In the most recent Vanity Fair, Monica Lewinsky has revisited an older piece she wrote in 2014 and effectively recast her life story in light of the #MeToo movement. To the surprise — and praise — of many, she has revisited the history between her and Bill Clinton.
In 2014, she had clearly stated that she and Clinton had been in a consensual relationship: “Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” In 2018, she writes: “I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. (Full stop.) Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”
Mainstream responses are, of course, in agreement with Lewinsky. In an age where college students are told to procure not merely consent but enthusiastic consent, it’s no surprise that this reworking of a twenty-year old story, one of the most retold and picked apart on the planet, lived out by a woman who is now 44 and was then 24, should be so freely and completely rewritten. Within a liberal and progressive framework, such a retelling makes sense. But how do those of us who are queer radical feminists, of any gender, think about these issues? How do we think of sex outside the framework of consent, which increasingly sounds more like a contractual agreement and is belaboured by requirements which emerge from the murky waters of heteronormative demands of fidelity, propriety and generally joyless sex? How can we think about a series of sexual encounters that so completely engulfed the attention of a country and the world within the integrity of their own moment without simply rushing to claim them in the rapture of entirely new and sometimes fictionalising narratives of the now?
Monica Lewinsky’s story is embedded in infidelity — a subject that Americans are deeply uncomfortable discussing except in the most pious terms, perhaps because they engage in it so much, much more than they’re willing to admit to pollsters, I suspect.
When she finally found a space to present her version in the pages of Vanity Fair, Lewinsky emerged as a surprisingly strong voice: plain, direct, and clear about the many people she felt had treated her badly. Regarding Hillary Clinton, she wrote, “…I find her impulse to blame the Woman…troubling. And all too familiar: with every marital indiscretion that finds its way into the public sphere—many of which involve male politicians—it always seems like the woman conveniently takes the fall. Sure, the Anthony Weiners and Eliot Spitzers do what they need to do to look humiliated on cable news. They bow out of public life for a while, but they inevitably return, having put it all behind them. The women in these imbroglios return to lives that are not so easily repaired.”
Lewinsky knows better than most such women what it means to have a life “not so easily repaired.” She had been a prime-time news story for years, at the centre of an impeachment effort that almost cost Bill Clinton the presidency. For her role, as a 22-year-old intern who had a short series of sexual encounters with Clinton, she was massively humiliated in every possible way, including the inevitable Saturday Night Live skits.
Lewinsky was not helped by revelations that she had also been involved with her former high school drama coach (after she graduated), a married man whose children she had babysat and with whose wife she had been friends. In the eyes of those (of all political persuasions) who saw her as a Jezebel, this was only further proof that she was a scheming homewrecker. Trapped in a story that only confirmed the long-standing American obsession with (and hypocrisy about) marriage and the family, Monica Lewinsky had literally nowhere to go, escaping paparazzi everywhere she went. She tried, for years, to find employment of all sorts, even signing up for a Jenny Craig advertising campaign which only ended up being cancelled. Eventually, in 2005, she left the country for England, entering the London School of Economics to get her Masters in Social Psychology.
Even that didn’t help, according to Lewinsky; she claims she has been unable to find gainful employment anywhere because would-be employers, while sometimes fascinated at the prospect of meeting her, eventually balk at the idea of her representing them.
It was, therefore, unsurprising that her 2014 Vanity Fair piece was also in a way an employment-seeking CV, where she placed a diffident parenthetical statement: “(My current goal is to get involved with efforts on behalf of victims of online humiliation and harassment and to start speaking on this topic in public forums.)” She did this by stitching herself into the story of Tyler Clementi, who committed suicide in 2010 after he realised that his roommate Dharun Ravi had used a webcam to record Clementi embracing another man. As a thorough and revealing New Yorker piece by Ian Parker points out, Clementi’s death was more complicated than the simple story parroted by all, that he had been driven to suicide by the webcam incident (for one thing, Ravi never actually posted the footage online, despite what media reports stated). But the simpler story is what gets attention and funds directed towards LGBT organisations that now claim to work on behalf of queer youth at risk, and it’s the story that Lewinsky needed to publicly support in order to earn some kind of a living as an advocate for victims of online bullying.
Lewinsky is likely not struggling financially. She comes from a privileged background (a White House internship is generally only procured by those with wealth and connections, people who can work for free and still live in an expensive city), and is probably comfortably well off by now, having been paid large sums of money for various projects and interviews. But the well is going to dry up at some point. Lewinsky finds herself in the strange position of perhaps being one of the ten most well-known women on the planet and yet also the most unemployable. More likely than not, Being Monica Lewinsky will be her lifetime gig. Who can blame her for trying to find a niche?
