I'm now about 2/3 of the way through Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan and ugh. Like, it's a cool mystery and has some neat scifi ideas in it. But I can't handle the Extremely Male Gaze™ shit.

Like, at first, I thought it was maybe trying to make a point about dissociation of having a new body and it's weird hormones doing weird things and how distracting it was. If that was true, it was a bit ham-fisted and over-gleeful, but, like, I get the point.

But now, most other dissociative things have stopped being mentioned and we're still hearing about women's bodies.

For instance, the main character and a lady cop were investigating some shit together and got jumped by a team of hit men. We're given to understand that they're both pretty serious operators and as such, there's a shoot-out, but they handle themselves OK with minor injury. But then they notice one of the hit men is strapped with explosives, so they flee the building before he blows it up, narrowly escaping. After, of course, the cops show up and the EMS and there's a circus as you'd expects. The lady cop got burned on her back and so the main character is waiting around for her to finish with the EMS to talk to her.

As she walks over he notices that she's wearing a new t-shirt with some generic cop slogan on it, since her other shirt got wrecked, you know, as makes sense. But then he notices that her breasts are "moving" underneath it (like, writhing of their own accord or…?). The way it's written itsn't, like, "I was uncomfortably aware of how her breasts moved under her new shirt," which would still be a bit weird, but at least would underscore that he's not really wanting to think of her that way (and there's a plot point that he's not wanting to think of her that way).