Does
this help?
The woman in this story, having experienced true horror (Her line, "All of it," presumably answering the unspoken question "How much of it was real?" Recall the conversation with Kevin and the protagonist's sense of superiority to those who are titillated by the idea of the sadistic sexual content "actually happening.") is not empowered by it, but is left permanently victimized and permanently fetishized by her role as the survivor. Instead of taking up a weapon and facing the monster, her own power (the beads) is first used BY the monster to abuse other women, then later taken up by herself (or possibly a doppelganger, the monster in another guise) to further abuse women, and finally appropriated by the voyeuristic male gaze (personified in our protagonist) as a fetish object. She doesn't get to keep them; one way or another, they're used against her. (Compare, respectively, reactionary anti-feminist politics, women who
distance themselves from the "bad girls" or who say, "
but I'm not really a feminist," and male "white knights" who like to talk about how much they
enjoy dating "empowered" women. In each case, the point is missing or misused.)
The story is in some ways a counterargument against the idea that the "final girl" in horror film idiom is secretly feminist; in this story, the whole horror fandom is indicted in exploiting her, leaving her broken and in pain, and it is implied that there is something
fundamental about this exploitation that makes it inevitable (the language about infection, about how even those who say they don't obsess about
Kaleidoscope can't help but focus on it, even if only subconsciously.) Our protagonist, for example, in confronting her, comes to realize that even though he "loves" her, his need for her is just as damaging, just as dehumanizing as the crude sexual objectification he derides in his fellow fans.
Consider the opening scene. A kaleidoscope is a lens for fragmenting and reorganizing one's perceptions. The opening of "Kaleidoscope" suggests making an abused woman herself into our "lens" for viewing what follows. However, in the end, all this does is dehumanize her in another way. No one ever sees her as a person who has been damaged, who is struggling to survive; she is always a symbol of something else, even to those who want to take her side, who want to "reclaim" her.