Madam, can I interest you in a theory? I have many theories here for sale. Many different theories. Some theories will keep you safe; there are others that will take you to the edge. I have theories that will make you rich; others that will ensure inner riches. Would you like to try some on?

This is my special one-size-fits-all theory. It doesn’t matter where you come from or where you are headed. It’s all the same to me. It’s a flexible theory that fits all the bumps and smooths them out. Everyone is equal: all at the bottom together. There’s plenty of company, you’re never alone, always distracted, always entertained. There’s sex and shopping; there’s drugs and driving. Whatever your whim, we can satisfy it. It can even be ecofriendly – we’re happy to use all natural products – protected by patents and trademarks.

We’ll even take your children off your hands and get them to come and help us at the ideas factory. We like knowing what they like. It’s a knowledge economy, you know. Now we know too and we’ll be inventing cool new products for the next generation. It’s the “We Know” label – you can’t see it, but all our products are electronically impregnated with our very own nanomarker. We know when a “We Know” customer walks in the door – or even past it.

Talking of nano- we also have nanotheories for sale. They’re so small no one will know that you hold any political position at all. It’s really useful for politicians, government bureaucrats, capitalists, biotech engineers – cutting edge people who shouldn’t have their lives disrupted by having to worry about what they say. It’s a descendant of postmodernism which has been the rage for so long – and so successful that even Prime Ministers and Presidents have learnt from it.

They turned it to military purposes so that you never know who the military might be. It’s a variation on that old patriarchy and most women recognise it (unless they’ve purchased a customised theory to show off to their friends). You know the one, in which their lover, their boss, their next door neighbour, their brother turns out to be the enemy, the rapist, the killer. But the nanotheory has an advantage over patriarchy, it can creep under the skin without the wearer of that skin being aware that they’ve been got at. So it’s very effective because no one can say, “Hey, I’m a victim.” Just rub it in like sunscreen and you’ve passed the cell guardians.

I also have some political theories going very cheap. Bargain basement. Now that patriarchy is outmoded we’re practically throwing it out. There’s been an oversupply of it and although it’s in high demand in some areas, it’s lost its sheen – and the unit cost has really dropped.

Old-fashioned equality – it’s a mid-range theory. Good for the middle classes, the wishy washy fence sitters with splinters in their bums. We’re recycling a few theories – remember we’re ecofriendly – through our chain of Op Shops. Theories like socialism – it’s out of fashion and so many people are clearing out their sheds, attics and spare rooms, getting rid of all that old collective spirit.

As for feminism, you can’t find it anywhere. No one wants to sell it because, they say, there’s no one out there to buy it. But then you hear on the grapevine that it’s become collectible. Maybe one day it’ll come back into fashion.

The really popular theory is global warming. It’s everywhere. It’s in droughts and cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, it’s in unusual weather patterns – heat waves and cold snaps. And the politicians are talking it up. It’s making headlines and new profits are to made from carbon trading. There are new forestry programs out there with GM trees programmed to grow at twice the rate, so they can be cut down in half the time. It’s a great business opportunity for those in the business of producing carbon waste: petrochemical companies, car manufacturers, military reconstructionists and the like.

Madam, can I interest you in a theory? I have many theories here for sale. Many different theories.

I have a great idea for a movie. Here’s the pitch: A poor, slutty immigrant takes a job as a chambermaid so she can have great sex with the hotel guests. One day she hits the jackpot. She walks into a room only to be met by an irresistible stud old enough to be her father. Known in his home country as “The Seducer” he offers her a full view of his impressive manhood. Overcome with lust, she falls to her knees and the two have great consensual sex. But being a woman and all, she is a lying, scheming whore and accuses the seducer of rape.  The poor seducer becomes one more victim of “sex offender hysteria,” as one caller to National Public Radio named it, and now he must defend his good name.

Where to pitch this? I could go to the usual adolescent boy filmmakers such as Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler, since they specialize in making movies about manipulative predators who are really good guys underneath. But wait. I have a better place. The porn website Maid Bangers seems tailor-made for this story. The teaser on the website reads: “Tom and Steve are on a Mission … They conquer hotel after hotel. When they are in town, not one maid is safe! “ (Emphasis Theirs).

On the site, free teasers lure in the viewer. Take “Luna” for example. According to the text, “Luna was spotted by Steve in the hallway and he immediately went after her. He came up with some lame excuse to get her back to the room, and it worked great. Once in the room, she couldn’t resist the boy’s charm.” Sound familiar? “Maya” has a similar experience. “Tom and Steve invited her in and before she could really understand what happened, she had a cock up her ass & one in her mouth.” Just in case this sounds like a rape to you, don’t worry—the pictures surrounding the text show Maya having hot, orgasmic sex.