All through this, the Clintons emerged richer than ever, despite their claims of bankruptcy upon leaving the White House. Together and separately, they treated Lewinsky as a disposable sex toy and a shrewish harridan bent on destroying the presidency. Over the years, it has become more starkly evident that what enraged Hillary Clinton were not her husband’s numerous infidelities including this one but that he had been found out in the worst way and that the revelations could have put an end to both their political aspirations: their half-serious motto used to be, “Eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill.” Clinton may have lost her presidential bid, but she remains cocooned in a comfortable, jet-setting life which she will probably enjoy to the end of her days, even as darkened as they are by thwarted ambition. Lewinsky got the worst of it all, driven into an everlasting exile in her own country. She has not been allowed to move on into a life untouched by all the shittery which she, to be fair, did not ask for in that she’s not the one who went to the press and political opponents. This is deeply, deeply unfair to her.
In America, reinvention is supposed to be the magical guarantor of freedom. The fictional Don Draper in Mad Men took on the life and name of a man blown to unrecognisable bits beside him in Korea, going on to a double life of sorts until he was finally driven to desperation and struggled to reconcile his past and present. In an age of biometric surveillance and incessant tracking by all the technology we carry around with us, it’s much harder to entirely become someone else or even hide, but the contemporary American solution to that is to simply carry on the task of reinvention in public sight. Lewinsky is right to point to the gendered aspect of such when it comes to men like Weiner and Spitzer. When women reinvent themselves in public, it involves fashion (think Chelsea Clinton, who could only emerge as a public figure after she was mentored by Donatella Versace and judged suitably fashion-conscious) or plastic surgery (Roseanne joked about her multiple procedures).
In Lewinsky’s case, her reinvention has involved turning to larger narratives coursing through the zeitgeist and seeing what might best fit her. In 2014’s Vanity Fair article, it was Tyler Clementi and anti-bullying measures. But that particular topic has since ebbed in the spotlight, to be replaced by the far more incandescent, Hollywood-driven “Me Too” and “It’s Time” public campaigns.
Seen this way, Lewinsky’s recent and revisionist piece in the very same magazine makes sense. Her voice in this recent work is quite different, more tremulous even as she points to trauma counselling and theory to explain both her and the nation’s emotional state after the events of the late ’90s and beyond. Where her tone in the 2014 essay had been strong and confident, here she is more prone to deference and hesitancy. In 2014, she had been forthright about her relationship with Clinton and even scathingly hilarious: “Thanks, Beyoncé, but if we’re verbing, I think you meant “Bill Clinton’d all on my gown,” not “Monica Lewinsky’d.” In 2018, she’s more concerned with painting herself as a traumatised subject, writing that she has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. She writes of her years of isolation as someone whose story was not considered legitimate enough to be taken up as a feminist problem, until #MeToo gave her a place to record it. Most bizarrely, she recreates the years of the scandal as some kind of deep national trauma, rife with the very patriarchal discourse she had earlier sought to criticise. She writes:
..Clinton was widely perceived as “the naughty child” … in line with the filial metaphor, “a family matter [had turned] into an affair of state.” Thus, in many ways, the crack in the foundation of the presidency was also a crack in our foundation at home. Moreover, the nature of the violation—an extramarital relationship—struck at the heart of one of humanity’s most complicated moral issues: infidelity. (You’ll forgive me if I leave that topic right there.)
The result, I believe, was that in 1998 the person to whom we would typically turn for reassurance and comfort during a national crisis was remote and unavailable. The country, at that stage, had no consistent, Rooseveltian voice of calm or reason or empathy to make sense of the chaos. Instead, our Nurturer in Chief, because of his own actions as much as the subterfuge of his enemies, was a figurative “absent father.“
She continues in this vein, as if somehow all of “us” were somehow cathected to a gigantic confabulation involving this “absent father,” and that we felt a sense of betrayal because Daddy had left us behind. But the truth — inasmuch as we can excavate such twenty years later — is that the Clinton-Lewinsky episode at the time was in fact a deeply pornographic moment. People were actually reading descriptions of the encounters to each other — a colleague laughingly said that her father, approaching 70 at the time, called her just to read out the salacious bits. It wasn’t creepy, merely an indication that relatively explicit descriptions of two adults engaged in coitus were now circulating within families in contexts where such might otherwise remain unseen and unheard — the difference was that politics was now explicitly sexual and sexualised. You couldn’t talk in sombre tones about The Presidency without also thinking about a cigar inserted into a vagina. A friend who was in high school at the time recounts that, of course, he and his friends discussed the case all the time and that the adults around them, in a Catholic institution, were most concerned about how the revelations were challenging and changing ideas about what constituted sex.
