Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
“Right. I’ll start,” I offered. “I’m Charlotte McAlister. Not ma’am. Never ma’am. Lottie to family and friends. Which means Lottie to you. Lottie Mac to the world. Queen of the Corvette calendar and headliner at Smithie’s strip club. You got a problem with me stripping?”
One head shake.
“You think I’m downtrodden and promoting the objectification of women?” I asked.
He looked around the room briefly.
This answered part one of my question.
He looked to me.
“Yes.”
That answered part two.
But wait.
Whoa.
“Really?” I asked.
His mouth said nothing.
His face repeated, “Yes.”
“I’m not, you know. I can do what I want with my body, including using it to make money,” I stated.
“True,” he muttered.
“And I’m a woman.” I jerked my head his way. “You are very much not. So I think that’s my call to make.”
“Where does it go from there?” he asked.
“Where does what go from there?” I asked back.
“You take your clothes off for money. And then where does it go from there?”
I felt my eyes get squinty. “Where do you think it goes?”
A shrug of his massive shoulders which I was pretty sure wafted a breeze through the room.
I still got what he was saying.
“So me stripping means I’m in some way responsible for a man’s bad behavior,” I translated the shoulder shrug verbally. “Because, you know, me stripping means men can think of women on the whole as nothing but sex objects, if they want them to or not, and further on from that, they can treat them as sex objects, whether we want to be treated that way or not.”
Mo didn’t confirm.
His look did.
“That’s bullshit,” I told him.
He silently disagreed with me.
“And it’s manthink,” I informed him.
This made him look amused.
And again I wanted to climb him like a tree.
Those silver eyes dancing and his mouth quirking an eighth of an inch up at the ends?
Damn.
We totally had a problem here.
In fact, several of them.
But the one I wasn’t going to get into right then was me thinking about how badly I wanted to treat him like a sex object.
“You know, men get drunk a lot,” I pointed out. “Women do too. They get drunk alone, among only men, or only women, or mixed. It happens millions of times every day and every night. And does every one of those millions upon millions of men get drunk and then go out and perpetrate a sexual assault on a woman?”
His amusement vanished.
“No,” I answered for him. “Because to do that, they have to have the monster in them. Bottom line. You either have it in you to do that, and thank God the vast majority don’t, or you don’t. It has not one thing to do with booze. Or drugs. Or what a woman wears. Or what she doesn’t. Or how she behaves. She has absolutely no responsibility at all for a man harming her. A monster does that because he’s a monster. He just hides it when he’s sober. But when he’s weakened, that monster comes out. And that’s it. The end.”
His big body shifted slightly, but he made no response.
Though I read in that it was his response.
He was with me.
“And the same with any kind of bad behavior a man commits,” I continued. “If he harasses a woman. If he beats her. I’m sick and tired of men, and women for that matter, blaming women for the bad behavior of men. That said, there’s something that helps to make this never ending. You know what perpetuates this kind of thing?”
He shook his head.
“Locker room talk and no man in that room having the balls to say, ‘You know what, that shit does not make you sound cool. It makes you sound like a loser who can’t get laid by a real woman. Knock it off,’” I told him. “When men allow men to talk shit about women, that reduces women to sex objects. It gives the impression all the men in that room are down with reducing women, and with that validation, some men carry on with that, the asshole ones, and they do things directly in an attempt to reduce women. And since it’s men doing it, they have no clue what it’s really doing. Reducing them.”
Mo agreed with me.
He didn’t say it.
I saw it.
Considering he communicated his response (his way), and even though I liked he had that response, I kept talking.
“Turn this around, what do you think of a woman who goes to a Chippendales show? Thunder Down Under? Is that about skanky guys who are probably addicted to drugs and have no other choice in how to make a living?” I asked.
“Skanky, maybe. The rest, no,” he muttered.
I felt my lips twitch but kept at him.
“Though, women who go to those shows are thought of as randy or out-of-control bachelorettes with their bridesmaids or desperate. Why the contradiction?” I demanded.