The Strauss-Kahn story belongs in the world of porn. It is here that all sex is consensual, no matter how manipulative and violent, and all women are whores who need a man to release their inner slut. In porn, women don’t do unskilled, low-paid work to feed themselves and their children. No, they work because this is where you go to get laid. Sites such as Fuck the Nanny, Nurse Hardcore, Naughty Bookworm, and Secretary Porn all tell the Strauss-Kahn story. Women don’t need a living wage, health care, safe housing, child care, or a career. They just need monster loads of “jizz” to make them happy.

Only in a porn culture could we take seriously the idea that what transpired between Strauss-Kahn and the unnamed woman was consensual. Only here could we actually spin a story of a single mother risking her livelihood to have Strauss-Kahn’s penis rammed down her throat.  And only here could we focus on the credibility of the woman while making light of the history of a man who was well known for his predatory behavior.

And don’t let’s forget that this is a black woman. We know that black women have the tendency to be “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”  If they could smear squeaky clean Anita Hill, a conservative Christian who spent her early career demonstrating her allegiance to the white Republican establishment, then every woman is fair game.  David Brock, a former research fellow with the right-wing Heritage Foundation, recalls in his book, Blinded by the Right, how he set about destroying Anita Hill by taking a “a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix. Hill was an ambitious incompetent passed over by Thomas for a promotion. She was "kooky." She was a man-hater. She had a "perverse desire for male attention." She had a "love-hate" complex with Thomas. She made "bizarre" sexual comments to students and coworkers. She sprinkled pubic hairs into her law students' term paper.” He now says that what he did was disgusting, but it worked, and Anita Hill became one more victim of a misogynist culture that protects its own at any cost.

Next on the chopping block is French Journalist Tristane Banon, the goddaughter of Strauss-Kahn’s second wife who claims she was attacked by Strauss-Kahn. I was going to pitch this story, too, to the porn industry but it turns out someone beat me to it. The porn movie, Goddaughter 3, tells the tale of “a beautiful temptress who uses her alluring erotic skills to climb ‘the family's’ ladder of power. She does anything with anyone to reach the top …. The danger, mystery, intrigue and hot, sultry sex are back!” Stay tuned.

Have you been feeling the urge to wave your arms wildly and yell “We are NOT making this up!”?                                                           

First, there was the pornography discovered in Osama bin Ladin’s  computers —and  herbal viagra found among his medicines. Media wags smirked he had to “satisfy” his youngest wife, Amal, the Yemeni who’d been married off to him (over objections from his other wives and even his mother) at age 15, when he was 43. Don’t you bet she’s enjoyed heaps of marital satisfaction? Pundits also wondered how his fundamentalist brand of Islam’s severe repression of women--imperative because we’re sexual Jezebels--could coexist with porn and sex drugs. After all, in his 2002 “Letter to the American people,” bin Laden sneered  “You plaster your naked daughters across billboards to sell a product without any shame.”  (Had a point there.)  But exposing and commercializing the female body for male titillation and shrouding it as a movable bolt of cloth to protect men from “temptation”  are flip sides of the same coin. Neither bunny suits nor burkhas factor in what women want.

Porn  actually needs sexual repression and demonized women in order to proliferate. Take sexuality out from under a rock and let it dance amicably in the sunlight of equality--and porn loses its audience. So, sorry guys, bin Laden’s porn stash is no contradiction.

Then there was the (now former) French presidential candidate, millionaire Socialist,  and  International Monetary Fund executive—the one who seems to confuse himself with Berlusconi. Where to begin here? That Dominique Strauss-Kahn (for short, DKS), 62, managing director of the IMF, allegedly did to one African widow what the IMF does to her continent?  That a 32-year-old Guinean émigré working as a hotel chambermaid while trying to raise her daughter with dignity might not burn with the mutual lust DSK’s attorneys argue was—honest-to-god—consensual? That claiming this is a set-up by DSK’s French political rivals—mais c’est absurd? That the power elite boys in global business and European politics have dismissed what they drolly termed Strauss-Kahn’s “womanizing,” for decades? That being indicted for criminal sexual assault, attempted rape, forced oral sex, and unlawful imprisonment are not the peccadilloes French men are pooh-poohing as American puritanical exaggeration? Interestingly, French women don’t agree; 1000 feminists signed a petition that ran in Le Monde, denouncing DSK’s defenders and their “sudden rise of sexist and reactionary reflexes, so quick to surface among part of the French elite.”

