tunnel rush
Ms. Lewinsky was quickly cast by the media as a “little tart,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” She was described by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as “ditsy” and “predatory.”
And other women — self-proclaimed feminists — piled on. “My dental hygienist pointed out she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong. Betty Friedan dismissed her as “some little twerp.”
In 2003 Rebecca Traister, in a piece entitled Get Off Your Knees, Monica, called her our “national succubus, siren and slut.”
Today Ms. Lewinsky holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and recently gave a TED talk that was so intelligent, articulate and painful that I was moved to tears. She received a standing ovation for it.
“This iteration [of Ms. Lewinsky] is a bundle of contradictions: warm yet cautious. Open yet guarded. Strong but fragile.
She is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control.
At 41, she doesn’t have many of the things that a person her age may want: a permanent residence, an obvious source of income (she won’t comment on her finances), a clear career path.”
In The Price of Shame Lewinsky shares her experience as “Patient Zero” of contemporary internet shaming. She makes a compelling case for finding a way to put the brakes on what is essentially cyberbullying.
“As she put it, shame and humiliation have become a kind of “commodity” in our culture — with websites that thrive on it, industries created out of it, and people who get paid to clean up the mess.
What happened to compassion? she asked up on stage. “What we need,” she said, “is a cultural revolution.””