what sexual acts did bill clinton do to monica

Every version of the Monica Lewinsky story reveals America's failure of empathy

Twenty-three years later on, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is a tale of cultural sadism.

Past Oct 5, 2021, 8:30am EDT

In the Purity Chronicles, Voice looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late '90s and 2000s, i pop culture miracle at a time. Read more here .

All famous women are symbols of something in American pop culture. But Monica Lewinsky is atypical for beingness, among other things, a symbol of a symbol.

When the story broke in 1998 that President Bill Clinton had carried out an affair with immature former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the media eagerly prepared to make Lewinsky the face of the scandal. In newspapers and on cablevision news and talk shows she became, variously, a slut, an innocent victim, a liberated adult female, someone sexy, someone fatty, someone feminine, someone unwomanly. Her name became synonymous with a sex act. Her humiliation became a national spectacle.

"I became a social representation," Lewinsky would subsequently write for Vanity Fair, "a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion near women, sex activity, infidelity, politics, and body issues."

With that essay, Lewinsky also became one of the first people to help construct the framework for our current reevaluation of the mores of the '90s and 2000s. In 2014, she reemerged into public view as an anti-bullying abet, first with a well-received TED talk and then with the Vanity Fair article, in both, asking the country to reconsider its eagerness to shame her.

In the public eye, Lewinsky wrote, she had become, "America's B.J. Queen. That Intern. That Vixen. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, 'That Woman.'" Merely, she added, "Information technology may surprise you to learn that I'yard actually a person."

Many reacted with a surprising amount of remorse. "I started to feel bad," David Letterman said on the air later he read Lewinsky'southward Vanity Fair commodity. "Because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman. And she was a kid, she was 21, 22. … I feel bad nigh my role in helping button the humiliation to the indicate of suffocation."

Lewinsky had made a error, the consensus came to exist, only that was no excuse for the manner the globe humiliated her. People should be allowed to brand mistakes when they're 22 without becoming the object of fell contemptuousness the way she did.

Equally the Me Too motion took off in 2017, the Monica Lewinsky story evolved once once more, and Lewinsky became a symbol of how liberals got feminism wrong in 1998. The new line of thinking was that responsibility for the mistake had rested with Nib Clinton all along. He was the ane who had all the power in his relationship with Lewinsky. He was the leader of the free world, and she was a 22-year-old intern. He was the one who had a responsibility not to pursue a relationship with her. The fact that he did anyway was an corruption of his power.

"Fifty-something leaders of organizations shouldn't be carrying on affairs with interns who work for them," wrote Matthew Yglesias for Vox in 2017, "regardless of whether the affair is in some sense consensual." Clinton, Yglesias argued, should have resigned.

Part of this more contempo consensus is the idea that liberals and feminists got it wrong back in 1998 by rallying behind Clinton instead of publicly supporting Lewinsky, that they focused all their attending on the fact that Lewinsky said the affair was consensual rather than on the vast ability disparity between Clinton and Lewinsky. Back then, we didn't actually understand almost power and consent, but now we do, because as a culture we have gotten improve. That has come to be the new conventional wisdom about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

Withal, if we revisit the reactions people had to Monica Lewinsky in 1998, information technology becomes clear that few were really ignoring that power disparity dorsum then. Information technology was central to the story existence told about Monica Lewinsky, though the associations information technology carried were far dissimilar from those it carries today.

"Readers of Kenneth Starr's study," the Washington Post opined in September 1998, shortly after contained counsel Ken Starr released the infamous details of his investigation into Clinton, "imagine her equally the star of either 'Fatal Attraction' or 'Seduced and Abased' — or 'Impaired and Dumber.'" Starr's 453-folio report went into explicit detail nearly the sexual relationship betwixt Clinton and Lewinsky in a "blow-past-blow business relationship," equally contemporary commenters were prone to note with a chuckle. And the Post was right in its summary of the Starr report'southward reception: Those movie narratives were the ascendant reads playing beyond America at the time.

Merely regardless of whether you're reading her as the star of Fatal Allure, Seduced and Abandoned, or Dumb and Dumber, it's obvious Lewinsky isn't a wicked and powerful seductress. She's very clearly the one with no power. That's role of what fabricated the story then salacious, according to the mores of the time, and Lewinsky's humiliation so delicious as well.

From the vantage point of 2021, Lewinsky'southward comparative powerlessness makes her a clear victim in Interngate — more often than not. In contrast, the media narratives of the tardily '90s, both feminist and anti-feminist, translated Lewinsky's comparative powerlessness into an ever-shifting status of submissive slut, innocent victim, liberated adult female, and unwomanly shrew.