My French must be rusty, since I forgot “womanizing” apparently translates as  the preferred euphemism for “serial rapist.” Yet DSK’s “open secret” in Europe includes a history of allegations: sexual assault, molestation, groping, abuse of power, sexual harassment. Names are even named: the economist Piroska Nagy, his IMF subordinate; the journalist Tristane Banon, the Socialist parliamentarian Aurelie Filipetti, and on and on—provoking only the occasional wrist slap from his brothers or, once, his apology—to the IMF, not the women. Now, NY investigators are being flooded with calls from women saying they too were sexually assaulted by Strauss-Kahn, and other employees at the same NYC hotel are reporting his advances to them.

Plus ça change. Here comes the long-suffering political wife (his third), Anne Sinclair,  supporting him. This is now such a cliché that it has its own TV series, The Good Wife. But Sinclair, a former journalist and heiress who’s financed his political career, takes her defense waaaaay out. When, in 2006, L’Express asked if his reputation pained her, she replied “No! I’m even proud of it. It’s important to seduce, for a politician.” (Leaving aside quaint notions of solidarity with other women, Sinclair’s opinion of the electorate is unnerving.)

As for French horreur that DSK was subjected by police to a “perp walk,” I haven’t been so proud of the NYC Police Department since 9/11!

Ooops, take that back.

See, meanwhile, we have the ongoing trial of two policemen for alleged burglary, official misconduct, and oh yes rape.  A woman on the verge of passing out came to them for help, saying she’d drunk too much. The defendants claim the sex was—surprise!-- “consensual.” They brought her home, undressed her, claim they left, yet apparently lodged a false call from her asking them to return, and returned while she was still passed out. One, Officer Kenneth Moreno, says  the semi-comatose woman “came onto” him, so he thought she was initiating a “relationship.” I did not make this up. Nor did the New York Times.

But I am still proud of Melissa Jackson, chief judge of Manhattan Criminal Court, who denied Strauss-Kahn bail.  Please pay attention because you won’t catch me saying this very often: Hurrah for U. S. justice!

Well, that didn’t last long. 

A male judge, Michael J. Obus, reversed Jackson’s decision, so DSK is out on bail, though tenants at the Manhattan luxury building where Mme. Sinclair immediately rented two apartments refused to let him reside there, even temporarily. (But hey, he’s resigned from the IMF, poor baby, having to settle for a separation payment of only $250,000.)

And there’s Ahhhhhnold. The Californicating ex-B-movie star won the governorship in the first place only  because his wife, Maria Shriver, stood by his side (see Good Wife, above  ) during a campaign rife with “rumors and allegations” about his, yup, “womanizing.” It didn’t hurt that she’s a Kennedy clanmember who put her reputation on the line for him,  sacrificing her journalism career in the process.  Now, safely out of office, Schwarzenegger confesses that he did father a child a decade ago with their housekeeper, Mildred Patricia Baena, who worked for the family for 20 years. She was pregnant by him while Shriver was pregnant with their youngest son. But gee, Schwarzenegger has apologized. 

Did I forget to say that the two NYC cops have apologized, too? Bill Maher (reliably obnoxious about women) and Chris Matthews (who’s already had to apologize publicly for sexist remarks) shared guffaws about how if you “mess around” with the maid like Strauss-Kahn, it’s best to have her consent first, as Schwarzenegger—they assume--did. But because Ms. Baena didn’t run screaming from the room as the hotel maid managed to do doesn’t mean she consented. When one party is a rich movie star/famous politician, and the other is a Latina housekeeper in his employ, the sheer imbalance of power precludes the possibility of genuine consent.  This situation, too, is spun as consensual, with added implications smearing Baena as mentally  imbalanced. Blaming the Victim remains a popular sport. 

Rounding out the week was the Yale fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose alums include both Presidents Bush. DKE’s  activities are now suspended for five years, for marching across campus chanting at women students, “No Means Yes!” and  “Yes Means Anal!”   (So much for our slogan, “What part of No don’t you understand?” Now we have the answer. They don’t understand the “No” part.) The DKE International Fraternity’s statement implied women were humorless, and whined that a 6 week suspension of pledging activities would be sufficient, since the chanting, while “inappropriate and in poor taste” didn’t warrant a 5 year punishment. Still, Mary Miller, Dean  of Yale College, is enforcing the 5 years.

“Inappropriate.” “Consensual.” “She came onto him.” “Womanizing.”  “No sense of humor.” “Rumors and allegations.”  “Conspiracy to frame him.” Phrases we all, men as well as women, by now ought to recognize immediately, which would save us from repeatedly falling over platitudes with an air of great discovery. For that matter, the next time Wikileaks guru Julian Assanges claims the rape charges against him are lies, the two women “consented” to sex without condoms, and he’s being framed by the CIA, can we  please think twice about his online “heroism”?

