S luts are good. Sluts make America proud. The world needs more sluts. I contend this without shame or conflict. God bless America.

But look, here comes some silly little rabbi in Florida, apparently caught in a time warp and thinking it is 1984 and not 2004, who just recently up and called Material Mom Madonna a "slut," in print, in public, on some Kaballah site somewhere, claiming Mrs. Richie is a bad role model for the weirdly chic mystic sect, and it made the tabloid news.

Oh and by the way? This rabbi, he's also Michael Jackson's personal Jewish adviser. Nice gig, rabbi. Your judgments mean so much.

But still, it happened. "Slut" rang out. Gasps were heard. Cries were cried. Or maybe they weren't. Maybe no one really cared. Maybe nobody's ire was irked, because the rabbi is a childish simp and Madonna isn't even really Madonna anymore and is actually more like Cher doing a big silly lounge-act thing, and also because Madonna hasn't really been any kind of truly remarkable or obnoxious slut since the Reagan era. Whatever.

But it raises an eternal question. "Slut." Still potent. Still a deadly stinger of a word. Still being bandied about like some sort of ultimate conviction, a nasty hammer blow, a definitive curse. Like a woman sharing her sex with unbridled abandon is unethical and wrong and dirty and, well, slutty, whereas if a man does the same he's considered, well, Colin Farrell. Is this still true? Is this still where we are?

And it ain't just men slapping this label around. In fact, as any female with a vociferous circle of friends can attest, women can be far, far nastier than men in their condemnations of their own. Women call other women sluts (and worse) all the time, savagely, brutally, meaning it in the most degrading way possible. And then they drink too much Diet Pepsi and steal their best friend's boyfriend. But that's another column.

Proof: Just recently, the S.O. somehow got sucked into a few soul-numbing episodes of "The Bachelor," during which a cadre of pneumatic self-righteous twentysomething blonds with the collective IQ of a carpet remnant ganged up on one of their own, a slightly older, delightfully obnoxious woman who admitted to sleeping with a married man in her past. Repeatedly. And who felt no shame for it. Or for the several hundred other men she'd slept with in her life.

And the twentysomethings, they were dumbfounded. Horrified. Jaws dropped. Gum stopped snapping. They circled. Their shiny pink claws came out. And they savaged her. They sat around the "Bachelor" kitchen and tore into her and sneered and scolded, each claiming some version of shock and snide chastity and bogus innocence. And then it came: Oh my God, Trisha, you are such a ... a ... a slut. Boom. Game over.

And 30 years of open-minded, progressive feminism, it turned in its shallow grave.

Which brings me to my flawed theory as to why there exists such a nasty double standard, why there will always be a double standard, why men who have tons of unbridled wanton sex are considered hunky lotharios and women who have tons of unbridled careless stupid sex are considered sleazy unwanted harlots barely more highly evolved than a rat snake.

Here it is: Because women are more powerful. Because women control and contain and embody the most potent of energies this world has to offer: its sex, its reproduction, its libido, all about Earth and the divine feminine and cycles of the oceans and the moon and birth and death and men can only stand back and kneel down and buy flowers and candy and go, wow, and damn, and oh my god, and then beat each other up and instigate wars.

That is to say, women do indeed have a higher degree of responsibility with their sex because it is their most potent and divine strength, a dazzling and eternally alluring hunk of mystical magic, just as men have more responsibility not to abuse their physical strength and their awesome ability to barbecue meats or parallel park.

This is my dime-store theory. Isn't it nice? Doesn't it sound all flattering and luscious? I thought so. I thought I was being all attuned and progressive. I thought I was all over the modern pro-slut feminism thing like whipped cream on a soy mocha.

I was wrong.

I have been set straight, more or less. I have been informed by some very smart very attuned young women with whom I shared the idea for this column that if I offered up this theory, that if I were to humbly suggest that women do, in fact, have a bit more accountability with their sexuality, I would be smacked upside the ideological head. By women. Smart women. Powerful women. Cool women who know things.

Here's why: Because my little theory ain't exactly something they need to hear. Because that sort of "all-powerful goddess-y controller-of-the-sex attuned-with-the-tides" thing is, in truth, just another ideological ruse, just another manufactured burden, just another contrived role we assume women want to assume.

This slut thing is, apparently, very tricky.

"Slut," of course, still has power. Is still packed with derogatory meaning, loaded with baggage. But you have to be careful, I am told, not to completely reverse its meaning, either, and imply that women are these radiant omnipotent sexual deities, as though they are some sort of alternative being, some sort of mega-loaded creature who embodies all these impossibly grandiose concepts that only, in truth, limit and annoy them.

It is, in its way, just another trap. It is, once again, putting the responsibility for sex and sluttiness and the procreative potency back onto women who don't necessarily want it or need it or feel like they have to embody anybody's inflated sexual notions of anything.

This is what they say. Just leave us the frick alone, let us play with our energies and strengths how we see fit, let us be just like men, not judged and not put upon, and let us be free to define ourselves how we want to, for good or ill, as guys seem to get to do, as the world has refused to allow us to do for, you know, millennia. To which I say, hell yes.

So, then, let's put it this way: You know what the world needs? More sluts. Not the limited ones and not the judged ones and not the ones that little dink-monkey rabbis get to point a scraggily little finger at and go, icky icky icky.

Rather, we need more of the self-defined sluts, luminous or divine, ugly or silly, egregious or annoying, regularly nonjudged sluts who can do whatever they want and sleep with whomever they want and who don't have to worry about what the hell "progressive" men or "enlightened" columnists or gum-snapping bimbo "Bachelor" bait have to say about it.

There. That is indeed, truly, what the world needs. Also, world peace. And lots of free lube. And less religious puling. Is that too much to ask?