You Do Uterus: In the age of #MeToo age, let’s revisit the Monica Lewinsky story

In many ways, times have changed since the 1990s. Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center began tracking men’s rights groups on their hate group watch list in an important move toward recognizing misogyny as, well, hateful. In the past few months, the #MeToo movement has given both a platform and varying forms of justice to survivors of sexual abuse, where a too often fickle, arbitrary legal system repeatedly fails them. However gradually, we’ve moved toward recognizing sexism as a continuous issue — one that’s persisted beyond the 19th amendment and Roe v. Wade — and one that still requires remedy.

Entering March, we come to the 20th anniversary of the notorious Starr investigation into sexual misconduct by former President Bill Clinton. This transformed 24-year-old former White House intern Monica Lewinsky into a household name, and this month, Lewinsky’s story is made relevant once again, but with the refreshing twist of a new, feminist cultural context.

Lewinsky commemorated the anniversary of the notorious 1998 report on her extramarital affair with Clinton with a poignant, thoughtful first-person piece for Vanity Fair’s March issue.

The essay places her experiences in context with #MeToo, and her story reads as hauntingly prophetic of today’s movement. Hers is, at its core, the story of a man exploiting his power to take advantage of a young, inexperienced woman — a young woman with high aspirations, but no connections with which to offer her options or protection, rendering her vulnerable to a predatorial male superior. The consensual nature of Lewinsky’s relationship with Clinton makes her experiences distinctly different from the stories of Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein and his laundry list of alleged victims. But nonetheless, it is a story of exploitation and vastly unequal power dynamics.

Some may argue Lewinsky’s story was less about misogyny and more about the age-old political witch hunt, far more of an attack on Clinton and the Democratic Party than Lewinsky herself. But in framing her story in these terms, we reduce Lewinsky to mere collateral damage, to an object without name, without identity, without humanity.

In her essay, she describes a recent, chance run-in with Kenn Starr, the special prosecutor who investigated Lewinsky and Clinton’s relationship. Starr’s work involved ceaselessly terrorizing and threatening Lewinsky and her family while investigating the affair, in the pursuit of any information that could be used to humiliate Clinton. In his quest, he paid no mind to the trauma that his report would indefinitely exact on a young, private woman. All those years later, she said he looked at her and barely recognized her; through all the months of his investigation, perhaps he had never quite been conscious that Lewinsky was, in fact, a real person.

What followed was years of bullying and slut-shaming, of hateful and compassion-less narratives from people of all political affiliations. Her experiences were woven into a culture in which young women were allowed no room for mistakes, but in contrast, the mistakes of older, more powerful men would fall neatly on women’s shoulders.

Nonetheless, Lewinsky moved on and, unlike many of the far-right conspirators who had tormented her (and subsequently joined forces once again on then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign), she grew up; she found her voice as a writer and her passion as an anti-bullying activist. She found humor, compassion and, in a new feminist age, she found support. Now, 20 years after the Starr report, she finds herself an inspirational figure to young women like me.

I have a strong affinity for the more traditional feminist role models, for Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Gloria Steinem and all of the many other women who have raised their voices, single-handedly defied a political order and faced unmeasurable backlash and hatred in doing so. But in Lewinsky, I find someone I can relate to with all my own imperfections. Whenever I read her essays, I find myself whisked away to my own experiences; I think of harassment, of hearing the words “they don’t believe sluts” and internalizing that idea — that my voice didn’t matter because of how people viewed me; I think of threats to share topless photos of me and I think of a principal who told me in sweet, reassuring tones that often young men didn’t know better, that they needed second chances.

And every now and then, I hear the question, “why are you a feminist?” directed at me, and moments before ultimately stringing together some simple, palatable answer centered around equality and justice, I think of my own experiences, but still don’t have the strength to repeat them. In that vein, there is so much I respect about Lewinsky, but perhaps most of all, I respect how she lived out her trauma on the world stage — granted, not of her own accord — and over the years has transformed it into something beautiful and powerful. I think of what so many young women are too often forced to experience just to find our voices, the things we care about, believe in and fight for. There was no #MeToo when Lewinsky was a White House intern, or even when I was in high school.

But today, there is. And that changes everything.

Kylie Cheung is a sophomore majoring in journalism and political science. She is also the associate managing editor of the Daily Trojan. Her column,“You Do Uterus,” runs Thursdays.