As we track the fashion those narratives played out in the press throughout the late '90s, we can see the style our civilization has evolved since 1998. What's inverse, however, is not that we've all adult a better understanding of how to read shifting ability dynamics; instead, we've honed our ability to read the sadism and the misogyny of our first impulsive reactions to those dynamics.

Hither's how the public in 1998 interpreted the fact of Monica Lewinsky'south powerlessness — and how those interpretations proceed to operate subliminally in the means we talk about Lewinsky today.

Jay Leno sitting before a picture of Monica Lewinsky on The Tonight Bear witness, July 24, 1998.

Margaret Norton/NBCU Photo Banking company/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Narrative 1: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which fabricated her a stupid, submissive slut unworthy of respect

The right-leaning Drudge Report was the outlet that broke the story of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. And its founder, Matt Drudge, had a very clear sense of what Lewinsky'due south place in the story was.

Lewinsky was, Drudge reported in January 1998, "a immature woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United states of america, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Part where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference."

The narrative this report sets is almost pornographic in its erasure of Lewinsky's personhood. She exists in this story solely to "indulge the president'southward sexual preference," with the only nod to her personality being that she considers the president "the beloved of her life." She is, in this framing, powerless and easily manipulated — and therefore ripe for mockery.

The public happily followed Grubber's atomic number 82 and set to mocking Lewinsky, creating what would become the ascendant cultural narrative of the moment.

In a man-on-the-street report, the Washington Mail service spoke to women who chosen Lewinsky "a naive little ho, actually," and a "spotlight vampire." Another Washington Post written report quoted a woman who said of Lewinsky, "We all know the profile — a picayune fat daughter out there trying to seduce powerful men."

"Hey look at me, I'm Monica Lewinsky," began a jingle on Howard Stern's radio evidence. "They print pictures of my fat face up and my 'do. Though I've barely finished school, I even so know the aureate rule: Do unto others then accept them do you likewise."

This early narrative was durable enough that versions of it were able to persist well past the beginning of Lewinsky's redemption. "She's America's favorite beret-wearing one-time intern, whose very name has get a synonym for a sexual practice human activity she eagerly performed on her knees, a matriarch who rocketed to fame for declining to dry-clean a blue dress stained with the seed of the and then-leader of the free world," wrote Andrea Peyser in the New York Post in 2014, after Lewinsky's Vanity Off-white article was published. "Now, Lewinsky, 40, wants our pity and, perhaps, a chore she can perform while sitting upright. And — drum curlicue, please — she doesn't blame former President Bill Clinton, the alpha male person earlier whom she famously knelt."

At that place'south a sort of just world fallacy at the centre of this narrative: Lewinsky allowed herself to be treated desperately past the president, therefore she deserved to be treated badly, and then therefore we should care for her desperately. Lewinsky, through her powerlessness, identified herself as an acceptable target for our culture'due south sadism, and thus it was appropriate for u.s.a. to direct it at her. She had information technology coming.

This version of the story is the 1 we are more often than not thinking most when we advise that American culture has moved past such outright savage cruelty in the years since 1998. But there were other versions of the story floating around at the same time.

Monica Lewinsky leaves the US District Courthouse with her attorneys on August 6, 1998.

Craig Herndon/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Narrative ii: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which fabricated her a victim who deserved our sympathy

The idea that Lewinsky's comparative powerlessness makes her a victim of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal has become the dominant narrative of our own era. Information technology as well existed in 1998, albeit equally a minority view.

It was, strikingly, a viewpoint held both by feminists on the left, where the stance was politically unhelpful and hence unpopular, and past the conservative religious right, where the opinion was politically very useful indeed.

Linda Hirshman, a feminist lawyer and professor of philosophy and women's studies, chosen on Clinton to resign at the time, citing the fraught power dynamic betwixt Clinton and Lewinsky and the idea that the human relationship would have been inherently damaging to Lewinsky.

"I retrieve information technology's wrong," Hirshman said on the radio plan Republic Now in 1998. "I retrieve the fact that presidents have done information technology since the showtime of the republic is non an excuse. … The ways he interacted with her, if information technology'south true, is indeed a violation of our contemporary ideas almost the moral and proper way to deal with other human beings in our earth."