We weren’t weeping for an absent father in The President as much as we were mentally recreating the image of him getting a blowjob from Lewinsky while he got on the phone To Discuss Official Matters. In an age where we trade images of our naked selves with each other on cell phones, this may not seem like much but in 1998, sex exploded like a geyser out of the Oval Office. The presidency wasn’t the subject of a titillating, slightly underground and parodic porn film (I have no doubt such exist, although I’ve never seen them), it was the porn film looping endlessly in and around our intimate and public spaces.
Lewinsky’s portrayal of a child-like nation anxiously waiting for Pop to come back home is a fiction, but it’s a necessary fiction for the rewriting of her own life that emerges at the end of this re-telling of her story.
Her new version of her story is also a new version of herself, presented in the stark and demanding spotlight of the #MeToo movement, a movement that for all its claims of inclusiveness and desire to help women who have suffered sexual harassment is in fact quite choosy about who those women can be. The actual legacy of #MeToo is a complicated one and deserves a separate article, or several such, but for now we can at least point to the fact that under its umbrella, there are so far only perfect victims. The movement (which is more of a consciousness-raising hashtag campaign) doesn’t allow for narratives of sexual volition or instances where women have openly sought to trade sex for favours and more. A recent article in Time points out that sex workers feel excluded by the movements around awareness of sexual assault (to be fair, the article is misleadingly titled, doesn’t actually name too many deliberate acts shaming sex workers, and is mostly about acts of exclusion — but exclusion is still an indication of the politics of the larger movements).
In such an environment, where women must first position themselves as wounded and sad creatures before they can garner any sympathy and prove that they were virtuous while being abused (a horrible and onerous predicament), Lewinsky can’t afford to even hint at the idea that she had any real sexual agency.
What if Monica Lewinsky, who once boasted about going to the White House with her “presidential kneepads,” could tell her story without feeling compelled to write herself out of her own sexual history? What if her words ran something like this:
I was young and foolish and for a brief while, maybe, I actually thought I was his girlfriend. Mostly, I got off on oral sex with the President of the United States. Blowing the Prez in the vicinity of the Oval Office? Nothing beats that high. I enjoyed it, and my only regret is that I didn’t dump that creep sooner. But I didn’t deserve anything I suffered afterwards; I never deserved the never-ending stigma; I never deserved to lose my whole life.
The fact that Lewinsky was volitional in her relationship — she did deliberately seek him out — shouldn’t erase the fact that Clinton could have either turned away or at least been more honest about what transpired instead of throwing her under the bus.
The only position for women who suffer sexual harassment and abuse is to claim a broken-ness, a constant fragility and woundedness. This is not to deny that sexual abuse of any sort is not traumatic but that culture at large needs women to maintain that sense of constant trauma. So, in 2014, Lewinsky had to attach herself to the Tyler Clementi train, thus erasing even the complexity of Clementi’s life— and then, perhaps not finding any deep roots in all that, has now linked herself to the #MeToo movement.
In a better, less judgmental world, we could all simply acknowledge that people of all genders engage in all kinds of behaviours, that how they negotiate those within their private relationships ought to remain between them and their lovers and partners and friends as long as there are no effects in their workplaces. We might also acknowledge that perhaps one reason Lewinsky has suffered the way she has is because her story broke at a time when media, politics, and culture at large were still dominated by women of Hillary Clinton’s generation — women who might be at least liberal in several ways but who still bristled angrily at the thought of a younger woman — and others like her— potentially wreaking havoc in their carefully put together facades of happy, perfect lives with philandering men: Do what you like, just don’t bring it home or do anything to wreck the life we build in public, might be the unspoken command flung around behind the walls of carefully tended and well-decorated houses. What we have instead is a a lot of deep hypocrisy about marriage, sex, and infidelity, which leaves women like Lewinsky out in the cold, forever tainted as rapacious and monstrous creatures that must be expelled.
Monica Lewinsky is like a fly caught in amber, an object of fascination that we love to gawk at but won’t let out of an encasing without which it is simply just another fly, likely to crumble into dust. We don’t have to empathise with her to sympathise with her predicament, of being forever in search of yet another Monica, a mononymous creature flitting from story to story, self to self, trying to find a place where she will be finally allowed to rest and perhaps recover in peace.
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Related Pieces
Confession, Neoliberalism, and the Big Reveal.
“The Ideal Subject Is the Subject of Trauma.” (Interview)
Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin, and the Gender of Power.
Suey Park and the Afterlife of Twitter.
Stop Fetishising Youth Organisers.
Lightly edited on September 15, 2021 for clarity.
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Image:
The Lost Path, Frederick Walker, 1863.