Here’s a little-known fact. Opinionators do wake at 3 a.m. after a column has been published and realize that a piece can be incontrovertible and still have missed a target.

I’m referring to last week’s column advising readers not to tar all Austrians with the same brush after the revelations about Josef Fritzl, 73, who kept his daughter Elisabeth in a sunless, nearly airless dungeon beneath his house for 24 years for rape and procreation. I stand by it; damning entire nations is absurd and dangerous.

But relations between men and women in Austria are still a bizarre backwoods matter, as one reader e-mailed to inform me. Thank you for the article, she wrote politely, but I am Austrian-German, and you are wrong. Her traditional upbringing by an authoritarian father and passive mother had scarred her as well as her own children, she said, causing one of her brothers to commit suicide and leaving the other emotionally unable to cope with life.

The Austro-German style, she wrote, is to physically punish or shame children for any transgressions, however minor. Girls are singled out for particularly vicious treatment. Spontaneity, complaining, disobedience, reading too much, playing too enthusiastically, showing feelings, crying, being pretty, all these things are considered criminal in a girl. Her mother once told her that she should take care not to scream during childbirth.

It wasn’t until she found a Greek boyfriend that she observed families who embraced, praised and openly adored their children. This was a revelation to her. Her family’s eventual emigration to Canada was her salvation, she wrote. “I could learn to be an individual true to myself.”

Fritzl’s discipline

After hearing from this courageous woman, I looked at the Fritzl case from a different angle. A man in the now-notorious town of Amstetten named Paul Hörer has told reporters he was great friends with Fritzl for 35 years, calling him a “decent, outgoing and amusing bloke.” But Fritzl was very strict with his children. “I had the impression Josef didn’t like [Elisabeth] as much as his other children. He hit her more (my italics). Every little thing meant she got dealt a few.”

Here in Canada, if we saw a big man repeatedly slapping and beating a little girl, we’d step in, correct? But Hörer was fine with it. The only person who has yet spoken of Fritzl’s abuse of his family was his sister-in-law, Christine, who said she had always hated him for his constant verbal cruelty to his wife Rosemarie, 69. But even she never dared to confront him. That is not what Austrian women of her era do.

Men in suits, and uniforms

Daily news about the case was provided by a panel of six local and regional police officers. A female newspaper columnist had by then made headlines by advising Austrians to take a hard look at their society and the government had already begun planning a PR campaign to restore the international image of what they feared would become known as the “land of dungeons.”

But the panel was all male. It’s as if Austrian women were wiped from sight. Police from the province of Lower Austria, politicians, spokesmen, they were always men. It was men who ruled that Fritzl’s rape conviction would be erased after 15 years, and men who subsequently allowed him to adopt three infants without fanfare. Fritzl had been raping Elisabeth since she was 11; it was male police officers who twice returned her to her father’s custody when she ran away.

It wasn’t until management of the case was taken over by officials in Vienna that women were heard from. The investigating prosecutor is a woman (Fritzl won’t like that) and so is the justice minister. The latter, Maria Berger, was the first one to say that police gullibility had been a factor in a crime that continued uninvestigated for decades. But Vienna isn’t Austria. The humane Austrian novelist Thomas Glavinic wrote a column in The Guardian describing the male setup in Austria. He referred to Amstetten; to the 2006 escape of Natascha Kampusch, held in a dungeon for eight years; to the village mayor poisoned by a praline filled with strychnine; and to the bomb-building neo-Nazi who blew up four Roma in the Burgenland region in 1995.

    “Initially, it might look as if there is no common basis to these cases. But these crimes reveal much about Austrian society. As far as we know, all were committed by men, by loners living in the countryside. Almost a quarter of the eight million Austrians live in Vienna. The rest spend their lives in smaller towns, hamlets or villages.” It is a strangulating life under religious rule. As Edna O’Brien once wrote in a novel about rural Ireland, “I would like to live in a city because if you scream someone can hear you.”

The gap in pay between men and women is more than 30 per cent, one of the largest in the EU. Statistics show that Fritzl’s broken wife is typical of Austrian women her age. She did not finish school and was jobless when she married; she would have been socially and economically doomed without marriage. Whether this affected her ability to connect the dots in her husband’s odd behaviour remains to be discovered.

It’s a man’s world

In this light, that all-male police panel began to look more sinister. In Austria, women are excluded from public life. What worries me is that no one notices it. And then it becomes apparent in the New World, too. The Austrian panel was a “wall of men,” the phrase I use to describe Canadian journalism and politics among other things. The June issue of The Walrus is almost entirely written by men, from letters to the editor to columns to features to cartoons to fiction to book and art reviews to the crossword. I subscribe, but am struck by the Aspergian social inadequacy of this indeed walrusy magazine. The May 5 issue of The New Yorker is equally all-male. The Wall Street Journal has just named the top 20 influential business thinkers, not a woman among them. And of course Hillary Clinton is vilified by the media. I think she deserves to be, but not because she is a woman.

These are all spores of the same fungus, the continuing unwillingness of many men (and many women) to allow women equal power. Elisabeth Fritzl’s unspeakable life is merely a grotesque extension of a common tendency. It still reigns in Austria, less so here, but it’s only a question of degree.

This Week

Joshua Ferris’s novel Then We Came to the End is about office life, never a subject easy to make entertaining. Canada’s Douglas Coupland has achieved it; so has the British novelist Michael Bracewell in Present Tense. But Ferris, who spent three years in an ad agency, is a master of commonplace dialogue thick with meaning, which is what you have in an office. His message, and it’s a painful one, is that all offices are the same. Doesn’t matter where you work.

This has forced me to confront another truth. We are told that working from home is an antidote to traditional office life. It’s not. The street where you live is just another series of cubicles with the same cast of characters: The quietly desperate, the alcoholic, the child molester, the gossip, the nice guy, the young grandma, the about-to-go-postal. And then there’s me thinking, “I have got to get out of here,” only to learn that it is literally possible, but not figuratively, not ever.