this is not about sex, it is about a powerful person taking advantage

And that's why descriptions of him as "cuntstruck" or your own prescription of masturbation for  "ladies' man" guys, slick players always looking to score, strikes me as the wrong interpretation here. He sounds more like this: from    Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Ladies' Man or Sexual Predator?

Weiss, who said he has treated more than 1,000 sex addicts, said the behavior often stems from a feeling of entitlement. Men who work long hours in stressful positions, for example, might feel as if they deserve a sexual encounter they know to be inappropriate.

"They'll work to convince themselves that a situation is OK when it's not," he said.

And while sex addiction and violence need not go hand in hand, the "high" that addicts feel during the pursuit of sex can skew their perception of reality, making them think something is consensual when it isn't.

Especially when I read this:

The charges follow earlier allegations by French journalist Tristane Baron that Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her like a "rutting chimpanzee" during an interview nine years ago. Baron said Strauss-Kahn insisted she hold his hand during the interview and made sexual advances that grew violent.

"I kicked him several times, he unbuttoned my bra ... and tried to unzip my jeans," Baron said in an interview broadcast on the French cable TV channel Paris Première in February 2007.

Baron, now 31, decided not to press charges at the time because her mother, a Socialist Party official, advised against it. But Baron's lawyer David Koubbi told RTL radio Monday that she's likely to file an official complaint now.

This is not the story of someone with too much sex drive who needs to masturbate more often. This is the story of someone who gets titillated by his ability to harass women.

He doesn't sound like someone who gets excited by consensual sex much less masturbation.

Here's a way to describe the difference: a beautiful young woman knows she has power over a powerful ladies' man type, she can entrap.them and lay them low; that's a weakness, not having the discipline to keep one's pants on.  With a predator type who gets high off his own power, it's more sicko, and it's the other way around, he's always looking to push his power on women when he's got them in a position where they can't do anything about it, and gets high off that, it's pure sexual harassment if not worse.

At the bottom of this is not about sex, it is about a powerful person taking advantage of and abusing a weaker, more vulnerable person.

But dominance is an aspect of sex with roots all the way back to our primeval ancestors.  It is how alpha males assert their 'top dog' position.  Saying this is not about sex because it was not consensual maybe politically correct but is just wrong otherwise.  

Whatever.  Thought you might enjoy this shorter translation of Bernard-Henri Lévy's defense of DSK from Michael O'Hare via Kevin Drum:  

DSK is my friend, and I am Bernard-Henri Lévy.  How dare these people of no importance treat him as though he has been credibly accused of a violent crime!  He has a wife, with whom I, BHL, have dined, at parties with witty and charming Important People, and to speak publicly of any of this is victimizing her.  To show my loyalty to this member of my privileged and superb tribe, I am going to make up nonsense about how rooms are cleaned in New York hotels, and assert, in my most magisterial way, that the US criminal justice system has a presumption of guilt. I have been to America, and I know about these things.  The idea that a chambermaid is permitted in that vile country to accuse a Man of Great Importance! That a servant is permitted to trip up the great enterprise of my beloved French socialism! That if my seductive, charming, friend DSK, who loves the ladies, especially his own three, has forced himself on women they are supposed to be seen as victims – the nerve!