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Women: Do Not Offer Oral Sex to Powerful Men
Three Decades Later, Monica Lewinsky is Still Blamed and Shamed
A few years ago, I mentioned via social media that Monica Lewinsky’s TED Talk about bullying was making an impression on students coming into my college classrooms. They were being asked to watch her TED Talk and read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.
An NYC book editor (responsible primarily for romance novels) attacked me online for at least 24 hours to make sure I knew that Monica Lewinsky was a “home-wrecker” who deliberately targeted older, powerful men. This editor wanted to make absolutely certain I knew that Monica was bad, evil, wrong, and 100% responsible for the Clinton-Lewinsky affair.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this female editor had time-traveled to now from back in Puritan days in the 1700s.
The harmful human behavior highlighted in Lewinsky’s true story and the fictional tale of Hester Prynne’s “Scarlet Letter” is today called “slut-shaming.”