Californians who voted for Schwarzenegger on the basis of Shriver’s defense now feel conned. Not that she’s to blame; he lied to her, too. In fact, maybe we should try a new approach to the Good Wives: Do them a favor and  just not believe them. Why think their teary testimony could be honest in such circumstances any more than that of the battered woman who calls 911, then changes her story, insisting she broke her own nose--for fear of what her batterer will do to her after the cops leave? We could also commercially terminate The Terminator, who’s returning to movie making:  women and men of conscience can  boycott all films of his, past and future.

But here’s the good news.

Ten or 15 years ago, a widowed émigré maid would likely have been too terrified to fight back or report such an ordeal to her employers. The hotel would probably have hushed it up for fear of  a powerful guest, but had the police been called, strings would have been pulled in the DA’s office to quash the arrest. Other alleged victims of the same man now are coming forward when, years ago, they dared not. Ten years ago there were fewer women judges on the NY bench, and fewer women deans anywhere, much less at Yale College--and women students might not have lodged a complaint about offensive chants in the first place. And there was a time when Maria Shriver, a lifelong devout Catholic, would not have considered meeting, as she’s doing, with a divorce lawyer.

But the best news is that  the press—traditional and new media alike—covered these stories at all.  That ought to be a given—but it wasn’t until fairly recently. And though press commentary was sometimes flippant or sensationalistic, news reporting was largely fair and respectful. And that would never have happened without years of women writing outraged letters to networks and newspapers, without pressure from groups like The Women’s Media Center.

So in the teeth of ongoing gross misdoings, all this is, nonetheless, strange good news.

Seriously.

Until tomorrow’s headlines, at least.

Robin Morgan’s latest book is Fighting Words. She is a contributor to Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed and to September 11, 2001: Feminist Perspectives. www.RobinMorgan.us

This week in America there has been something distasteful about the joyful celebrations of the killing of Osama Bin Laden.  More than distaste, it has been filled with macho and the elation of revenge.  Worse, it has obscured American's attention from how actually Bin Laden died.

I am among those millions of people around the world who are relieved that this terrorist responsible for repeated heinous acts that have taken thousands of lives, but I am also hearing   who are speaking quietly, as if it would be anti-American, about "being sickened," or "revolted" or "appalled" by the jubilation.  And we have more reason than might be immediately evident from news reports and White House announcements for our reactions.

Bin Laden is dead.  But he was unarmed when the US Special Forces stormed in on him, killed him and then buried his body at sea before we even knew he was dead not to mention before we even were able to ask how he was killed.  Follow the Pentagon and State Department announcements: first, it was stated that he was unarmed.  Then a few days later announcements included that an AK47 was nearby in the room.  Sometime after that, as some of us began to question the killing, we were told that a pistol was "within his reach."  

What we do know is that Bin Laden's courier was killed, but that although the President described firefights, no Navy Seal was fired upon. If Bin Laden was unarmed, surely he could have been taken as a prisoner.  Legally, it would then be the work of the International Court to try him and bring him to justice, for justice resides in our courts, or it is suppose to reside there. Whatever his punishment, it would not have resulted from a President authorizing vigilante justice.

Instead, from what we know today, the picture we are piecing together looks like he was assassinated—killed in cold blood. That is what the President of the United States referred to as "justice." That is what Americans celebrated in the streets for days.  With that, the President has dragged the US to a new low in our standards of justice.  Assassination follows from war crimes already committed by this President and his predecessor in Iraq and Afghanistan.

War crimes, assassinations and Americans flooding the streets celebrating vengeance, the President's ratings in the polls take a leap upward for his "strength" (read macho), pundits confident of his re-election, and congratulations from Dick Cheney. That sordid atmosphere leaves an air of suspicion surrounding anyone calling for real justice in relation to Bin Laden, the kind of mentality we experienced in the US with the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when many of us knew that war against Iraq was a war crime and that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction there.  No matter.  Americans wanted revenge for 9/11 even though Iraq had nothing to do with that crime against humanity masterminded by Bin Laden.  They got it at the cost of 1.3 million Iraqi and almost 4,500 American soldiers lives.  Then the celebration of war virtually drowned out the massive global anti-war protests before the invasion in 2003.

As long as the US and its deadly military are the final arbiter's of justice in the world, we will all be dragged down and sink into its amorality.  That is why in Unmaking War, Remaking Men I have proposed a plan for a global peace-making military whose special forces would use the least force necessary to bring down leaders engaged in ethnic cleansing, genocide and other crimes against humanity.  Until we make that kind of change we will be doomed to macho revenge masking as justice.

Kathleen Barry, feminist, sociologist and Professor Emerita is the author of Unmaking War, Remaki