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?”