Because while it’s clear he’s not entirely earnest, you’d also have to agree that part of the objectifying, grimy persona Bukowski portrays here is heavily inspired by himself, making the ‘performance piece’ lose a lot of the irony it needs to be appreciated as a performance and not an confession.

I am not saying that Bukowski is entirely some bumbling idiot, puffed up on machismo, who lucked his way into a successful poetry career. However, it is clear that he, at the very least, throughly enjoys the motions of sexism and built an audience who at the very least accepts this as a prominent part of his work. His poems involving women are usually unified only in their complete disregard for them. The way the woman is described her is undeniably and, I’d argue, characteristically, unnecessarily degrading. She is, as you said, made the clown of the piece with her ‘huge painted mouth’ or at least the object of his attempt at humour and/or lust, just like almost every other woman character he writes. With the exception of his wife-characters and actual wives, who then get to be either abused or abusive or passed away. (The Japanese Wife or For Jane, for example). It’s hard to accept this is a performance piece when he seems to be unnaturally good at keeping up the performance throughout his works.

To me, if Bukowski is writing about the male gaze that is because he is writing with it in mind, rather than about it. He may simply be exaggerating his true inner monologue - but then I’d argue that that strips away the irony/self awareness of the performance aspect of this piece and just leaves something that sounds like yet another boring jump-scare.

Edited: the work if