Loving Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller as a woman

I've just finished Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. I wish I could give it one star and five stars at the same time. I don't think I've felt this way before about any book.

I read the first 10 pages 6 or 7 years ago, sure that I wouldn't pick it up again because of how misogynistic and pretentious it seemed to be. Still, those few pages I read made a great impression on me and I found myself thinking about those sentences often.

Tropic of Cancer has been a strange read to me. It feels utterly demaining towards women (refering to them as c***s) but, at the same time, (and perhaps this is just copium for me, only wanting to justify how much I love Miller's prose elsewhere) it feels like he had a special insight into toxic masculinity, into society's obession with sex and how often it is tied to bringing down/dominating the object of attraction.

In his attempt of trying to put into a book the "unspeakable", the taboo, the worst thoughts of men… I find something touching and humane. As if he was startled more than most at the pits of humanity and it shook him so much he couldn't just let it go.

The sordid (true or not) tales in Tropic of Cancer seem "passé" now, or so I've read in many reviews. Isn't that the point? Miller didn't "invent" a new depth of depravity. He just portrayed it. And the fact that we can now read those lines, that violence in sex, and feel nothing… Isn't that his point exactly? Whatever scandal his writings provoked weren't because what he said was new, but because it was said at all. I don't believe humans 100 years ago were more pure than they are now.

Despite all the allegedly autobiographical horribleness in Tropic of Cancer, I can't bring myself to hate Henry Miller. And I don't know if the reason is because I feel I can find empathy between his lines or because I want to believe I can.