In a short story by Mary Gordon, a wife gives her husband a short story to read. The story makes him think of another woman from his past, and he weeps from the remembered loss. Although she comforts him, the wife feels betrayed by his revelation and his failure to protect her from this intrusive knowledge. After he has fallen asleep, she moves to a spare bed in another room. “She lies on top of the spread, stretching her limbs as far away from her body as she could. Her sex was open – utterly vulnerable, she thought.”

In this simple image we see a woman enacting a nonverbal gesture that would be known only to a woman in privacy with herself. There is no male gaze to prompt, validate, or claim her. She spreads her legs for herself, using her sexual body to express her feelings of vulnerability and betrayal. The gesture is potentially sexual, but not necessarily so. It just depends upon who is looking. A woman does not express herself apart from androcentric culture, but she is also not the same body for herself that she is when portrayed through the androcentric gaze. That is, there are always at least two stories to negotiate when reading women's fiction, the story about life in a patriarchy and the responsive female voice inside the story about patriarchy. Both stories are authentic to women's writing – living in relationship to androcentric norms and claiming distance at the same time.