Tag Archives: Sex Abuse

Lessons In A Life Adrift

Ian McEwan’s Lessons opens with a piano teacher groping her student. She is 25 years old, and the boy is 11. Her cold fingers pinch the inside of his upper thigh and travel up his shorts to his underwear. As is typical, the victim blames himself. He’s newly arrived at his English boarding school and misses his mother tremendously. He’s textbook, and Miriam begins grooming him.

Roland is 14 when the Cuban Missile Crisis happens. Fear and loneliness compel him to ride a bike to Miriam’s house in the nearby village. She doesn’t seem surprised when he shows up unannounced. Roland is escorted upstairs to her bedroom, and Miriam tells him what she expects. As if he is a child. Because he is. After they have sex, he is even more under her control. “She had always frightened him. He had not forgotten how cruel she could be. Now it was more complicated, it was worse and he had made it worse.”

Over the next two years, Miriam manipulates Roland. She is always the teacher, and he is always the pupil. His schoolwork suffers. He loses touch with friends. The night before his sixteenth birthday Miriam tells Roland they will be traveling to Scotland in the morning to get married. This scares him more than the Cuban Missile Crisis did. When he flees, Miriam yells “You’ll spend the rest of your life looking for what you’ve had here.”

She’s not wrong. The trauma from this relationship has “rewired his brain.” He drops out of school. He floats from one job to another, from one relationship to another. Finally, in his thirties, he meets Alyssa. They get married and have a son, but the marriage falls apart.

Alyssa dreams of being her generation’s greatest writer, but she’s sinking. Being a wife and mother is suffocating. She can’t be the writer she wants to be so she leaves. Years later, she writes novels and they’re brilliant. Roland wonders how he could have been married to a genius and not realized it. Is Miriam to blame? Is he still a victim?

Roland’s life story (from the 1950s to 2020) is deftly told. McEwan is a deeply humane writer, and he creates fascinating characters with complex motivations. The women are far more interesting than the men, but this shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Shakespeare or women.

McEwan is generous and empathetic with all his characters – even Miriam. That is a testament to his genuine skill as a writer. But there’s a problem. Roland does eventually (late in middle age) confront Miriam. This is a pivotal moment, and its resolution is humane only if Miriam hasn’t abused other children. And we have no reason for believing this is the case. What if she is a serial pedophile? The fact that no one thinks to ask this, especially after all the scandals uncovered during the 1980s and later, is a glaring problem in an otherwise masterfully told story.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Look at What’s Happening in France – Don’t Look Here

On rare occasions a powerful and secretive institution may become so corrupt, it should not be trusted to police itself. Fortunately that theory doesn’t apply to the Catholic Church.

Look at what’s happening in France. In October 2021, the Bishops Conference recognized that the Catholic Church was guilty of allowing the sexual abuse of children to become “systemic” after an independent investigation found an estimated 216,000 children were victims of abuse by the clergy since 1950. See! They acknowledge there might be a problem – though they haven’t really said what they plan to do about it. But, obviously, they can continue to police themselves.

And let’s not get distracted by (what some would call) a scandal. France is an isolated incident. As is Ireland, Australia, Germany, and all the others. In the United States, the Catholic Church has been far more honest. A few dioceses have filed bankruptcy so some assets can be sold for the benefit of victims (assuming there are any). Now when I say assets, I certainly don’t mean all assets. Just those the public knows about.

So have faith. More importantly, please continue to send us money. We actually want your money more than we want your faith.

And don’t worry about these peccadillos. I like that word because it sounds like peck of dildos – so it’s funny and we can all laugh and maybe change the topic. Perhaps to more words that sound like sex toys.

Father Orifice (pronounced Orifeechee), Chaplain of Pungent Sound Technical College of Technology