"You don't have such fraught relationships with people who are so frail," Hirshman told Slate'south Tedious Fire podcast in 2018. "I merely went dorsum to her grand jury testimony, and it is really wrenching. I mean, and what her friends were maxim at the time, and what her mother was saying. Obviously there was available to objective observers show of how painful this was for her no thing what she was saying almost how she was fine. Any mother of a teenage daughter knows that they'll ever say they're fine."

In that viewpoint, Hirshman found an unlikely ally in conservative then-Sen. John Ashcroft. In her 1998 Democracy At present interview, she approvingly cited Ashcroft'southward analysis of the power dynamics at hand. "Ashcroft was on the news yesterday, maxim — I thought quite movingly and convincingly," she said, "that the disproportion of power between the master executive of the United states, a notoriously and legendarily persuasive Bill Clinton, on the ane hand, and a young woman two months out of college on the other, would at least give you some suspension."

Notably, this argument didn't be simply on the right and in the extreme reaches of feminist soapbox. Other feminists fabricated similar cases.

"Clearly the Monica Lewinsky scandal is non a example of illegal sexual harassment," columnist Marjorie Williams allowed in Vanity Fair in 1998. At that place had been no quid pro quo; Lewinsky had by her ain account consented. "Just if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the confront of the law's spirit and reasoning."

Williams considered the willingness of mainstream feminists to stand up by Clinton, and especially the common feminist statement that Clinton's marriage to the bright Hillary Clinton showed him to exist a friend to women, to be a betrayal of the cause. "There's an awful affront to women in the apparently sharp distinctions that Clinton draws between the kind of woman you lot marry and the kind of woman yous seek out for pleasance," Williams wrote. "We were supposed to be doing away with the Madonna and the whore — or at least trying to integrate them."

Clinton besides faced disapproval from women within his administration. At a private Cabinet meeting in September 1998, Health and Human being Services Secretary Donna Shalala spoke out against Clinton'south actions directly to his face. Shalala was a former college president, she explained to Slow Burn in 2018, and she used to fire people for doing more than or less what Clinton had done to Lewinsky.

"If you're a college president, the terminal thing you practise is let people striking on students," she said. "I mean, we have rules nigh these things. And it was just unacceptable, and everybody was existence a bit of an apologist for him in the room and I just blew up."

In August 1998, one of Clinton's supporters in Congress vented on the issue to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. "It's the grossest kind of infidelity," the anonymous woman said, "just sheer constant physical relief and satisfaction, really using in the crudest mode somebody who was patently extraordinarily gullible and obviously madly in dear with him, somebody who would have done annihilation for him, and doing this in the Oval Office. I'grand having a very difficult time with information technology. I don't want to exist an enabler."

Information technology'south striking that Dowd is the figure who publicized this view. In her early coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Dowd was sharply critical of Clinton's abuse of power and sympathetic to Lewinsky every bit a victim. Yet in her after columns, Dowd would begin to criticize Lewinsky, too, in means that prove how this second narrative of the scandal could contain within information technology a cruel and vicious 3rd narrative.

Monica Lewinsky rides in a car driven by one of her lawyers in downtown Washington, DC, August 1998.

Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Narrative 3: Lewinsky was the one with no power, which made her a victim, which is extremely funny and a reason to further humiliate her

In June 1998, vi months afterwards the story bankrupt, Monica Lewinsky posed for a series of portraits in Vanity Fair, wearing red lipstick and designer gowns. In a New York Times column, Maureen Dowd argued that the portraits were "pornography" and that they were "sickening." (Lewinsky was fully clothed in every pic.)

What Dowd seemed to find pornographic and sickening about the photos was the mode they played against her sense that Lewinsky was a victim and hence properly deserved to be in a state of humiliation. That she wasn't humiliated in those pictures — that they were glamour shots — Dowd seemed to detect both jarring and offensive.

"The weird affair about the shot of Monica clutching the feathers is that it's non sultry. It'due south saddening," Dowd wrote. "Stubby and white, her hand looks disturbingly childlike. Her brusk nails are painted cherry-red, like a trivial girl who has put on her mother's smoothen. Shades of JonBenet Ramsey." The photographs, Dowd concludes, show that "in that location'due south one thing Monica has immunity from: brains."

This was the third narrative of the Monica Lewinsky story, and it functions as a synthesis of the first ii. Lewinsky was unquestionably taken advantage of, goes this version of the story, and Clinton was unquestionably in the wrong. But the fact that Lewinsky could exist so hands manipulated proves that she was foolish and childlike. Her victimhood ways that she deserves contempt and contemptuousness.

