2023-05-02 15:52:05
“The Silent Pain of Straightforward In-Out Sex”
American best-selling author Lisa Taddeo
Source: Diane von Schoen / Piper Verlag
Lisa Taddeo is considered a keen observer of female desire. For the American bestselling author, women’s sexuality always seems alienated, mediated, never direct. When a model dies, it’s cause for celebration because “there is one less beautiful girl”.
Dhe only currency that counts for a woman in this world: Not being young and beautiful, but younger and more beautiful than the others. Whether it is because of desire or the need to be recognized is just as irrelevant as the question of whether the man she is yearning for is already taken, whether she really loves him or just his photo on a dating site.
This description fits every one of the women Lisa Taddeo’s short stories are about. The American best-selling author has found her subject and doesn’t seem to see the need to deviate from it ever again. As in her first, non-fictional report “Three Women”, which immediately topped the international bestseller lists, which explored the sexual experiences of three women, and the following novel “Animal”, the American explores the complicated in her first volume of short stories “Ghost Lover”. Terrain of unfulfilled female desire.
There’s the woman who receives an award for inventing a new dating app and recaps her love life during her acceptance speech. There is the woman observing her surviving husband from the afterlife – of course he is not alone, for such a story should have been told by someone other than Taddeo. There’s the 42-year-old who wants to rip off her fiancé from a 26-year-old simply because she can. What else does she train excessively for every day?
The fiancée, on the other hand, thinks about having sex with a cowboy even on her wedding day, and she can’t forget it. There’s the woman who rejoices when a model dies because there is now “one less beautiful girl” to compete with. She later has a one-night stand with an actor who then rips her off financially.
The quality of the stories varies. Some, like “Ghost Lover” and “Forty Two” appear carefully constructed, others thoughtlessly thrown onto paper. Sex – more precisely: female sexuality – does not seem to get along without metaphors here, it is always alienated, mediated, never direct. “She had sex once when she was forty-one and it had chopped the soft insides out of the shell of her heart,” it says.
Or: “He felt inside you like a soft piece of iron, plain and rugged. The silent pain of no frills in-out sex.” The fact that one looks in vain for no frills in Taddeo seems to be the program. Nor does one find salvation in the orgiastic climax. The author’s worldview is more cynical than Sally Rooney’s (just a little), but not as radically poetic as Ottessa Moshfegh’s.
obsession with aging
Perhaps the biggest problem is not so much Taddeo’s inconsistency in terms of narrative quality, but rather its consistency in character characterization. At first, the harshness of the female gaze portrayed by Taddeo seems refreshing, but after playing through the game for several stories (first you, then first, then third-person), one wonders, first of all, whether the author can’t do anything else, and secondly, whether the obsession with aging actually describes the basic dilemma of being a woman as accurately as the 43-year-old wants us to believe. Do you feel understood because someone is finally saying the unfeministically incorrect thing that you hardly think about yourself and immediately suppress? Or is such a focus more depressing because it unintentionally reinforces the problem itself rather than an awareness of the problem?
Readers who don’t scrutinize every woman they meet for their potential to be sexual competition may find Taddeo’s thinking constricting. However, one should not miss a short, adventurous excursion into a world beyond the poetically well-known in-out.
#Lisa #Taddeo #Silent #Pain #Straightforward #InOut #Sex