Could a male author get away with this? And why would anyone want to?

The late Italian novelist Elsa Morante comes w/ the strongest cred as a feminist and inspiration for other women writers; the extraordinarily popular "Elena Ferrante" in fact took her pen name as a tribute to Elsa Morante, and the translator of EM's novel Arturo's Island (1957), Ann Goldstein, is also EF's translator. So it's strange to me that Morante's novel should, at least on the surface, be so misogynist. Yes, the narrator is the eponymous Arturo, looking back on his youth as an unsupervised waif on the remote coastal island, but the whole ethos of the island is that it's a male society and that women are looked on not only w/ contempt but actually as objects of loathing. The men on the island gather for many drunken binges, no women allowed, and in fact in the house where Arturo was raised no women are even allowed the enter the premises, with the exception of A's mother, who died in childbirth at age 18, and, in section 2, the 2nd wife of A's father - we're uncertain of her age, except that she's most likely late teens (Arturo is at that point 14). His father/her husband treats her with utter contempt, and both he and Arturo think that she's ugly (they think the same of all women!), although Arturo recognizes something attractive in her when he decides that she looks somewhat like his late beloved dog! Enough. I think it's obvious that over the course of the novel these views will change, somehow, yet I wonder how Morante can get away with such writing and avoid being pilloried. Much will depend on what she does w/ this set-up, yet one has to wonder: Could a male author get away w/ depicting women in this manner? And why would anyone want to do so?