I am ambivalent about a book

I am currently reading Tanith Lee’s The Gods Are Thirsty (1996), which is about the French Revolution--I wanted a counterpoint to all the French royalists in Broster’s books. I've read a fair amount of her books before, but it was years ago, before I started writing myself. But wow, her style is instantly recognizable. Often with historical books I think about whether the style is modern or not, but her style is so much her own that she just transcends that. The main character is Camille Desmoulins, and the book occasionally slips into first person narration for him, but otherwise it's an omniscient POV that dips into people's heads, vividly paints the setting, or even does occasional authorial asides--though stylistically still far from the old-fashioned sort of omniscient POV. I wish more modern books would do omniscient POV! Lee often writes dark fantasy, which gives this a dark fantasy flavor as well in my mind, though as yet it is entirely realistic and as far as I can tell follows history closely.

...and then there is the aspect which makes me ambivalent. This is the most male-gazey book I've read in a long time, where women are relevant as objects of love and/or lust. For example, in one scene, two men go to an alluring beautiful prostitute together, and in a deeply horny male POV scene they fuck her one after the other, where she apparently comes both times and one of the men comments that she is like clockwork. Obviously it is realistic for 18th century men to buy sex from women! But, like...what does she think about her night's work? And for that matter, what does she think about the revolution? Who knows. There is a brief glimpse of women being active in the march on Versailles, but that's like two sentences. Where is Olympe de Gouges? Where are the salonnières and working-class women who were involved in the revolution? To be sure, maybe that will come, since I've only read a fourth of the book so far, but that's still 125 dense pages. Hmm.