Monica Lewinsky is killing it on Twitter. Last week, US Vice-President Mike Pence was quoted by the Washington Times as saying: “Spend more time on your knees than on the internet.” (He was talking about prayer.) American writer and journalist Lauren Duca wrote “OK, who’s gonna tell him?” Monica Lewinsky replied, “def not me,” adding a side-eye emoji. It pretty much broke the internet. And it encapsulates a shift in the way she has publicly related to her own past.
Lewinsky’s affair with President Bill Clinton between 1995 and 1997, and her subsequent part in his 1998 impeachment trial, catapulted her into an unprecedented level of fame and scrutiny. The events coincided with the burgeoning of the internet, its circulation of gossip and judgement, and the 24-hour news cycle. Clinton claimed that she had come on to him, and that he’d rebuffed her, upon which she threatened him. Men in positions of power know that to claim that a woman wanted sex can derail her life, while he can hide behind the closing ranks of male solidarity. Lewinsky was dealt a cruel fate: an ill-judged, risky, and exciting mutual involvement morphed into a spectacle in which she became the object of, and the synonym for, vicious jokes and misogynistic slurs by right-wing and left-wing critics alike. She was portrayed as a stalker, a histrionic young woman, desperate for the attentions of a powerful man. News anchors and TV pundits had a field day; Lewinsky’s life skidded manically out of her control, and no-one came out of it well.
In the years after the scandal, Lewinsky tried her hand at various enterprises—talk-shows, a handbag company—all of them attempts to regain control over the narrative about her. But she was caught between a rock and a hard place; either her life was swamped by the past, or her attempts to move out of that position were mocked. She couldn’t win.
In recent years, Lewinsky has moved towards, not away from, the scandal. In a 2014 article in Vanity Fair, ‘Shame and Survival,’ she wrote eloquently of her experience, and in 2015 gave a TED Talk about shame and bullying that was viewed by millions, many of them presumably with no memory of what happened in the mid-90s.
Both are dignified, compassionate, and articulate; Lewinsky makes a powerful case for the terrible effects of online shaming. And she returns to the unequal focus on her agency and choices, against the elision of Clinton’s own agency. “He was my boss,” she says in Vanity Fair, “he was the most powerful man on the planet.” Making reference to lyrics in Beyonce’s 2013 hit ‘Partition’—“He bucked all my buttons, he ripped my blouse/He Monica Lewinski'd all on my gown”—she says: “Thanks, Beyonce, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all over my gown.’” In an interview in 2016, she adds: “I don’t actually know why this story became about oral sex... it was a mutual relationship.”
It was politically expedient for Clinton to underline the supposed passivity of receiving oral sex. Much of the public discourse about the scandal (“How does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?”) reiterated this framing of Lewinsky as the sexual agent, and of Clinton as the passive recipient—the victim—of her desire.
Lewinsky repeatedly points out this injustice and critiques the corrosive effects of a culture of humiliation. But she has also insisted on performing her own shame. In the 2002 HBO film Monica in Black and White she rues her own naivety. In the TED Talk, she says: “Let me be clear, I regret my decisions every day.” She reassures the audience that she feels shame, the price she long paid for our respect.
But this is changing in the playful medium of twitter and emojis. When a psychologist asked on Twitter what people’s worst career advice was, Lewinsky replied: “an internship at the White House will be amazing on your resume.” When Senator Marco Rubio blamed a negative Politico article on an intern, Lewinsky retweeted it and wrote “blaming the intern is so 1990s (eye-roll emoji).” And then there was the Pence tweet.
It’s a bold strategy, to joke about blow-jobs—the very medium that derailed her life. In these tweets, she is neither straightforwardly performing shame (I’m ashamed I had an affair with a married man), nor straightforwardly defying it (I have nothing to be ashamed of!) Her winking, self-mocking tweets acknowledge the anguish, the humiliation, the absurdity of her experience; we don’t need to crush her with those because she knows them only too well. She is saying: of course this was insanity! Of course I made a catastrophic misjudgement! But she is adding: that misjudgement was not mine alone, and it does not legitimate the egregious bullying, the punitive sanctimony, the prurient and judgmental spectacle that the world indulged in as a result.