At times, this narrative is able to veil itself in credible pity for Lewinsky. Even so even then, there's always a sort of delighted lingering on all the ways her failings brand her a victim, on all the ways that she must have been silly and unsophisticated for falling casualty to Clinton. "She is typical of the nihilism of female sexuality at this point," a 25-year-old spokesperson for the Independent Women's Forum, an anti-feminist group of women intellectuals, told the Washington Postal service of Lewinsky in 1998. "I think it's tragic someone in his position so brutally exploited her lack of agreement and sophistication. This poor footling girl thought this was going to be like 'Dynasty.'"

The aforementioned logic also emerged on the feminist left. In the New York Observer, the feminist writer Susan Faludi linked Lewinsky, forth with Clinton accusers Paula Jones and Juanita Broaddrick, to the "Daughter Ability feminism" she rather incoherently identified with such disparate cultural figures as the Spice Girls and Fiona Apple tree.

Girl ability, Faludi argued, "is derived only past celebrating yourself, ideally via your injuries; gaining power past talking well-nigh what was done to y'all. Information technology is, by definition, merely a destructive ability, aimed at bringing down the apparition by having a sulk 'due north' sob in front of the adults. It's the ability available to a daughter whose only recourse is tattle. The many plaintiffs of the Clinton scandals are cast, or cast themselves, as girls."

Faludi did not dispute, in this particular commodity, accounts that Lewinsky, Jones, and Broaddrick had been injured by Clinton. (Elsewhere she would famously argue of Lewinsky that "if annihilation, it sounds like she put the moves on him.") Her argument is rather that by speaking out about their injuries, Clinton'south accusers had been acting like victims and hence children. To be a victim of a sexual predator is, according to this narrative, to be worthy of humiliation.

But Faludi, similar Linda Hirshman and Marjorie Williams, wasn't expressing the mainstream feminist narrative about Monica Lewinsky. That idea lay in the fourth version of the Monica Lewinsky story.

Monica Lewinsky leaves the Creation Club in DC with her chaser William Ginsberg, left, 1998.

Timothy Clary/AFP via Getty Images

Narrative 4: In seducing the president, Monica Lewinsky grabbed for power when she properly had none, which made her a liberated adult female — and an object of contempt

In 1998, when feminists like Hirshman made the claim that Clinton took advantage of Lewinsky, they were met with outrage from other feminists.

"We desire the right to exist sexually active without the presumption that we were used or duped," argued Amelia Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner in the Nation. "If feminists hold Lewinsky up as a violated naif, then we don't believe that an developed woman can take responsibility for her own desires and actions. In other words, nosotros will have gone a long fashion back, baby. Feminists should support Monica Lewinsky non as a victim of a rapacious man but as a young woman with a libido of her ain."

This fourth Monica Lewinsky narrative made the instance that, regardless of whatever disparity in ability between intern and president, Lewinsky was fully capable of making her own sexual choices. It turned abroad from Clinton's responsibility to say no to focus on Lewinsky'southward right to say yes, and information technology treated that correct as empowering — almost as empowering, in its own fashion, every bit a female president would have been.

"It'due south similar every girl'south dream," said Elizabeth Benedict, author of The Joy of Writing Sex, in a feminist roundtable on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal for the New York Observer that famously ran under the headline "New York Supergals Love That Naughty Prez." Benedict celebrated the feminist dream of the '90s: "You can be the President, just you lot tin fuck the President, too."

"And y'all get a apparel," added onetime Saturday Night Alive writer Patricia Marx.

In 2018, the Observer editor who put together that roundtable, Lisa Hunt, told Slate's Deadening Burn that she had felt the roundtable was a productive feminist response to the scandal. Host Leon Neyfakh summarizes her reasoning as: "Feminist thinking about sex can be divided into two strains — one that's all about a adult female's right to sexual agency, and ane that's nearly a adult female's right to be complimentary from sexual predation. Chase thinks that peradventure the supergals who met at Le Bernardin xx years ago were more focused on the former because they were that much closer to a time when women didn't accept sexual autonomy and self-conclusion."

But two decades after, that Observer roundtable and its lascivious glee at the delight of sex with the president are understandably remembered equally a symbol of all the ways feminists failed Lewinsky.

Shortly after discussing all the ways in which it would be a dream to sleep with the president, the panel turns to the question of what Lewinsky might do next. Nancy Fri, author of The Power of Dazzler, has a constructive proffer. "She can rent out her mouth," she says.

