Lena Dunham, actress, television writer, and disturbing memoirist, is displeased that a National Review writer quoted passages from her book and characterized some of the episodes described therein as representing the sexual abuse of her younger sister, Grace. Her lawyers have threatened to sue the conservative website Truth Revolt for subsequently doing much the same thing.

In her memoir, Dunham describes, among other things, casually masturbating in bed next to her younger sister (when not reading Ann Sexton books or watching old Saturday Night Live reruns), with whom she shared a bed until she was 17, handling her toddler sister’s genitals (“I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina”), bribing her for physical affection (“Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying”), etc. “This was,” she writes matter-of-factly, “within the spectrum of things that I did.” No doubt it was; the question is whether it should have been.

Dunham’s response to the criticism was predictable (and, as it turns out, infectious) outrage, while her sister’s defensive reaction—“Heteronormativity deems certain behaviours harmful, and others ‘normal’; the state and media are always invested in maintaining that,” via Twitter—is the pitch-perfect product of a Brown miseducation, right down to the affected British spelling.

Among those who took up the mantle of defending Dunham was the television host Jimmy Kimmel, who wrote that the suggestion that a “seven-year-old girl is even capable of ‘molestation’ is vile.” (“Molestation” is his word, not ours; neither National Review nor Truth Revolt ever used the word “molestation,” so it is unclear what Kimmel is quoting.) But in any event, contrary to assertions of that worthy legal scholar/comedian, New York routinely investigates sex-abuse cases involving seven-year-old offenders, though the cases typically are handled in family court rather than in criminal court; Nevada has charged an eight-year-old with sexually abusing a sibling; the state of Delaware has a nine-year-old on its registry of sex offenders.

A main point of the article was that Dunham’s cloistered, oddball upbringing has left her utterly alienated from ordinary standards of conduct or expectations regarding the consequences of personal behavior. It is safe to assume that if the youngest daughter of a family some eight or nine miles uptown from the Dunhams’ multi-million-dollar Tribeca apartment had reported having her vagina “carefully spread open” by an older sibling, then the result likely would have been, at the very least, endless family-court hearings and social-worker supervision, and possible loss of custody of the child. Dunham’s critics on the left, who have been surprising in number, have deployed the voguish language of “white privilege” to describe her inability to appreciate what exactly was wrong with that behavior. We are not comfortable with that particular phrase here, inasmuch as it conflates race with a cast of mind, as though moral blindness were a hereditary trait, but the underlying sentiment is approximately correct.

The latitudinarian tendencies of elite culture are a problem for elites, but they are a more acute problem for others in that they contribute powerfully to setting social expectations for individuals and families of more modest means. Dunham’s memoir is, wittingly or not, a manifesto for cultural and family dysfunction; that she cannot understand it as such is evidence for the depth and breadth of that dysfunction.