowered by hearing them. As Sloane tells Gia, "I'm tired of stories of women not winning."
It's debatable whether any of the women "win" in a wider sense – but perhaps their stories being told, and the people the TV series will touch as a result, is a victory in itself.
How to watch: Three Women is now streaming on Starz.
If you have experienced sexual abuse, call the free, confidential National Sexual Assault hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or access the 24-7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
If you feel like you’d like to talk to someone about your eating behavior, text "NEDA" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected with a trained volunteer or visit the National Eating Disorder Association website for more information.
