Monica Lewinsky

I married my husband in part because he said he was willing to meet my needs, all I had to do was ask, and then he spent 17 years turning me down anytime I asked and adding insult to injury by telling me it was my fault. For that and other reasons, I was not faithful to him.

I've had a few women complain to me about their marriages and seemingly assumed that I would automatically side with them in vilifying the husband and accept without question that everything wrong with the relationship was his fault, especially if he was unfaithful. All of the women I've personally spoken with who claimed their husband was unfaithful were also routinely withholding sex to punish him.

Monogamy as prison only lasts as long as your victim agrees to it. The minute they've had enough of your shit, someone will be happy to get with them if you don't want to take care of business.

Suffice it to say, those conversations never went the way those women expected and I was either on the husband's side or saying "Well, if everything wrong with the relationship is entirely his fault, leave. Problem solved." And then the stuttering and backtracking and "You don't under!"-ing begins. 

I've never liked Hillary Clinton. I've touched on that previously elsewhere. 

Given my background and my opinions of Hillary Clinton, I've always been sympathetic to Bill Clinton in spite of not knowing either of them personally and thus not really knowing what's going on there with his history of infidelity. 

I've always respected the fact that Monica Lewinsky has maintained from the start that her relationship with Bill Clinton was a mutual, consenting relationship in spite of it being a situation that did enormous damage to her life. An awful lot of women are quick to blame the man and even outright lie once things become public and her reputation is in the line of fire.

The position Lewinsky staunchly took takes enormous strength of character and I've never really seen anyone give her credit for that. I suspect she would have been treated better if she hadn't done that.

Wikipedia has a section on the scandal which gives dates but doesn't state her age. A little math suggests she was 22 when the affair began and 24 when it ended. 

She continued to maintain that the relationship was mutual and wrote that while Clinton took advantage of her, it was a consensual relationship...

She did write that looking back at her relationship with Bill Clinton, although it was consensual, because he was 27 years older than she and in a position with a lot more power than she had, in her opinion the relationship constituted an "abuse of power" on Clinton's part.

I was molested as a child and spent a lot of years telling my story publicly without naming who hurt me. This gave me maximum maneuvering room for sorting my feelings and my opinions and point of view without having to deal with worrying about accusations of maligning someone's reputation or a public he-said/she-said situation. 

Like Lewinsky, I had an illicit affair with an older man who was in a position of power over me. Like her, I also took responsibility for my decision to do so in spite of the law stating clearly that it was very wrong and entirely his responsibility to make sure it didn't happen, as touched on here.

Unlike her, the affair was not discovered and did not become a public scandal. I ultimately chose to walk away, as noted in my last post here, for reasons of self respect. 

Like her, it took me a long, long time to understand something important about how and why that's a very big no-no. I don't regret my decision because I'm a victim of incest twice over and spent decades suicidal because of it, but I did eventually conclude that keeping the secret was a much bigger burden and larger barrier to career success than I thought when I made the decision. 

Because of that, I eventually began very carefully blogging about it with an eye to continuing to protect the man in question out of gratitude for the fact that he helped fix my life when it's supposed to be unfixable. And I continue to feel damned if I do and damned if I don't, burdened by needing to keep the secret and dragged publicly by my own words for airing it in public. 

I feel that way in spite of having the luxury of time and privacy to sort it before deciding of my own volition to speak of it publicly for my own reasons. 

I wish the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky had left less of an ugly mark on her life. She was young and he was one of the most powerful people in the world.

I will suggest that planet earth can't seem to let her live it down for the same reason they don't let victims of sexual assault live it down: Other people are hanging their baggage on her and cannot let her be okay with herself when they aren't okay with themselves. 

Most likely, people are fascinated and offended by her adamant insistence it was a consenting relationship. I believe a high percentage of women defacto earn their living on their back and politely call it love while resenting having to put out to keep a roof over their heads and she's being punished for apparently actually liking men and sex.

At the risk of sounding like I'm blaming the victim, I will suggest it might go better if she pursued work in a way that downplayed her name. She continues to attach her name to books about her and a line of purses etc. when that name is best known for a huge public scandal. 

Make purses or whatever under some more neutral name, let the purses or whatever stand on their own merits and then incidentally get known as "hers" and "She's the person to get with if that's something you like."

That's a blind spot most women seem to have which I've spent decades trying to sort out for myself. 

And maybe planet earth could get therapy and sort THEIR sexual baggage instead of bullying her and pretending it's her fault for being a "bad woman" when realistically if you want to fry someone, you should fry Bill Clinton for getting involved with someone so young under circumstances practically guaranteed to go sideways.

Though if I ran the world, I likely would have raked Hillary Clinton over the coals rather thoroughly in the process of trying to figure out why her husband seems incapable of keeping it zipped though Monica Lewinsky and other women who met him in person consistently suggest in writing he's much more respectful towards women than most men and it's apparently why women say "Yes."