"Merely, you know, men do like to get close to the oral fissure that has been close to power," muses Fear of Flying author Erica Jong. "Call back of the fantasy in the man's mind as she'south going down on him and he's thinking, Oh, my God."

Later farther debate as to whether Lewinsky spat or swallowed afterward oral sex, Jung comes to a determination. "I think if we were old-fashioned women, we would exist saying she should be burned as a witch, basically," she says. "And I retrieve information technology's a tribute to how far nosotros've come that we're not trashing Monica Lewinsky."

Jung's belief that it is liberating for the panel not to trash Lewinsky lines up with Chase's sense that the console is nothing more than a group of feminists celebrating all the ways women have come a long mode, baby: Non only can a adult female get the president (although and then, equally now, nosotros're short on applied proof of that assertion), but she can also take sex with the president (although then, as now, it seems unlikely that question was e'er in doubt).

In 2000, the brusk-lived satirical WB comedy Grosse Pointe would parody this idea, that to gloat Lewinsky'south sexuality was to celebrate her. The evidence sees a immature lightheaded actress audition to play Lewinsky in an upcoming prestige biopic.

"Monica Lewinsky is the defining woman of our generation," breathes her friend.

"She knew what she wanted, and she went after information technology," the actress says. "She brought this whole country to its knees."

"And notwithstanding kept her dignity," the friend adds.

The double entendre of the conversation makes articulate what the gleeful salaciousness of the Observer console as well revealed: how little distance there is between this celebratory feminist narrative and that original mainstream narrative that Lewinsky was nix more than than a slut who deserved to be humiliated. It'due south the same sadistic impulse all over over again.

Lewinsky allowed herself to be treated badly by the president. Therefore she deserves to be treated badly. Therefore nosotros should treat her badly. All that the celebratory feminist narrative defends is Lewinsky's and then-called choice to exist humiliated.

Monica Lewinsky attends the Hollywood premiere of FX's Impeachment: American Criminal offence Story in September 2021.

Rich Fury/WireImage

Every story we tell virtually Monica Lewinsky holds the possibility of humiliating her. We still haven't fully institute our style out of that trap.

Today, the national consensus lies more or less with Hirshman in casting Lewinsky as a victim who deserves our sympathy: Lewinsky was Clinton's subordinate, and he took advantage of her, and that was wrong. We have a commonage sense, moreover, that nosotros failed her in our countless national slut-shaming of her. Matt Yglesias'due south elementary and correct exclamation from 2017 more or less lines up with the consensus on sexual morality today: "50-something leaders of organizations shouldn't be carrying on affairs with interns who piece of work for them regardless of whether the matter is in some sense consensual."

Still, over and over once again, as America delves into the details of this story, discomfort lingers. There is some awkward snag that seems to exist around the idea that by her ain account, Lewinsky eagerly pursued Clinton. We seem to accept trouble believing that both this fact and the idea that he never should have allowed himself to be seduced may be true at once.

In 2016, the podcast You're Incorrect About ran an episode on Lewinsky. Hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall were speaking later on Lewinsky's first comeback essay simply earlier Me Too mainstreamed the idea that Clinton was absolutely wrong in his carry toward Lewinsky. At the end, Hobbes mused over how difficult he plant her to clarify every bit a subject field, in part because of how enthusiastically she pursued Clinton.

"I kind of wanted to reclaim Lewinsky equally a feminist hero and a full victim of all this. And obviously she is," he said. "But it'south also only astonishing to me that she did some really stupid shit. She was calling him 20 times a day at the terminate. She had convinced herself he was in love with her. I don't recollect the penalisation fit the crime. I recall what she went through in the '90s was wildly disproportionate. … Merely she did some stupid shit."

On an episode of Slate'southward Slow Burn down podcast in 2018, host Leon Neyfakh begins laughing with Hanna Rosin, a journalist who covered the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, well-nigh how absurd it was for Bill Clinton to take pursued an affair with his intern while he was actively beingness sued for workplace sexual harassment. Rosin laughs, as well, and then seems to catch herself.

"Oh, it's not funny. It'south really not funny. God, we recollect of this then differently now," she says, however laughing. "It's not funny. I'm actually amazed that in my conversation with you I'm still laughing. Because I did think in my head, the Monica Lewinsky scandal really does marker a moment in feminist shame. Information technology is genuinely the thing I wait dorsum on and think, God, the fashion — I hateful, everyone says this — simply the mode nosotros talked almost her, the fashion we treated her, how blind nosotros were to the ability dynamics. We talked about them merely in this kind of superficial fashion, you know? It just wasn't prime in our minds, the power dynamic and the position she was put in and how her life was absolutely ruined by this and how she got dragged into it. And yet you and I nevertheless detect it funny. Why is that?"

