Monica Lewinsky: "The shame sticks to you like tar"

I tell Lewinsky that I think the problem with focusing all the attention on misogynists and racists is that it’s bound to legitimise certain types of bullying. I’ve seen men try to speak up about their online abuse only to be met with a barrage of “stop whining” and “check your privilege”. The sentimental view is that men tend to recover from online bullying just fine, whereas women are crushed; but psychologists will tell you there are bigger differences between individuals than gender when it comes to overcoming abuse.

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“It’s very easy to get micro, especially when someone is telling you a personal story that’s gutting,” Lewinsky says. “And it’s important to highlight which groups experience cyberbullying the most. But this is an umbrella problem, and under this umbrella sit many people who suffer online harassment for many different reasons.”

Lewinsky’s outlook on her scandal has been doggedly non-ideological from the start. “I’m endlessly fascinated by how people derive meaning in life,” she says, “the chasm between how idealised people pretend life is and how complex we really are.” She’s written that she thought it was stupid and wrong in the 1990s when most people blamed her for the affair with President Clinton, but also stupid and wrong in the 2010s when people got more enlightened and started retrospectively blaming him. There’s an extraordinary moment in the 2002 HBO documentary, Monica In Black And White. It’s a kind of Ask Me Anything session, with Lewinsky taking questions from an audience of graduate students and HBO staff. Towards the end, a man stands up and asks, “How does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?” There are gasps from the audience.

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