It became savagely comical as more and more photographs and videos of the alleged perpetrators were published in the papers and on TV. Even as newsfolk waxed concerned about our society's shocking tolerance of violence against women, egged on by gleeful spokespersons from organizations like NOW, everyone pretended not to notice that nearly all the guys who soaked, stripped and molested up to 50 women in the park were Puerto Rican and black.

In its patronizing, racist way, the media pretended it had just seen the manifestation of some kind of generalized social problem -- a conclusion unfair both to the wider society and Puerto Ricans and black communities. Much of the behavior caught on video may be shocking stuff for New York Times writers and most of its readers, but it's par for the course in many Manhattan neighborhoods north of Central Park.

It's ironic that the Times, which has accused Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD of trying to impose the "values of Mayberry" on a culturally diverse city, should see it as shocking that subcultures exist in New York with very different notions both of gender equality and the kind of behavior that is appropriate in public places. (Especially ironic is the Times' wannabe enthusiasm for gangsta rap as an authentic but harmless expression of ghetto culture.) But then this incident, which gave Central Park South a taste of life as it is lived by black and Hispanic women in many of the city's poorer neighborhoods, is exactly the kind that illustrates the conflicts between feminism and multiculturalism.

Our dishonest refusal to deal with cultural difference -- a phrase nowadays inflected with scrupulous neutrality as if some cultures were not, in some respects, much less vile than others -- makes it much harder to figure out exactly what happened on that humid Saturday evening and why.

If you watch some of the amateur videos of the wilding all the way through, you see that more was going on than simply another manifestation of the beastliness of men. Several of the videos show that, before things got really nasty, scantily dressed women went through the gantlet of water-sprayers and grabbers again and again.

But then you see other women running through the same gantlet who clearly don't want to play the game, or who realize to their horror that the game has changed -- no longer playful; it's rougher, angrier, more sexual and assaultive. And finally, there were the truly terrifying attacks on French and English tourists: brutal attacks that were rapes in all but the technical, legal sense of the word.

There are questions to be asked here. Did things get ugly when the crowd first turned its attentions on people who weren't down with the kind of aggressive flirtation that is the norm in parts of Harlem, but beyond the pale outside Zabar's? Was particularly violent attention paid to middle-class women or white women (or skimpily dressed women)?

Then there's the whole issue of police inaction. All sorts of troubling questions remain not just unanswered, but unasked, because they touch on issues of ethnicity and class.

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