There is no doubt some—many—find her tweets distasteful and hypocritical. How can she both want to put the past behind her while simultaneously returning to it, irreverently? If she mocks herself, can’t others do the same? But her tweet—and the delighted, “you-go-girl”—responses to it, mark an atmospheric difference from even the recent past.
Amongst a demographic highly alert to slut-shaming, to imbalances of power in the workplace—a demographic radicalised, perhaps, by the #MeToo hashtag—Lewinsky has an audience highly attuned to the invidious position she was in; to the vast difference in power between her and Clinton, and to the higher price paid by women for “mistakes.”
This has always been my feeling about Lewinsky—that she made some rash decisions under the motor of desire, infatuation, intensity, excitement. Her catastrophic misjudgement was bound to end badly—though it was of a sort people make every day, pursuing ill-fated relationships in circumstances over-determined by inequalities in power. The difference for Lewinsky is that her mistake was accessible to all of us to be picked over.
Making errors of judgement doesn’t legitimate being hung out to dry, or being held hostage to the incident for the rest of her life, or the misogyny in which the world delightedly indulged. She was naive about how those decisions might play out and paid a disproportionate price for it. But should that make her life unliveable?
What was striking about Lewinsky during and after the scandal was her vulnerability; her earnest need to be loved by an attractive man, the sheer importance that regard meant to her—and her openness about that. It can be horrifying to see written so nakedly on another human being the need for love and desire. And so we attack it, though one day it might be us, broken and desperate. Who hasn’t been vulnerable in this way? The contempt for Lewinsky was powered not just by misogyny and slut-shaming, but also by the gleeful splitting off and projection into another person of our own horror at our neediness. People love to see naivety punished.
Lewinsky’s tweets now, finally, acknowledge what has long been semi-dormant in her public statements: a refusal of the dynamic whereby women are asked to rationalise, justify, and explain their sexual choices—while men are not asked to be accountable for their desires since we see desire as out of their control, embedded in their DNA, somewhere beyond reason and therefore accountability
Lewinsky used to try to account for herself—her insistence on her regret and shame was part of that—but now she is refusing this stance. She knows sexuality is not governable, she knows that abuses of power take place, and she knows that we treat male and female sexuality with utterly different standards. That’s where we should focus, and that’s what her tweets point to. I can’t wait for the next one.
Lewinsky’s affair with President Bill Clinton between 1995 and 1997, and her subsequent part in his 1998 impeachment trial, catapulted her into an unprecedented level of fame and scrutiny. The events coincided with the burgeoning of the internet, its circulation of gossip and judgement, and the 24-hour news cycle. Clinton claimed that she had come on to him, and that he’d rebuffed her, upon which she threatened him. Men in positions of power know that to claim that a woman wanted sex can derail her life, while he can hide behind the closing ranks of male solidarity. Lewinsky was dealt a cruel fate: an ill-judged, risky, and exciting mutual involvement morphed into a spectacle in which she became the object of, and the synonym for, vicious jokes and misogynistic slurs by right-wing and left-wing critics alike. She was portrayed as a stalker, a histrionic young woman, desperate for the attentions of a powerful man. News anchors and TV pundits had a field day; Lewinsky’s life skidded manically out of her control, and no-one came out of it well.
In the years after the scandal, Lewinsky tried her hand at various enterprises—talk-shows, a handbag company—all of them attempts to regain control over the narrative about her. But she was caught between a rock and a hard place; either her life was swamped by the past, or her attempts to move out of that position were mocked. She couldn’t win.
In recent years, Lewinsky has moved towards, not away from, the scandal. In a 2014 article in Vanity Fair, ‘Shame and Survival,’ she wrote eloquently of her experience, and in 2015 gave a TED Talk about shame and bullying that was viewed by millions, many of them presumably with no memory of what happened in the mid-90s.
Both are dignified, compassionate, and articulate; Lewinsky makes a powerful case for the terrible effects of online shaming. And she returns to the unequal focus on her agency and choices, against the elision of Clinton’s own agency. “He was my boss,” she says in Vanity Fair, “he was the most powerful man on the planet.” Making reference to lyrics in Beyonce’s 2013 hit ‘Partition’—“He bucked all my buttons, he ripped my blouse/He Monica Lewinski'd all on my gown”—she says: “Thanks, Beyonce, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant ‘Bill Clinton’d all over my gown.’” In an interview in 2016, she adds: “I don’t actually know why this story became about oral sex... it was a mutual relationship.”
