Scene – in a Deli – 20-year-old Gwendoline, 42-year-old millionaire Brit James; James is about to explain his collection of high-class erotica – Allen Jones paintings and so on – to Gwendoline.
“You were saying …?” I blinked at him, and took a huge messy bite out of my cheeseburger.
“They are a kind of statement – I think we all have feelings that we rarely avow, that it is politically incorrect to avow, even dangerous to avow; and I think that it is healthier, better for everybody if we can avow, and talk about those feelings – cruelty, power, fear, domination, submission. Even act them out, as it were.”
I looked down and viciously speared a pair of innocent French fries. “So, objectifying, reifying, alienating, enslaving women, using girls as footstools, putting girls in chains, exhibiting blindfolded girls, reveling in damsels in distress – the possessive fetishizing totem-like petrifying patriarchal imperialist power-hungry power-anxious sadistic defensive male gaze in action,” I looked up and smiled my sweetest smile, “And so on, and so on … Those are the feelings?”
He was looking at me steadily, something that might be a smile hovering on his lips. Without taking my eyes from his, I stuck the French fries in my mouth and chewed sloppily, noisily.
“You are a very dangerous young woman.”
“Oh?” I again gave him the look from under my eyebrows; the look Kate said has the power of the Medusa. It can turn men to stone, she said, or kill them dead outright, or drive them to drink. She said it, late one night, when we were both drunk, sprawled on my bed, lying on our sides facing each other; she was joking – and stroking my thigh and tickling my belly, and I was running my fingers through her hair, and kissing her earlobe and forehead, then her lips, very carefully, very slowly.
“Yes. You are dangerous.”
“Hmm.” I chewed. “We all like to be looked at, I suppose. Well, most of us, if the look is friendly. If it recognizes that you are there, I mean, that you exist, that you are you.”
“A subject, not an object.”
“Yes. Precisely.”
“I-thou.”
“Yes, you got it.”
“Authenticity.”
“Absolutely. Two-way, mutual authenticity.”
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/mjdh0j/the_shaming_of_gwendoline_c_by_gwendoline_clermont