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(Everyone knows her name, after all.) She turned down lucrative offers to tell all - because they “didn’t feel like the right thing to do” - and survived on loans from family and friends. She reappears in the press this week by way of a 4,000-word Vanity Fair essay about the hellish aftermath of her “mutual relationship” with President Bill Clinton.
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Nearly two decades later, Lewinsky is still a punch line and a sly euphemism for oral sex. (The story was blasted out on Drudge.) The young woman is permanently cast as a semen-smeared laughingstock. Affair leads to legal explosion, investigation, impeachment and, ultimately, one of the first tests of the Internet’s viral capabilities. The basics of Lewinsky’s story we all remember: Young intern makes idiotic mistake and, like many before her, starts a sexual relationship with the President. My teenage friends and I were among her critics, though the rest of the country, too, seemed to be acting like horny misogynist teens. Long before slut-shaming was a term, Monica Lewinsky was its original target. What kind of woman flashes her thong at the President, anyway? And yet we did know one thing: we didn’t like that raunchy Lewinsky girl. (He did what with a cigar?!) None of us was old enough to truly comprehend the complexities - or power dynamics - of a 22-year-old intern fellating the President of the United States. I was 16, perched with a group of friends in the hallway of my high school, devouring the contents of the Starr report like a trashy romance novel. Ask any child of the 1990s, and she remembers - vividly - when she first heard about the Monica Lewinsky scandal (as well as the particular sex acts involved).