What this tells us about Italian feminism isn’t clear, but it’s certainly ugly.

There’s something under-ripened about the state of feminism in my country. In other countries, to proclaim oneself a feminist is taken to mean that you are a person who defends the rights of women to live as they like, to have equal rights and opportunities, and to be in charge of their sexuality. In Italy, those who call themselves feminists treat what is supposed to be a fundamental component of one’s worldview as a sort of battle between high-school cliques: I will fight for your rights — as long as we’re friends. If a sexual assault victim has been unfriendly, we will side with the next one, the one who answers our phone calls. Our sympathies are determined not by who has suffered but by who has invited us to her dinner parties.

I’ve seen this face of Italian “feminism” before, in other episodes, and it has a genuinely stifling quality. The debate, for instance, over whether surrogacy should stay illegal in Italy — a topic worthy of serious, engaged discussion — long ago devolved into something more like a catfight. In the case of Ms. Argento, there are plenty of real discussions to be had: about the line between a relationship gone wrong and harassment, about the statute of limitations, about power plays and workplace relationships. We are not having those discussions.

Perhaps it has something to do with the broader place of women in Italian public life, where there’s a sense that we have to fight for scraps; there’s room for only one sort of feminism here, and it’s mine (or my friends’). Surely it’s no coincidence that the most significant Italian novelist of the past few years is Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan series, as the scholar Tiziana de Rogatis puts it, illustrates “the terrible amalgam of envy and elective recognition which inevitably constitutes the friendship between two women, two subservients in search of their emancipation.”

Or perhaps it has to do with — Italian cliché though it may be — our history with the Mafia. Our attitude toward life mimics the Corleone family’s: Our family, our friends, our clique will always come before abstract concepts of right and wrong. It’s a variation on “the devil you know”: The patriarchy you know will always be more appealing than a triumphant feminism in which none of your acquaintances are involved.

In 1902, an 11-year-old named Maria Goretti, the daughter of a farming family living outside Rome, was threatened with rape by a neighbor with a knife. Rather than submit, she let herself be stabbed to death. The Roman Catholic Church made her a saint. Sometimes it seems she’s the ideal paradigm for Italian feminism today: The only woman everyone here can agree is a victim is the one who got herself killed. The one we do not need to compete with.