For years, most of my life, I claimed I’d never been sexually assaulted, and I even believed that was true. I’m angry about it now. And even so, I get it.

“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do—we do it all the time.”

—the last line from Munro’s last book, Dear Life (2013)

I suspect that Alice Munro had been abused herself, most women of her generation and before were [and mostly still are], and she accepted the inevitability of just getting on with life. I’m not making excuses for bad parenting here, but I keep reading younger people and men condemning Munro as if she’d been the abuser herself. She officially found out about the abuse when her daughter was 25. Her ex-husband found out when their daughter was 9 and told no one.

All sympathy with their youngest daughter.

Men got away with stuff like that when I was a girl. People today act as if this sort of appalling behavior is something new. It isn’t. In—forgive me—the patriarchy, men mostly do as they please to the women in their lives. We had as President a man accused by many, many women of assault. Nearly half of voters chose him; the Electoral college installed him. A court of law declared him a rapist, but he’s still on the ballot. So here we are.

It’s nothing new. Women are under enormous pressure to support the men in their lives, even men who behave very badly indeed. The stories we tell support this inequity. My grandmothers, both single mothers, experienced this. In The Philadelphia Story (1940), Katherine Hepburn’s character is blamed by Cary Grant’s character for his alcoholism, her mother for her father’s infidelity. We see it in fiction, this pressure to accept that men will behave badly on occasion, but it is certainly their female partners, wives, daughters, sisters, or students who are to partly blame.

Girls have babies fathered by relatives. Often. Where once it was assumed that inbred children were incredibly rare, we have known from DNA evidence that it’s not so unusual. Fathers, brothers, and uncles have been impregnating the young girls in their families forever. Most articles on the subject deal with the taboo and the genetic implications. Mostly they don’t address the reality that men and boys molest and impregnate the girls in their families more often than anyone wants to admit. That this is rape.

We blame the girl. Munro’s husband Gerald Fremlin blamed his 9 year old step daughter. The fictional Humbert Humbert blamed Delores, who was also a prepubescent child. Delores wasn’t “seduced” as I so often read, she was groomed, and yet… it is “Lolita” who became the dirty wink-wink word, not HH who raped her.

One of my favorite teachers, the man who taught me to write in the 9th grade, was molesting a 7th grader for a long time before he was found out. He was asked to move on; no one brought action; and I didn’t believe the story, considered it cruel gossip. And then years later Gary confirmed what he’d seen, and I had to accept the truth. One of my favorite teachers was a pedophile by any definition, but he also taught me to write a strong essay.

The paradox of this is not lost on me.

Men and boys are pressured to be tough; women and girls are pressured to be silent.

[There was a coach who told his teenage player to piss his pants in front of everyone when asked to leave practice for the bathroom. (The kid did it.) There were three broken collarbones and a broken arm in pre-season, with that same coach. Another coach sent his own son back into the game after a concussion—you can’t legally do that anymore. A security officer followed a high school girl when she tried to escape him by moving out of state. That happened more than once. I learned that a boy found in court to have raped a girl had been placed together in my class—the girl had to come to me to alert me to this. The girl who won a scholarship to a midwest university and then wrote to her mother she was never coming home. I could go on to list the abused girls and boys, whose parents I reported; and nothing was done to stop the abuse. The insistence by a fellow [female] teacher that “sexual harassment” was too imprecise a term to be enforceable. Indecent remarks by adult men about minor students. My frantic phone calls searching for intervention when Child Services was unavailable outside regular weekday business hours. The indiscretion of the local police department. The abuses both boys and especially girls were expected to tolerate while I was a mandatory reporter still astounds me.]

Is it possible for a very young girl to behave in a way that seems like a sexual come-on? Is it possible for the adult in this situation to behave like a decent human being?

Barbra Streisand was critical of the MeToo movement right at the beginning, minimizing the experiences of women abused in the industry. (Something about: it doesn’t last long and then it’s over?) It was clear to me, at least, that this was how she survived early in her career. No one wanted to hear about the “casting couch” except as a punch line. Routine exploitation of girls and young women was a joke. Think about that… it was funny?

When I tried to report an incident where I experienced abuse in 1971, the adult in charge literally curled his lip at me in disgust—disgust at me for talking about it. I understood at that moment that no one was going to hear me, much less do anything to protect me. It was not the first time I’d been sexually harassed or abused, but it was the first and last time I tried to tell about it.

I don’t say any of this to excuse Alice Munro’s failure to leave her husband and stay gone. She was not the custodial parent, but she had a duty to protect her daughter even as and adult child. If she didn’t know, she should have. But it is the attitude of the father that should tell you where we were as a society. He did not tell his ex-wife when he learned what happened to his daughter during her summer vacation; he did not refuse to send his daughter back to her abuser.

That’s it, folks. We used and abused little girls as if it was no big deal, as if it didn’t cripple their understanding of how people should behave for the rest of their lives.

Thank goodness times have changed. Haven’t they changed? We admit it happens and that it shouldn’t and that the adults in charge failed in their responsibilities to protect their children. We are shocked. We condemn their denial. But we’re still blaming the woman more than the man. At least Andrea’s terrible experience isn’t the punchline to her story.

So yes, I am deeply disappointed in Alice Munro for not doing more to support her daughter. The father? The step-father? I could not stop slapping them. (I like to think: stab them in the heart, but I’m really not that kind of person.) Put them both in jail. It’s notable that the step-father admitted guilt and served no prison time. None.

I have been through all the stages of grief over this.

full disclosure: During my MFA program, I wrote my long critical essay about Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung.” The narrative voice describes a long dead poet, and then closes in on her until the story is from the poet’s eyes before abruptly stepping away again. It demonstrates a masterful command of shifting narrative distance. Like many of her early stories, Munro is breaking a rule about how to write a story, and breaking the rule is deliberate and the point of the story.

The “New Criticism” was popularized, in part, to separate author from text, and as a counter to the silencing of voices during “red-scare” bigotry of McCarthyism of the 1950s.

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The New Criticism.—Wikipedia

A cursory review of the private lives of some much-lauded male authors will reveal despicable behavior. Surely, I don’t need to list them all. We might prefer good people wrote the stories we love, but we still often admire the great work, even when the authors were not good people.

Maybe that should change? Or maybe we should accept that sometimes good come from flawed people.

Let those without sin…