The intern has grown up. Have we?
In a new Vanity Fair article, Monica Lewinsky emerges on behalf of victims of online abuse. In the age of slut-shaming, let’s not succumb to scandal but support her, writes Jessica Valenti
IN 2006, I found myself at the centre of an online controversy after posing in the centre of a group photo with former president Bill Clinton. I had the audacity to bring my breasts with me that day, and soon conservative bloggers were attacking me for wearing a shirt that was too tight — and for “posing” to “make [ my] breasts as obvious as possible”.
Perhaps not shockingly, I was called a “Monica”; online comments were along the lines of “Who’s the intern?”.
A well-known law professor and blogger even said that I “should have worn a beret” and that a “blue dress would have been good too”.
Despite hundreds of blogs debating my feminist bona fides because of a Gap crew-neck sweater and an onslaught of sexually violent e-mails, the harassment was relatively short-lived. (Although it did take a few months for the first Google search of my name not to be “Jessica Valenti boobgate”.)
I now laugh about the episode. But at the time, I thought a lot about the comparisons to Monica Lewinsky. I could not imagine how horrible it must be for someone’s life to be turned into nothing more than a collection of suggestive cultural symbols: the blue dress, the beret, the cigar.
So I was thrilled to see Lewinsky taking her humanity back this week, writing about the toll a political scandal took on her life for an article running in the June issue of Vanity Fair.
Lewinsky is hardly the first woman to be publicly scorned by the US public in a sex scandal. But “thanks to the Drudge Report”, she writes, “I was also possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the internet”.
Indeed, more than 16 years after Matt Drudge took Lewinsky’s affair public, “slut-shaming” and the public humiliation of women — for real or perceived sexual indiscretions — is as ubiquitous as the internet cat meme. But in 1998, we had yet to hear of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons in Nova Scotia or 15-yearold Audrie Pott in California.
Both teens were raped and afterwards subjected to online abuse calling them “sluts”. Both girls also killed themselves.
In 1998, it was not common-
The web page promoting Lewinsky’s full article is already filled with disgusting comments
place for men to release sexual pictures and videos of their exes on the internet as a form of revenge. Or for celebrity men to harass their former partners by posting sonogram pictures of a supposedly aborted pregnancy. Or for death threats to have become simply an expected part of being female online.
Lewinsky could very well be the internet’s first humiliated woman — at least on the kind of national and international scale upon which scandals now so simply exist.
Of course, it is not just women who get violently harassed online: what sparked Lewinsky to “give purpose” to her past was the death of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old student who killed himself after fellow students streamed images of him kissing another man. Lewinsky says that following Clementi’s death, her “own suffering took on a different meaning”. And that her ultimate goal in going public after so many years of silence is “to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment”.
It is an incredibly admirable mission — and a cause that could use help.
Ironically, or perhaps expectedly, the VanityFair.com page promoting Lewinsky’s full article is already filled with disgusting comments:
“Here we go with Monica blowing hard again”
“Looks like the girl ran out of money!”
“why do i know where bill placed his cigar”
“Apparently, there is only one way to gag Monica, and Bill Clinton figured it out”
I imagine that Lewinsky has long girded herself for this new wave of misogyny and hostility. You have to believe that years of humiliation has thickened her skin to an incredible degree.
What I worry about more is the rest of us. When presented with yet another opportunity to rehash sexism and scandal, will we take it?
Or will we side with those who demand humanity over hate? — © The Guardian