Something that never fails to amaze me is the general incredulity expressed when men, especially men of high social standing, are accused of bad behaviour. Invariably, it’s men who are incredulous. Most women aren’t; we know men behave badly because they can. And because, oftentimes, we ourselves enable them to.

The big-ticket buzz all last week was, of course, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), head of the IMF, on sexual assault charges. Strauss-Kahn is also, more important, the Socialist party’s leading candidate for president of France. Or, he was.

A maid who worked in the French-owned New York hotel where he was staying alleged to the authorities that he attacked her and tried to force himself on her. Let’s state for the record that in this case we don’t have all the facts as yet. But let us also be very clear: even if, as some of his conspiracy-theorist political cronies seem to suspect, he has been set up, that it is part of a campaign to besmirch the reputation of the man who poses the most credible and imminent threat to President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2012, Strauss-Kahn has a history of past, shall we say, indiscretions that should have called his aspirations in question a long time ago. A pattern of past behaviour, like it or not, must be taken into account certainly in public perception about what really happened in that hotel room. For surely, you don’t exactly get the nickname The Great Seducer if you’re a Tibetan monk. And, let’s be clear about the set-up conspiracy, which for all we know may be true: you can’t be set up with a woman if it isn’t common knowledge that you’re not predisposed to bad behaviour with women.

Indeed, in an interview with the newspaper Libération, held on April 28, but released last week in light of the controversy, Strauss-Kahn identified three threats against his political ambitions. “Money, women and my Jewishness,” he said. “Yes, I like women. So what?”

Seducing women is quite a different thing entirely from sexually assaulting them; womaniser does not usually equal rapist. But as women, we appreciate a) that there are men who don’t always understand the nuances, and b) how easy it is to slip from one category into the next.

Just ask Tristane Banon, the 31-year-old writer who now says she is likely to file a criminal complaint against Strauss-Kahn for sexually assaulting her nine years ago. She first made a public accusation against him in 2007 — that he wrenched open her bra and tried to unbutton her jeans during an attempt to rape her — but she stopped short of doing anything because her mother, her own mother, who is a member of a regional council that belongs to Strauss-Kahn’s Socialist party, coaxed her into silence. You don’t want to be known as the girl who made trouble for a politician, the mother reasoned. But complicity is exactly why sexual misconduct is allowed to escalate.

At this point, I don’t think we’re taking liberties to assume that there was indeed a sexual component to what happened between Strauss-Kahn and the maid since, at the time of writing this, his defence was expected to be that it was consensual sex.

Banon’s mother’s action, no matter how wrongheaded it may be perceived to be, is nevertheless understandable. In France, as in just about anywhere else on the Earth, men are the ones with the power. Butting heads with a powerful man in society is, well, for a woman, suicidal. But the irony is that our silence is what allows men to maintain the power. To put things in perspective: this is a man who heads the organisation that has prescribed how the Jamaican economy must proceed in the coming years. This is the man whose organisation has more or less determined that 10,000 public sector jobs be yanked. Don’t say that this man isn’t powerful; he is. What if our finance minister — even if the minister were a woman — had a daughter who made such an allegation against Strauss-Kahn? How do you think that situation, even if proven undeniably true, would be resolved?

Three years ago, when he had an affair with a married subordinate, DSK (who I’m inclined to think of as Silvio Berlusconi in waiting) was chastised by the IMF board and found himself clinging to his job. Apparently, the accusations had begun to wear thin. He had the reputation of making sexual approaches to women that was apparently an open secret. Then he’d made some vague rumblings about behaving better in the future, after yet again acknowledging his so-called passion for women. But sometimes wink-wink-nudge-nudge chastisement simply isn’t enough. I don’t care about the rules governing these things — in France, it’s called omerta, the unofficial law of silence about misconduct — or how great a man’s financial acumen is, as long as there are complaints of sexual impropriety, he must be investigated fully and, if the allegations are found to be true, he must be disciplined. Not tapped on the knuckles. There can’t be one rule for powerful men and another for ordinary men.

DSK, who is married with four children, reportedly admitted to Banon’s mother that he attacked her daughter but his defence was that he didn’t know what had come over him. What came over him is what often comes over very rich and powerful men when their advances are spurned, men in desperate need of psychotherapy: their super-inflated egos kick in and they believe they have the right to possess anything they want. How can their wives in particular pretend not to know what’s going on? Denial is, too often, a form of complicity. So is the conspiracy of silence.

Which is why the shock expressed at the news, also last week — big week for sex scandals, right? — that Arnold Shwarzenegger fathered a child with a former staffer is perplexing to me. Allegations had previously surfaced that the Governator was a serial groper on his movie sets. Those allegations were, however, brushed aside after he admitted in that good ole boys’ sheepish kind of way that heh-heh, he was sometimes naughty. What is this Damascus Road conversion people seemed to be expecting? If he used his prominent station to manipulate women in the past, how unlikely was it to occur in the future? But he is a powerful man so all was duly forgiven and forgotten, he went on to become Governor of California and his wife went on living the dream, as usual, the complaining women were the ones who were thought of as liars, troublemakers and whores out for their moment in the spotlight.

Let’s try to understand something here. Contrary to that most juvenile of chauvinistic suppositions, most women who are really abuse victims don’t willingly want a moment in the spotlight. Not for something as personal as the intimate details of our sex lives. It actually takes courage and character to do it. Look at that Jamaican woman who recently went public with admitting she’d been sexually abused by Barbadian immigration officials. That was an extraordinary act of courage that empowered many people to access their own courage and come forward, too. But that’s what it usually takes to slay a dragon: courage.

How many Jamaican great seducers do we know, ladies? How many of us women have had to practically grow tentacles fending off their unwanted advances, plugging our ears against their slimy innuendoes? If you asked a bunch of women to compose lists of all the Jamaican captains of industries who’re great seducers, you’d be surprised at the names of the men who’d make the cut, again and again, in this country of buried secrets. But nobody wants to rock the boat. Nothing will change, however, until one of us women speaks up. Then another, and another, and another…