MONICA LEWINSKY SUSAN BOYLE SILENCE FREE

However, if we revisit the reactions people had to Monica Lewinsky in 1998, it becomes clear that few were actually ignoring that power disparity back then. That has come to be the new conventional wisdom about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Back then, we didn’t really understand about power and consent, but now we do, because as a culture we have gotten better. Part of this more recent 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 attention on the fact that Lewinsky said the affair was consensual rather than on the vast power disparity between Clinton and Lewinsky. “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. The fact that he did anyway was an abuse of his power. He was the one who had a responsibility not to pursue a relationship with her.

MONICA LEWINSKY SUSAN BOYLE SILENCE FREE

He was the leader of the free world, and she was a 22-year-old intern. He was the one who had all the power in his relationship with Lewinsky. The new line of thinking was that responsibility for the mistake had rested with Bill Clinton all along. People should be allowed to make mistakes when they’re 22 without becoming the object of vicious scorn the way she did.Īs the Me Too movement took off in 2017, the Monica Lewinsky story evolved once again, and Lewinsky became a symbol of how liberals got feminism wrong in 1998. Lewinsky had made a mistake, the consensus came to be, but that was no excuse for the way the world humiliated her. … I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation.” “Because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman. “I started to feel bad,” David Letterman said on the air after he read Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article. Many reacted with a surprising amount of remorse. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, ‘That Woman.’” But, she added, “It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.”

In the public eye, Lewinsky wrote, she had become, “America’s B.J. In 2014, she reemerged into public view as an anti-bullying advocate, 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. 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. “I became a social representation,” Lewinsky would later write for Vanity Fair, “a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.” Her humiliation became a national spectacle. Her name became synonymous with a sex act. In newspapers and on cable news and talk shows she became, variously, a slut, an innocent victim, a liberated woman, someone sexy, someone fat, someone feminine, someone unwomanly. When the story broke in 1998 that President Bill Clinton had carried out an affair with young former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the media eagerly prepared to make Lewinsky the face of the scandal. But Monica Lewinsky is singular for being, among other things, a symbol of a symbol. Īll famous women are symbols of something in American pop culture. In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time.

Monica lewinsky susan boyle silence