Essay: Patriarchy and the Women Who Love It

On Alice Munro

Andrea Skinner. Photo by Steve Russell Toronto Star

tw: child sexual abuse, sexual asssault

Author and Nobel Laureate Alice Munro chose her husband over the daughter he sexually abused. Munro knew about and believed the abuse had happened. But she chose to stay with and protect the abuser.

This is not an essay about how to be a good mother or one that insists that mothers subsume and sacrifice their lives for their children. It is an essay on how easily women become footsoldiers of the patriarchy, fame and wealth notwithstanding.

Alice Munro was famous and wealthy and chose to stay with a sexual predator. In so many narratives of abuse, including child sexual abuse, we know that mothers stay with an abuser not out of choice but because they cannot afford to leave or because they are coerced to stay. 

Some mothers simply do not believe their children when they disclose they’ve been sexually abused by an adult, be it the mother’s husband or partner, a brother or another male relative. It is more often than not a male abuser. 

Alice Munro was famous and wealthy and believed that her husband, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually abused her daughter, Andrea Skinner, and still chose to stay with him.

This is not an essay about how to be a good mother or one that insists that mothers subsume and sacrifice their lives for their children. It is an essay on how easily women become footsoldiers of the patriarchy, fame and wealth notwithstanding.

In an essay she wrote last weekend detailing the abuse, Skinner said that Fremlin had sexually abused her in 1976, when she was 9. Skinner told her biological father, Jim Munro  at the time (with whom she lived) and he chose not to tell Alice Munro.

Worse, he continued sending Skinner to spend time with Munro and Fremlin.

Jim Munro  knew he was sending his daughter to a house where she had been sexually assaulted. He was complicit. He enabled abuse.

Again and again, the adults betrayed Andrea. 

And she was not the only girl that Fremlin abused.

In fact, and worse still–there are so many instances of “And worse still…” long before Skinner had told her mother of what Fremlin had done to her, Fremlin himself had shown Munro who he was and still she stayed with him.

“When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type,” Skinner wrote.”In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as ‘prudish’ as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing.”

Worse still, was Munro’s reaction when Skinner–who was by then in her 20s–told her mother in a letter what Fremlin had done to her.

“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity," Skinner wrote. 

Worse still, was Fremlin’s reaction. 

“He told my mother he would kill me if I ever went to the police, and wrote letters to my family, blaming me for the abuse. He described my nine-year-old self as a “homewrecker,” and said my family’s failure to intervene suggested they agreed with him. He also threatened retribution,” Skinner wrote.

Fremlin said Skinner, had “invaded (his)  bedroom for sexual adventure.” Skinner had asked him if she could sleep in the spare bed in the room he shared with her mother, who was traveling at the time.

Remember: Skinner was nine.

In spite of the letters and his threats, Munro–who had briefly moved out of the house she shared with Fremlin after Skinner had told her what he had done to her daughter–returned to Fremlin and stayed with him until he died in 2013.

Worse still–I told you there are so many–Munro said that she had been “‘told too late,; she loved (Fremlin) too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men,” Skinner wrote. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. And there are some women who benefit from it and become its footsoldiers to continue to benefit from it, including famous and wealthy women, like Alice Munro. 

I know how patriarchy socializes women to police other women who expose sexual assault. They silence you because you’re “making us look bad,”–us being the family, the community, etc. 

The first time a man sexually assaulted me, I was 15. And it was two different men, one of them a policeman, minutes apart as I performed the rituals of the Haj, the pilgrimage that is the fifth pillar of Islam. I didn’t–couldn’t, actually–tell anyone for years, because I was so ashamed that something so awful and dirty had happened to me during such a sacred ritual and at such a holy site, Makkah–the holiest site for Muslims and the place towards which Muslim pray five times a day. 

It broke me and began what I can only describe as my years-long attempt to hide my body from men. And a years-long hatred for them.

I didn’t–couldn’t–tell anyone for years because I didn’t think anyone would believe me.

“I have been afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened,” Skinner wrote in the letter. 

When I finally strung the words together to describe what I had been subjected to, a fellow Egyptian and Muslim woman took me aside to chide me for doing so in front of non-Muslims. 

I’d made us look bad.

I know how patriarchy socializes women to police other women who expose sexual assault. They judge you for “allowing” it to happen to you.

In November, 2011, at triage in the ER after 12 hours of incommunicado detention, first by police at the Interior Ministry and then by military intelligence, where I was blindfolded and interrogated, I explained to a nurse that riot police had beaten me and sexually assaulted me and that I needed my arms to be x-rayed. 

“How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist” she asked me in disgust.

I had a fracture in my left arm (the eventually required surgery) and two fractures in my right hand and needed casts from my wrist to my shoulders in both arms.

Again and again, in the wake of MeToo, we saw women who refused to believe that a man who was their friend, who for them was a good guy, could be for other women a predator. Because he was  “good” to them, they tried to dismiss and silence the women who had exposed how bad he could also be by showing how much harm he had caused

Patriarchy is not men, Patriarchy is a system of oppressions that privileges male dominance. And there are some women who benefit from it and become its footsoldiers to continue to benefit from it, including famous and wealthy women, like Alice Munro. 

Again and again, Alice Munro saw how much harm her husband Gerald Fremlin had caused and continued to choose him. This is not an essay about how to be a good mother, it is an essay about how easily some women, including famous and wealthy ones, footsoldier for the patriarchy.

I have read perhaps just one short story by Munro. Her "legacy" means nothing to me. And it should mean nothing to anyone now learning of her complicity in the sexual abuse of her daughter and other girls.

In fact, her “legacy,” protected the most powerful–Munro–the enabler–and Fremlin–the predator.

“My mother’s fame meant the silence continued,” Skinner says.

I didn’t–couldn’t–tell anyone for years about being sexually assaulted during Haj because I was so ashamed that something so awful and dirty had happened to me during such a sacred ritual and at such a holy site. That shame was never mine to hold. It belongs wholly to the men who assaulted me.

“For so long I’d been telling myself that holding my pain alone had at least helped my family, that I had done the moral thing, contributing to the greatest good for the greatest number,” Andrea Skinner wrote. “Now, I was claiming my right to a full life, taking the burden of abuse and handing it back to Fremlin.”

I told the footsoldier of the patriarchy who had chided me for finally speaking about what had been done to me that I was not the one who was “making us look bad.” It was the men who had sexually assaulted me.

Fuck the patriarchy and fuck its footsoldiers.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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