Sometimes I wonder what year it is.  2011, or 1911?

Item:  former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s legal team is about to spend at least half a million dollars trying to discredit the immigrant chambermaid who accused him of rape and sexual assault.  Presumably, they’ll try to use her sexual history against her.  After all, she’s a widow with a 15-year-old child.  That is, she’s no virgin.

Item:  the so-called virginity tests forced on women protestors in Cairo by the military.  In fact these were officially sanctioned rape, even if no penetration was involved.  They were a deliberately chosen means of intimidating, humiliating, and attempting to control women.  To say that virginity has nothing to do with political activism is to belabor the point.  It’s not as though those who “passed” the publicly administered “test” were released with the military blessing to go demonstrate in freedom.  It was yet another means of repression.

For those who might think this is a peculiarly Islamic thing, consider that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, with whom he lived monogamously for 19 years, was twice widowed by the time they married.  And that of the nine women he married after her death, only one was a virgin at marriage (the others were all divorced or widowed).  Since virginity was clearly a non-issue to Muhammad himself, any religious argument for it is hard to make.

As for those virgins in paradise, well, see my TEDx talk for that.

The same applies in Christianity.  Yes, of course I know about the Virgin Mary — I wrote a book about her.  But as I pointed out there, to reduce the concept of virginity to the existence of a biologically useless membrane called the hymen is worse than absurdly literal.  It totally misses out on the grand metaphor of virginity, which existed around the world at the time.  As with a virgin forest, it stood for incredible fecundity, for a surfeit of growth and reproduction, untamed and unfettered.  That is, virginity was the miracle of fertility, and in that respect, the Virgin Mary is the last in a long and once-powerful line of mother goddesses.

So let’s not blame religion.  That’s just the excuse.  Nor such a thing as a “Middle East mentality.”   Because…

Item: as late as the 1970s, British officials were administering virginity tests too.  And again, the purpose was to intimidate women — to deter them from entering the country as immigrant brides (if they weren’t virgins, it seemed, they had to be lying about their reasons for entering the U.K.).   And while we’re talking about Brits, by the way, how weird is it that at that same time, the early 1970s, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin for his enterprises?  Flying the friendly skies?

Perhaps all this means that in forty years’ time, the confusion of virginity with virtue will be as outmoded in Egypt as it now is (Branson excepted) in England.  But then of course it’s not about virtue, and never was.  It’s about the peculiar desire of some men (thank God not all) to control women — their sexuality, their behavior, their freedom of choice.  That is, it’s about not about women as people, but as possessions.

Item:  A commenter on this blog, fulminating against Islam with such blatant racism that I had to bar him as spam, summed up his argument this way:  “We know how to treat our women.”  That “we” evidently referred only to men, specifically to non-Muslim western men who think of women as possessions — “ours” — and as such, to be (mis)treated as “we” see fit.   He was, he made clear, a fundamentalist Christian.

So tell me, what year are we living in?  Scratch the years I gave at the top.  If you go see Werner Herzog’s new movie, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (about the prehistoric paintings on the walls of that cave), you might discover that even Neanderthals had more respect for women than this.  And they lived 35,000 years ago.

What happens now that IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (as of today, make that former director) has posted $1,000,000 bail while hiring the world’s most expensive defense lawyers for his rape trial?

Now the victim gets pilloried.

Her name has been published in France and on the web, where fantasies of her being a whore are rampant (apparently it’s okay to rape a prostitute).  The French gang of good ole boys (and, doubly shamefully, gals) have proclaimed themselves in shock — shock! — that a pillar of society like DSK could be treated by the NYPD like a common criminal.  So what if rape is criminal assault?   Handcuffs are fine for the lower classes, but for the privileged few?  How dare those Americans!  Can’t they see she’s just a maid?

Once again, as DSK’s lawyers dig up every detail of the victim’s life and twist it to make it appear slutty, it’ll be clear why rape is so drastically under-reported.  This woman has real courage.  Most victims simply can’t face the idea of being picked apart and violated again and again in the press and by the defense, who will do everything they can to “prove” that she is a lying, vengeful, publicity-seeking slut.  Like the mob that raped CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square, they will do their best to pull her apart.

Could you pass the slut test?

Imagine it:  every detail of your personal and work life put on public view and twisted into leering ‘significance.’  Every date, every drink, every tittle and every tattle of gossip or innuendo, every misstep you ever made will be paraded as “proof.”  Only a hermit could pass this test.

You’ve had sex before — guilty.

You are poor — guilty.

You are black — guilty.

You are a single mother — guilty.

You have breasts and a vagina — guilty.

You are human — guilty.

How did you even dream of daring to bring such a charge against a wealthy, powerful, white man?  Who do you think you are?  You’re just a cleaning woman.  Just a nobody.  Just another lying slut.

This sentence really struck me in President Obama’s Middle East speech this morning:

We have a chance to show that the US values a street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of a dictator.

And now we have a chance to show that we value the dignity of an immigrant maid more than the assumed privilege and entitlement of wealth and power.  How dare they treat him like a common criminal?  Because if he is indeed found guilty — and for the NYPD to act with such alacrity in a rape case, you can be sure the evidence is very solid — then that is exactly what he is.  A criminal.  And all too common.