The news that a housemaid “did a Bobbitt” on her Arab employer has got many people here in Dubai coming out in sympathy for the maid.

According to The National, a 35-year-old Bangladeshi maid was arrested after getting fed up with being sexually harassed by her 70-year-old employer ‘who is from an undisclosed Gulf country’ and used a kitchen knife to perform the corrective surgery.

Hang on a moment – according to 7 Days, it was a 20-year-old Ethiopian woman and her boss was 76, while The Daily Mail refers to a 26-year-old Ethiopian emasculating a 78 year old Emirati. The AFP and PTI agencies, too, refer to the guy as being an Emirati.

Well, as they say… don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story!

What we do know is that this 27½ year old Bangladopian ‘lashed out with a knife’ at the GCC-Arab-who-may-or-may-not-be-from-the-UAE, slicing off his private parts, and the guy was taken to ‘Dubai Hospital’ (wherever that may be) … or perhaps Rashidiya Hospital, as speculated by some of the papers.

It is alleged the Bangladopian flipped after being sexually harassed by him for many days. According to another newspaper, the maid was raped the first day she arrived and her employer continued abusing her. On the day of the incident she claims he asked her to give him a massage. She got angry, went to the kitchen to get a knife and attacked him, a police official is quoted as saying.

Some of the media, short of a good picture to go with the story, reconstruct the implement of destruction, ranging from simple kitchen knives…

To a picture of a knife with what looks remarkably like red currant juice dripping off it….

The Boston Speakeasy takes a different, more uplifting approach…

The UK’s Metro added further excitement for its readers with links to other stories including “Penis graffiti on St Petersburg bridge dropped from Russian art competition”, “Man has ‘mini’ tattooed on penis to win car” and “Penis-shaped rock discovered” just to whet their appetites.

Worldwide reaction has been pretty heavily on the side of the maid. ‘Absolutely brilliant. Well done to the maid’ sums up the majority of writers to media sites.

‘We always hear cases of maids being sexually abused by their employers, yet the sad part is that they have no recourse to justice at all. This lady did what she had to do, because in her situation, this seemed the only solution out of her misery’, commented one person; while another said ‘Very well done... hats off to the maid.. Now he will regret for the rest of his life... That’s what we call KARMA!!!’.

Yet another mused ‘Well well......Now she will have her own Wikipedia page like Lorena Bobbitt’; while someone else helpfully suggested ‘Next time cut and dip it in boiling water. The owner might need some soup after discharge from the hospital. Well done Ethiopian’.

A blogger to the Random Forest site said: ‘I wrote this with my legs well and truly crossed, wincing in pain as I tried not to think about it. I bet he will think twice before pushing things this way in the future!’

On the other side of the consensus were the likes of Boston Speakeasy: ‘I don't know what the punishment for this kind of crime is in Dubai, but you got some comin' to ya. Payback's a bitch, bitch.’

What no-one seems to have thought about, however, is what the old guy was doing as the maid went to the kitchen, took out the knife and presumably then undressed him to the point where she could actually do the wicked deed. Did he just sit and wait, hoping for a spot of S&M with her? I mean, if some woman started wielding a knife close to Junior and his friends, I can assure you I would move pretty damned fast.

And how easy is it to sever a man’s penis? And is it easier done when erect or flaccid? I mean how many of us have really sharp knives in the kitchen? Did she just slice through with one fell swoop or did she have to saw away at it? I think we should be told.

According to Dubai-based plastic surgeon Dr Luiz Toledo, if the penis had been kept iced and there had not been too much of a time lapse, it could be re-attached and function again, at least partially. Now that statement begs a lot of questions, doesn’t it? Did the Emirati go place his penis in the ice compartment as he was calling the police? (There’s a lesson to be learned by us all!)

The surgeon who performed the reattachment said it took several hours and that phallic reconstruction involves the use of skin tissues and soft bones from the patient's forearm and leg. More questions come to mind – I think I will have to scour the pages of Wikipedia for an answer!

Seriously though, the UAE and other Gulf countries have come in for repeated criticism from human rights groups over their treatment of millions of foreign workers, mostly Asians. The watchdogs have also sharply criticised the sponsorship system, still in force in most Gulf states, by which workers must be sponsored by their employer and which has been likened to modern-day slavery.

Police have been reported as saying that maids committed 665 crimes in Dubai last year, including ‘113 illegitimate relationships’.

"We always warn bosses about abusing maids in our police campaigns because bad treatment might backfire on them,” said a police spokesman. “People need to treat maids well because they are also human and have rights.”

Oh really?

Take the recent case of a Filipina maid whose employers refused to let her resign after she was mentally abused and forced to work for 16 hours per day, seven days per week for three years. The maid, a mother of-one, had attempted to resign at the beginning of 2011, giving her employers a one-month notice. After her employers wouldn’t let her quit, the maid escaped and fled to the Philippines Overseas Labour Office. Her employers responded by declaring her as an absconder at the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department.

She was arrested and taken to the Dubai immigration prison and is set to be deported. Foreign labour is regulated in the UAE under the Sponsorship (kafala) system, which ties the legal status of the migrant workers to their employer, making it illegal to leave their sponsors without the consent of the sponsor. Sponsors, however, are free to fire (and thus cause the deportation of) their workers whenever they please. Even in cases of abuse, if the worker leaves her sponsor without permission, she loses her legal status. The absconding charges result in a visa ban, meaning the worker will be forbidden from entering the UAE again.

Consul General for The Philippines in Dubai, Benito Valeriano, has said there is nothing he can do to help the woman: “She has been listed as an absconder... we can’t do anything - this is the system here.”

But back to our Bangladopian once again. A fitting end piece (cod piece???) to our story:

In the same month that this news broke, appeared another story which got scant attention over here in the Emirates. We all know that the world’s only Phallological Museum is located in Iceland, don’t we?

What? You don’t? Perhaps you should visit www.thepenismuseum.com which boasts ‘The World's Greatest Penis Site - New way to look at tons of penis pictures. Quality penis photos can be browsed using our penis search tool.’

The museum, run by Sigurdur Hjartarson in the tiny Icelandic fishing town of Husavik, has just received its first human penis to join the extensive collection of phalluses from whales, seals, bears and other mammals. Several people had pledged their penises over the years — including an American, a Briton, and a German — but Pall Arason’s was the first to be successfully donated, Hjartarson said. The 95-year-old Icelander's pickled penis will now be the main attraction. "I have just been waiting for this guy for 15 years," he told The Associated Press in a brief telephone interview.

Now, with the addition of Arason's organ, he has 276 specimens, many suspended in formaldehyde or dried and mounted on the walls.

It’s enough to bring tears to the eyes!