Another powerful man has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman, and while it may be tempting to say that the media coverage has been shockingly bad, the truth is that there’s nothing shocking or even surprising about it. This is the type of coverage we’ve come to expect every time a woman has the tremendous courage needed to report a rape, particularly when the man who raped her is rich and powerful and she isn’t.

Unless you’ve spent the past week under a rock, you’ve heard about the arrest of International Monetary Fund chief (now resigned) Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault charges. DSK, who also happened to be the likely presidential candidate of the French Socialist Party and a very real threat to Sarkozy, stands accused of anally and orally assaulting a hotel employee and attempting to rape her vaginally. The victim, a poor African immigrant employed as a chambermaid, reported the attack to hotel management who eventually called the police. When the cops arrived, DSK had already left the hotel and was headed to JFK to grab the afternoon flight back to France. Police caught up with him at the airport ten minutes before take-off and took him into custody.

It’s not so much the actual case I want to discuss as the puke-worthy media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s as if feminism never happened! Feminists have tried to get across the message that rape isn’t sex and isn’t even about sex for, oh I don’t know, several decades now. Rape can be about power, control, entitlement, anger, rage, domination, and hate. Sexual contact/penetration is just the weapon. FBI profilers divide rapists into four categories–Power Reassurance, Power Assertive, Anger Retaliatory, and Anger Excitation–based on their motivation and modus operandi. Nowhere to be found in this typology is the “nice guy” who is so overcome with sexual desire by the sight of an attractive woman that he “just can’t help himself.” That’s because that guy doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately this message has clearly been falling on deaf ears. Not only does the mainstream media believe that rape is about sex, but they’re actually repeating the refrain of rape apologists everywhere that rape is just sex. News report after news report refers to the allegations against DSK as “sex charges,” a “sex scandal,” and a “hotel-sex case.” And I’ve lost track of the number of articles equating an act of torture (yes, rape is recognized as a form of torture) with extramarital affairs or eccentric but consensual sexual practices, while the author ponders the “cultural divide” between France and the US. The LA Times, for example, informs us that “(i)n sexual matters, the French consider themselves open-minded and liberal and dismiss Americans in particular — and Anglo-Saxons in general — as puritanical and uptight. It follows, therefore, that a French politician’s sexual peccadilloes, extramarital affairs and indiscretions are nobody’s business but his own.” Oh yeah, totally. Some dude tearing off your clothes and ramming his dick into every orifice as you’re desperately trying to fight him off, hey, that’s just a minor indiscretion on his part. Nobody’s business but his own and certainly nothing to make a big deal about. After all, you wouldn’t want to be “puritanical and uptight.”

I bet you know the answer to this one: When are hate and bigotry considered cutting-edge, forward-thinking entertainment? When the targets are women, of course! I was going to write about this post at Feministe in which a male guest blogger twists himself into a pretzel trying to justify the violence-soaked misogyny of a rap crew he likes, but I see the Red Queen has already beaten me to it. So I’ll talk a bit about the incredibly positive reception outspoken misogynists bigots like Odd Future get from the predominantly male journalists at the New York Times, The Guardian, The Village Voice and other so-called “serious” publications.

For those who don’t know, Odd Future lyrics go way beyond the now-accepted-as-mainstream notion of women as bitches and hos who exist only to be fucked and need to be slapped around sometimes. Most Odd Future tracks dwell in graphic detail on the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of women bitches. And yet countless dudes who consider themselves progressive and claim to abhor bigotry are engaging in Olympian mental gymnastics to come up with reasons the creators of this hate are not only decent guys but important artistes.

For instance, when group leader Tyler says that rape is fun, that is “likely a metaphor for something else.” Why? Because no one could possibly think rape is fun? Newsflash: One in four women in the US will experience a completed or attempted rape. There are a lot of men who think rape is fun. They’re called rapists. Or perhaps these enlightened dudes just can’t see someone whose music (or movies or books or athletic performance) they like as a rapist. Rapists are 100% unadulterated evil with zero positive characteristics. I guess that’s why they’re always lurking in bushes wearing ski masks; everyone would immediately recognize their evil rapeyness if they showed their faces. How could someone as “undeniably charismatic” and “irrepressibly goofy” as twenty-year-old Tyler possibly be a rapist? Oh, I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a connection between rape and viewing women as subhuman fuckholes. Or between rapists and sociopathic assholes who think the damage they do is irrelevant as long as they’re having a good time.

I don’t know whether the man whose hate-drenched lyrics advocate the rape and torture of people like me really commits such acts. I do know that this type of violent bigotry set to a seductive beat has real-life consequences. Very bad ones. Advertisers spend billions of dollars every year on TV commercials to influence behavior. Why? Because that shit works. Yet there are those who argue with a straight face that music they consider far more powerful than any corny commercial does not influence behavior?!? It’s bullshit and I suspect they know it.