How Perceptions Of Monica Lewinsky Are Changing With Metoo

Monica Lewinsky says #MeToo move inverse her views on relationship with Clinton

Anti-bullying campaigner Monica Lewinsky says the #MeToo movement and gild's changing understanding of consent have changed the way she sees her relationship with then United states president Beak Clinton in the 1990s.

Speaking in Sydney on Saturday dark, Ms Lewinsky said for twenty years she had "clung and so steadfastly to this notion that [information technology] was a real, consensual relationship ... and I never allowed myself to explore annihilation unlike".

Monica Lewinsky presented "A Compassionate Internet" at the UNSW Eye for Ideas event on Sat night.

Only the #MeToo movement, in which women the earth over have shared stories of inappropriate, unwanted and unlawful sexual conduct by powerful men, had changed society's understanding of consent, she said.

"As we started to have public conversations that were different about consent, every bit nosotros started to recognise abuse of power in different ways, these structures started to crumble effectually powerful men who have been able to engage in [bad] behaviours and be lauded and celebrated," she said.

"As we started to dismantle that, I started to await at my ain situation and but beginning to ask questions differently."

Ms Lewinsky said she now "100 per cent" believes her human relationship with Mr Clinton constituted an corruption of power, not only at the time but in the aftermath.

"At that place is no incertitude for me on many levels," she said. "[But] consent is really complicated. I tin can blanket say it was non sexual assault. I was not coerced to do anything. I didn't feel like if I didn't do something I would lose my job.

"But I also call up that in that location's a nuanced identify where we're starting to look at consent in a fashion of trying to understand and say, 'Well, with the power differential, with the age difference, given a number of different factors, is consent rendered moot?'

"I started unpacking all this last yr ... I practice call back we're asking those questions now and I don't recall we've finished with the answers nevertheless."

Ms Lewinsky, 46, said the amount of change brought about by #MeToo in a short time was "extraordinary" but it was not yet clear where social standards and expectations would settle.

"There has been enough momentum and free energy and force that the pendulum has moved," she said.

"Information technology's still swinging. Some feel it may accept swung besides far. Information technology volition probably eventually notice its place, simply wherever it stops, information technology will be different from where it was earlier. And I feel grateful to be alive at that time to see something similar that happen."

Speaking most public shaming in the mod era, Ms Lewinsky said humiliation had become a "commodity" for publishers, especially through online clicks.

"If you lot accept a step back and you start to look at some of the ways that people make money from things that happen in gild, nosotros kickoff to see that humiliation has become a commodity and an industry. It has become valued in a way that it hadn't been many years before," she said.

"It's a sort of catch 22. It becomes more sadly delicious - in a bad way - for us as a society because we're able to see other people's flaws, and we're constantly comparing our insides to other people'due south outsides.

"The power to see that people that we might take on a pedestal are flawed merely similar we are somehow makes us feel meliorate."

Monica Lewinsky is in Australia as a invitee of the UNSW Heart for Ideas and The Wheeler Heart, actualization in Sydney every bit office of UNTHINKABLE on Saturday, and in Melbourne as office of Broadside Feminist Ideas Festival on Sunday.

Source: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/celebrity/monica-lewinsky-says-metoo-movement-changed-her-views-on-relationship-with-clinton-20191109-p5392m.html

Posted by: robinsonwiscon.blogspot.com

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