In exploring the blooming career of Monica Lewinsky as an anti-cyberbullying activist, it’s not only Lewinsky that’s trying to rehabilitate or reinvent hereself. It’s also a chance for the liberal media and the feminist movement to redeem themselves. See The New York Times, with an article last week titled “Monica Lewinsky Is Back, But This Time on Her Terms.” Reporter Jessica Bennett lauded Lewinsky for “a biting cultural critique about humiliation as commodity.”
She even turned to Gloria Steinem for commentary. “It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Steinem wrote in an email, noting that in Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” She thanked Lewinsky “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”
But back in 1998, Steinem wrote about “Feminism and the Clinton Question” in that same New York Times and barely wanted to discuss Lewinsky as if she mattered. The intern gave her consent, so the case is closed. For Steinem then, it was all about preserving the Abortion Defender in office. Who had a compassion deficit and an empathy crisis back then?
Whatever it was, her relationship with President Clinton has never been called unwelcome, coerced or other than something she sought. The power imbalance between them increased the index of suspicion, but there is no evidence to suggest that Ms. Lewinsky’s will was violated; quite the contrary. In fact, her subpoena in the Paula Jones case should have been quashed. Welcome sexual behavior is about as relevant to sexual harassment as borrowing a car is to stealing one.
Wow, let’s imagine Hillary endorsed every word of that as a feminist. This is the essential paragraph:
For one thing, if the President had behaved with comparable insensitivity toward environmentalists, and at the same time remained their most crucial champion and bulwark against an anti-environmental Congress, would they be expected to desert him? I don't think so. If President Clinton were as vital to preserving freedom of speech as he is to preserving reproductive freedom, would journalists be condemned as "inconsistent" for refusing to suggest he resign? Forget it.
She didn’t want America to “disqualify energy and talent the country needs.” Feminists threw all the Clinton "bimbos" under the bus. They scowled at every female accusation as a threat to the feminist agenda, even when Juanita Broaddrick came forward on NBC in 1999 charging she was raped by Clinton.
MSNBC’s Irin Carmon addressed the feminist trend toward Lewinsky at the time:
The bestselling author of Backlash, [Wall Street Journal reporter] Susan Faludi said, “If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him,” and said Lewinsky had been “sleeping her way to the bottom of the Revlon empire.” (Shortly before the affair became public, Clinton’s friend Vernon Jordan had been trying to arrange a job for Lewinsky at Revlon in New York in part to get her away from the president.)
Feminist and Democratic strategist Susan Estrich wrote, “Lewinsky at least appears to have flirted her way to a job at Revlon and, when that disappeared, a $2 million modeling offer and the status of the most-sought after woman in the world. Not bad, some might say, for someone who can’t type.”
Jessica Bennett has been on the Monica-rehab beat for a while. Last year, she wrote a piece for Time titled “The Shaming of Monica: Why We Owe Her an Apology.” She proclaimed: “America turned its back on a young intern, and the media called her tubby, slutty and predatory. A TV network even asked people to vote on whether she was a "tramp." Long before slut-shaming was a term, Monica Lewinsky was its original target.”
She wrote: “The timing of Lewinsky’s essay [in Vanity Fair], as we await a Hillary Clinton presidential run, is no doubt strategic, taking us back to an era that the Clintons would rather not revisit. But perhaps it also shows how far we’ve come. Does the media owe Monica Lewinsky a collective apology?”
Bennett reinvented 1998 as if Lewinsky was more vilified than her old friend Linda Tripp or independent counsel Kenneth Starr, and then made a fool of herself by relaying that the word "bullying" wasn't in the vernacular:
“It was a different time back then. There was no consciousness raised about slut-shaming. Bullying wasn’t even in the vernacular,” says Leora Tanenbaum, the author of Slut!, which first established the term slut-bashing (a precursor to slut-shaming) when it came out in 1999. “People who were decisionmakers and influential writers were making comments about her hair and body. It was a textbook case of the sexual double standard.” [Italics hers.]
Bennett was also interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered to rehabilitate Lewinsky and insist on media apologies for her. In all of this, the Clintons are barely mentioned as slut-shamers with a sexual double standard.
AUDIE CORNISH, anchor: It also allowed her to do that with a new generation -- right? -- who may not think of her in the same way. I mean, is that part of this reimagining of her image?
JESSICA BENNETT: Yeah, one of the things that I noted was that a lot of young women in particular were really gravitating towards her. You know, I went with her to a lot of public events, and they would come up to her after and tell her how inspired they were. They were flocking to her as if she was some kind of icon. And that was something that was surprising to me.
CORNISH: You know, there have been a few high-profile people of media, including David Letterman and Bill Maher and -- who have expressed remorse about the way they treated and talked about Lewinsky after 1998. And in your piece you even talk about having a tinge of guilt yourself about this, kind of being riveted by the details of the affair when you were in high school. What do you make of this idea of media guilt now?
BENNETT: You know, back when this happened, we didn't even have a language to talk about it. So words like slut-shaming or media gender bias, they didn't really exist then. So I was 16 at the time. I was too young to really understand the complexities of what was happening, but I was old enough to get that I wasn't on Monica Lewinsky's side, and neither was the culture.
And I think that over time there's been some public reckoning. And it's been interesting to talk to media folks about this who covered it at the time and now even look back on their stories and think, huh, that wasn't quite fair. I think that a lot of the language that was used back then -- you know, she was called a tart, a tramp, basically everything but slut, publicly -- it would never fly today. You wouldn't get that on the air. You wouldn't get that in columns in The New York Times. And back then you did, with little criticism.
Bennett’s right about the Times. They ran an op-ed in February wondering “Should ‘Slut’ Be Retired?” Here again was expert Leona Tanenbaum, who thought “bullying” was a new word, and “who is also the senior writer and editor for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.”
The word is just too dangerous:
Being called a “slut” in some contexts can mean a girl is socially important — and, she writes, “in some social circles, it is compulsory to achieve ‘good slut’ status. A girl must behave like a ‘good slut’ whether she wants to or not.” But “once a girl achieves ‘good slut’ status, she is always at risk of losing control and becoming known as a ‘bad slut’” who is ostracized and shamed.
Like poor, poor scandal-squeezing millionaire Monica Lewinsky.
