88 ELLECANADA.COM
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IVELisa Taddeo
is re-evaluating our
relationship with sex.
WE LIVE IN an era of TMI (as I write
this, KUWTK is milking the Jordyn
Woods scandal), yet unedited truths about
women and our desires are few and far
between in the cultural narrative. Lisa
Taddeo i s t r y i ng to cha nge t hat. For eight
years, the American journalist (she has
written for the likes of ELLE, Esquire and
Glamour) travelled across the United States
interviewing women about their sex lives,
asking them about the kinds of things most
of us wouldn’t even tell our oldest friends.
“There were hundreds of hours of tape and
thousands of text messages and emails,” she
says. “I drove with them to the places where
they were meeting lovers; I hung out with
their kids.” The result is Three Women,
a look into the sex and emotional lives of
three very different, very real women.
There’s Sloane, a well-off restaurateur and
Shan Boodram
wants to teach women how
to own their dating lives.
IT IS A truth universally acknowledged
that dating in 2019 is...awful. (Seriously,
there are stats: A Pew Research Center
study found that 40 percent of millennials
think dating is harder now than it was for
previous generations.) Enter The Game of
Desire, the newest book from L.A.-based
Canadian sexologist and YouTube star
Shan Boodram. “You can either be one of
mother in Rhode Island who has sex with
other men and women because it gets her
husband off; Maggie, from North Dakota,
who had an affair with her married high-
school English teacher and is still dealing
with the fallout years later; and Lina, a
Midwestern homemaker in an unhappy
marriage who is cheating on her husband.
Taddeo says she identified with Lina the
most. “She was the rawest—she was in pain
[because of what she was doing]. But also
the way she found herself in those sexual
moments felt really real to me,” she says.
“I’ve had a lot of moments like that [in my
life]—both the pain and the excitement.”
T h at’s wh at Ta ddeo so ex p er t ly c apt u res:
that desire is full of contradictions and,
most importantly, that we shouldn’t judge
ourselves or other women for having these
feelings. “There is a severe judgment of
desire [in our society],” she says. “I hope
this book is a starting point for other people
to tell their own stories.” Consider your
next girls night a safe space to tell all.
CARLI WHITWELL
Sex, freedom and
self-delusion are
explored in these
compelling and
empowering new books.
WO RD S
with
FRIENDS
BOOKS