I recognize this discomfort in myself.

Intellectually, I know that it was Clinton'due south responsibleness, as the 49-twelvemonth-old president, to refuse advances from a 22-year-old unpaid intern. Moreover, I'm enlightened that Clinton has been accused multiple times of sexual set on and sexual harassment. Within that context, Clinton'due south decision to bear on a sexual relationship with his immature intern appears less like a ane-fourth dimension lapse of judgment than like office of a connected design of predatory behavior.

Beanie Feldstein as Monica Lewinsky on Impeachment: American Crime Story.

Tina Thorpe/FX

Yet I recently sat downwards to watch Ryan White potato'south Impeachment: American Crime Story miniseries, which debuted in September on FX. And when I saw Beanie Feldstein every bit Lewinsky flash Clinton her thong in the office shortly before their first sexual encounter, for a dissever second I felt a sort of defensive shock. A baroque thought appeared in my mind: Wasn't information technology blaming the victim, I wondered, to advise that she pursued him so brazenly?

Of grade, Lewinsky did pursue Clinton. The flashed thong is a matter of historical record. It has been more thoroughly investigated than possibly whatever other sexual accelerate in history.

What my brain tripped on, I think, is some yet-present inability to reconcile Lewinsky every bit a woman with her own sexual desires and agency and equally a figure who was taken advantage of. We accept made this binary an either/or proposition, when it is entirely possible for information technology to exist a both/and. That's where the discomfort lies.

Lewinsky herself, as she begins to have more and more command of her narrative, seems to ofttimes recognize the discomfort people feel effectually the question of her complicity in the affair, and the extent to which they might find it funny. For most of her public life, she has maintained that her human relationship with Clinton was fully consensual and that the true villain of the story was Ken Starr and the media witch chase she experienced after he published his study. But in 2018, in the midst of a resurgent Me Too movement, she expressed a few other thoughts.

"Now, at 44, I'm beginning (simply beginning) to consider the implications of the ability differentials that were so vast betwixt a president and a White House intern. I'm beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot," she wrote for Vanity Off-white. "'This' (sigh) is as far as I've gotten in my re-evaluation; I desire to exist thoughtful."

It was Lewinsky who, serving as a producer on Impeachment, told the testify's writers not to elide her decision to go after Clinton and to show the thong flash on camera. "I just felt I shouldn't get a laissez passer," she told the New York Times.

It makes sense that Lewinsky is being so cautious so thoughtful near this question, so unwilling to commit to one particular interpretation of the facts. Every version of the story we tell about her, even the good ones, contains within itself the possibility of another story in which she is humiliated. That's a fact of which she is fully aware.

"So often have I struggled with my own sense of agency versus victimhood," she explained in her 2018 Vanity Fair essay. "In 1998, we were living in times in which women'southward sexuality was a marker of their agency — 'owning desire.' And however, I felt that if I saw myself as in any way a victim, information technology would open the door to choruses of: 'See, you did simply service him.'"

In 1998, nosotros excoriated Lewinsky for being a adult female adjacent to the idea of sex. Not having sex would not accept saved her from our scorn, not as long as there was a sex scandal happening within her vicinity. (Equally right-wing sloganeers are happy to remind you, "Hillary sucks but Monica swallows.")

Part of the project of feminism over the past 20 years has been to augment the narrative, to create space for a world in which a adult female may be in proximity to a sex scandal and not exist understood as deserving of humiliation. Yet despite a widely held want and ongoing effort to distinguish between the two, we can find ourselves caught in this vexed sort of purity test: Is Lewinsky enough of a victim for our sympathy? How much of a victim must she be to deserve respect? Tin she be both a victim and a adult female expressing sexual agency?

America's intellectual understanding of consent has evolved and matured by leaps and bounds since the Starr Written report offset arrived. Merely for many of us, this intellectual understanding is nonetheless not quite equal to the engrained sexual morality we grew up on.

So if we find ourselves, despite our better judgment, longing to demand proof of victimhood from the women we extend our empathy toward, maybe we shouldn't be as well surprised at our own thought patterns. Later all, that's the sexual morality millennials grew up on. We learned it from the aforementioned place we learned what a blow job is: the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

heistpubleausing98.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.vox.com/culture/22672346/monica-lewinsky-bill-clinton-impeachment-american-crime-story

Share this post