She was predator, not prey. It was consensual, not coercive. But how would Monica Lewinsky know that someday, 20 years in the future, a narrative would arise that would enable her to reinvent herself as the victim?
I have been working toward this realization for years. I have been trying to find that power—a particularly Sisyphean task for a person who has been gaslighted.
To be blunt, I was diagnosed several years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracized back then. My trauma expedition has been long, arduous, painful, and expensive. And it’s not over.
Take a second to breathe, wipe the tear from your eye, and reflect. Monica has.
But as I find myself reflecting on what happened, I’ve also come to understand how my trauma has been, in a way, a microcosm of a larger, national one. Both clinically and observationally, something fundamental changed in our society in 1998, and it is changing again as we enter the second year of the Trump presidency in a post-Cosby-Ailes-O’Reilly-Weinstein-Spacey-Whoever-Is-Next world.
She was a 22-year-old who showed her thong underwear to a married 49-year-old horn dog, her blue dress a change of pace from pants suits. He should have been a better man than to go for it. But as Cathy Young explains, the disgraceful impropriety of a president doesn’t necessarily lead to the rehabilitation of Monica Lewinsky.
The piece has been widely praised as a smart, necessary contribution to our national conversation about sex, power and consent. It is indeed a fascinating essay. But its main takeaway should be to raise more questions about whether #MeToo in its current version represents progress.
Until now, Lewinsky has always insisted that her relationship with President Bill Clinton was fully consensual and mutual, despite the vast gap in their position and age — and despite efforts by Clinton foes to portray his actions toward her as predatory.
And, indeed, it’s not that Lewinsky is now saying it wasn’t consensual exactly, but that consensual doesn’t exactly mean consensual anymore.
“Now, at 44, I’m beginning . . . to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a President and a White House intern,” Lewinsky writes, concluding that “in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.” She allows that what happened between her and Clinton was not sexual assault, but she believes it was “a gross abuse of power.”
It’s true that she was a White House intern and he was the President of the United States. It’s true that there was a power differential between their positions. So was Clinton’s taking her up on her offer a “gross abuse of power”?
It was always clear that the 22-year-old intern, not the 49-year-old President, initiated the affair in 1995 (first by lifting her jacket to flash the top of her thong underwear when they were briefly alone in an office, then by seductively whispering that she had a crush on him).
Later, Lewinsky was the one who pushed for more intimacy, complaining to her confidants about her lover’s reluctance to have sexual intercourse.
But what of her ability to resist her own sexual impulses, seized upon by this powerful man?
Yet to say that the power dynamic negates consent is absurd. There was no point at which saying no could have put Lewinsky’s career or livelihood in jeopardy.
However young, she was a college-educated, sexually experienced grownup.
As Cathy says, this isn’t to say that Clinton shouldn’t have known better, been stronger, resisted the attractions of this willing ingenue, and that his conduct wasn’t a disgrace. But that doesn’t absolve Lewinsky of her role in the affair, or make her oft-stated consent somehow less consenting.
More telling is that Lewinsky, despite her having insisted over the years in the retelling of her tale, that it was consensual, can have her slate wiped clean and be extolled as a shero of the cause simply by invoking a hashtag.
People rethink their pasts all the time. But Lewinsky stresses that she probably would not have had her epiphany without #MeToo — not only because of the heightened awareness of sexual coercion, but because of the support and solidarity the movement offers: “Virtually anyone can share her or his #MeToo story and be instantly welcomed into a tribe.”
It’s a revealing statement, and not in a good way: It brands #MeToo as victimhood-based tribalism for women. What began as a protest against abuse of power to coerce sex and silence victims has become an invitation to reframe regretted sexual experiences as coercive. Lewinsky’s self-reinvention as a victim completes this descent.
Then again, facts are old-school and truth is what really matters these days. If this is Lewinsky’s truth, at least today, and it conforms to the purpose of the tribe by reinventing the story of Bill Clinton’s failing as yet another vestige of the Patriarchy, isn’t that far more important than the nasty factual details we’ve all come to know so well?
But then, if Monica Lewinsky can rehabilitate herself as a victim, given the facts of what happened, given how well the facts are known, who can’t reinvent her story according to the narrative to make herself a victim no matter what she did?
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“The idea of consent might well be rendered moot”? Evidently she is trying to run the theory that power groupies can’t “consent.” That seems like quite a stretch.
It’s hardly a stretch to those who don’t want it to be a stretch. Check your privilege, white man.
“Lewinsky’s self-reinvention as a victim completes this descent.”
So this is the end of it? I’m not that optimistic.
Agreed. There is no bottom here.
So you’re saying she’s still going down?
Pig.
Aw, c’mon, I remember 1998. It seemed like more than a big enough bottom at the time.
It’s really not a difficult thing to understand. Lewinsky, like many women attracted to power and celebrity, saw a chance to be intimate with POTUS, and seduced him into whatever sort of a groupie/celebrity relationship they had.
He was not an unwilling or difficult subject of her affections. Trapped for decades in a loveless, sexless marriage albeit by choice made by political constraints, he had eagerly sought out strange, from Lewinsky and other females whenever he could for many years.
The problem is when you choose to become POTUS, you have to put an end to that stuff during the time you are POTUS. People will forgive consensual dalliances before or after you are President, but once you’re President you’re exposing yourself to blackmail. It was taken as a fact in the Arab world that Lewinsky was placed there by Israeli intelligence for that exactly purpose. I see zero evidence of that, but it sorta’ points out the danger that exists. That’s why it was not “just about sex” or “a private matter between him and his wife”.
It’s why Trump’s sex escapades before assuming office don’t much matter to most people. He never said he was St. Donald, and people knew what he was when he ran and factored it in. If he gets “caught with a broad” in the Oval Office now, that should not be tolerated by even his strongest supporters.
Both Mossad and I appreciate your explaining that to us.
I do not agree that she was a predator. No one was prey or predator, though when it hit the fan he had a lot more power to tear her down, with willing surrogates in the media, than she did in reverse. Petty example: no one calls a blow job “getting a Clinton.” Power (or powerlessness) doesn’t equal predation.
Wisdom and decency would urge a much older adult in a sexual relationship (especially a President with an intern , horribile dictu) to observe what sex columnist Dan Savage calls the campsite rule: leave the younger person no worse off than when she arrived. Of course wisdom and decency went out with any affair, certainly any affair conducted inside the “crown jewel of the federal prison system.” The campsite rule doesn’t deny the human agency of adults, for not every moral issue is a forensic one.
He could have banged a 42-year old industry lobbyist with a K Street office making $300K. He could have banged several of them at once, frankly. (Maybe he did and was just careful, who knows.) Few would have judged him too harshly for “going out to eat” on Hillary Clinton, if that was all it was. But you don’t have to buy into post-modern feminist garbage to see this as grossly lopsided.
I turn 49 next week, and I work as an ordinary senior associate in a pretty ordinary suburban law firm. No way there’s no power imbalance between me and the 22-year-old receptionists and interns here, and I cannot even fire anybody.
Sequence matters.
You’ve asserted there’s a power imbalance, but not argued why that matters. It’s not like Lewinsky was blisfully unaware of Clinton’s position, nor did Clinton force himself on her.
Children get mad at us for not treating them like adults and adults get mad at us for not infantilizing them.
“She was predator, not prey.”
Still clueless, after all these years.
“To be blunt, I was diagnosed several years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly from the ordeal of having been publicly outed and ostracized back then. My trauma expedition has been long, arduous, painful, and expensive.”
You must have left out the portion of the interview where she denounces Kenneth Starr and Linda Tripp…