It was politically expedient for Clinton to underline the supposed passivity of receiving oral sex. Much of the public discourse about the scandal (“How does it feel to be America’s premier blowjob queen?”) reiterated this framing of Lewinsky as the sexual agent, and of Clinton as the passive recipient—the victim—of her desire.
Lewinsky repeatedly points out this injustice and critiques the corrosive effects of a culture of humiliation. But she has also insisted on performing her own shame. In the 2002 HBO film Monica in Black and White she rues her own naivety. In the TED Talk, she says: “Let me be clear, I regret my decisions every day.” She reassures the audience that she feels shame, the price she long paid for our respect.
But this is changing in the playful medium of twitter and emojis. When a psychologist asked on Twitter what people’s worst career advice was, Lewinsky replied: “an internship at the White House will be amazing on your resume.” When Senator Marco Rubio blamed a negative Politico article on an intern, Lewinsky retweeted it and wrote “blaming the intern is so 1990s (eye-roll emoji).” And then there was the Pence tweet.
It’s a bold strategy, to joke about blow-jobs—the very medium that derailed her life. In these tweets, she is neither straightforwardly performing shame (I’m ashamed I had an affair with a married man), nor straightforwardly defying it (I have nothing to be ashamed of!) Her winking, self-mocking tweets acknowledge the anguish, the humiliation, the absurdity of her experience; we don’t need to crush her with those because she knows them only too well. She is saying: of course this was insanity! Of course I made a catastrophic misjudgement! But she is adding: that misjudgement was not mine alone, and it does not legitimate the egregious bullying, the punitive sanctimony, the prurient and judgmental spectacle that the world indulged in as a result.
There is no doubt some—many—find her tweets distasteful and hypocritical. How can she both want to put the past behind her while simultaneously returning to it, irreverently? If she mocks herself, can’t others do the same? But her tweet—and the delighted, “you-go-girl”—responses to it, mark an atmospheric difference from even the recent past.
Amongst a demographic highly alert to slut-shaming, to imbalances of power in the workplace—a demographic radicalised, perhaps, by the #MeToo hashtag—Lewinsky has an audience highly attuned to the invidious position she was in; to the vast difference in power between her and Clinton, and to the higher price paid by women for “mistakes.”
This has always been my feeling about Lewinsky—that she made some rash decisions under the motor of desire, infatuation, intensity, excitement. Her catastrophic misjudgement was bound to end badly—though it was of a sort people make every day, pursuing ill-fated relationships in circumstances over-determined by inequalities in power. The difference for Lewinsky is that her mistake was accessible to all of us to be picked over.
Making errors of judgement doesn’t legitimate being hung out to dry, or being held hostage to the incident for the rest of her life, or the misogyny in which the world delightedly indulged. She was naive about how those decisions might play out and paid a disproportionate price for it. But should that make her life unliveable?
What was striking about Lewinsky during and after the scandal was her vulnerability; her earnest need to be loved by an attractive man, the sheer importance that regard meant to her—and her openness about that. It can be horrifying to see written so nakedly on another human being the need for love and desire. And so we attack it, though one day it might be us, broken and desperate. Who hasn’t been vulnerable in this way? The contempt for Lewinsky was powered not just by misogyny and slut-shaming, but also by the gleeful splitting off and projection into another person of our own horror at our neediness. People love to see naivety punished.
Lewinsky’s tweets now, finally, acknowledge what has long been semi-dormant in her public statements: a refusal of the dynamic whereby women are asked to rationalise, justify, and explain their sexual choices—while men are not asked to be accountable for their desires since we see desire as out of their control, embedded in their DNA, somewhere beyond reason and therefore accountability
Lewinsky used to try to account for herself—her insistence on her regret and shame was part of that—but now she is refusing this stance. She knows sexuality is not governable, she knows that abuses of power take place, and she knows that we treat male and female sexuality with utterly different standards. That’s where we should focus, and that’s what her tweets point to. I can’t wait for the next one.
