[M]isogyny is still thriving. When the Guardian began researching the online harassment of its own writers, they discovered something bleak: of the 10 contributors who receive the most abuse in the comment threads, eight are women – five white, three non-white – and the other two are black men. Overall, women Guardian writers get more abuse than men, regardless of what they write about, but especially when they write about rape and feminism.
As I'm sure you're aware, Bill Clinton has suffered no career/financial fallout from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Not so for Monica.
Her plan after graduating was to get a job and lead “a much more private life, and move towards a more normal developmental path”. But she found that nobody would employ her. The stigma outweighed her qualifications and aptitude. She couldn’t even get volunteer work with a charity. “I was going through such a hard time,” she says, “I felt so shattered, it took me six months to even get up the courage to approach this particular organisation. And when I did, they told me my working there ‘wasn’t a good idea’. It was a very desolate 10 years for me."
[...]
She drifted back to London and had coffee with her old LSE professor, Sandra Jovchelovitch. “She said to me, ‘Whenever power is involved, there always has to be a competing narrative. And you have no narrative.’ It was true. I had mistakenly thought that if I retreated from public life the narrative would dissipate. But instead it ran away from me even more.”
[...]
These days, she’s often approached by victims of online bullying, “when I’m on the subway, in line for coffee, at dinner parties.” Shamed people tend to seek each other out, the cure for shame being empathy. “Sometimes they’ll say, ‘I went through this, but it’s nothing like what you went through.’ But I tell them that, if I drown in 60ft of water and you drown in 30ft, we both still drowned. You either know what it’s like to be publicly shamed or you don’t.”
And so she’s spent much of the past few years trying to formulate practical advice for them. “To be able to give a purpose to my past, if I’m stuck with my past, feels meaningful to me,” she says.
[...]
In 2014, after a decade of silence, Lewinsky wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, headlined Shame And Survival. “The night before it was published, a friend gave me a card with an Anaïs Nin quote: ‘And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.’”
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