“EXPRESS YOURSELF, DON’T REPRESS YOURSELF/Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.” The opening lines from Madonna’s song “Human Nature” are pretty simple. And yet when it was released in 1995, the song wasn’t just a song; it was an artist’s slap back at her detractors. It was a battle cry, a lullaby, a lyric deposition on sex and a woman’s right to it. A J’accuse on a woman’s right to take risks. The song was a stance against the then socially accepted norms about women in an era before #MeToo, before safe spaces, before wokeness. Before all of that, there was Madonna, providing women with one way to think about “it.”
And now, with her debut book Three Women, journalist Lisa Taddeo offers another way. Three Women is a battle cry too,…
