… I feel bad about my role in helping push the humiliation to the point of suffocation.” “Because myself and other people with shows like this made relentless jokes about the poor woman. “I started to feel bad,” David Letterman said on the air after he read Lewinsky’s Vanity Fair article. Many reacted with a surprising amount of remorse. Or, in the inescapable phrase of our 42nd president, ‘That Woman.’” But, she added, “It may surprise you to learn that I’m actually a person.” In the public eye, Lewinsky wrote, she had become, “America’s B.J. In 2014, she reemerged into public view as an anti-bullying advocate, first with a well-received TED talk and then with the Vanity Fair article, in both, asking the country to reconsider its eagerness to shame her. With that essay, Lewinsky also became one of the first people to help construct the framework for our current reevaluation of the mores of the ’90s and 2000s. “I became a social representation,” Lewinsky would later write for Vanity Fair, “a social canvas on which anybody could project their confusion about women, sex, infidelity, politics, and body issues.” Her humiliation became a national spectacle. Her name became synonymous with a sex act. In newspapers and on cable news and talk shows she became, variously, a slut, an innocent victim, a liberated woman, someone sexy, someone fat, someone feminine, someone unwomanly. When the story broke in 1998 that President Bill Clinton had carried out an affair with young former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the media eagerly prepared to make Lewinsky the face of the scandal. But Monica Lewinsky is singular for being, among other things, a symbol of a symbol.

Īll famous women are symbols of something in American pop culture. In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time.

Monica lewinsky susan boyle illuminati