My Roman Empire

The 90s icon I cannot stop thinking about

For the uninitiated, or blessedly less-terminally-online folks, a few months to a million years ago, the Internet was in a tizzy when we found out that #men think about The Roman Empire multiple times a day. Meme-ification took hold and many folks piped up with what their version of the Roman Empire was.

I have two: Tom Holland’s Lip Sync Battle and Monica Lewinsky.

Please manage your expectations, as we’re not talking about Tom Holland today (but stick around for a little treat at the end).

I was twelve when Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial began, and I unintentionally learned a lot about what it means to be a young woman next to a man in power during that scandal. And as I stand on the precipice of my coming-of-rage (this is what we’re calling perimenopause, yes?), I think about Monica Lewinsky or a related tangent multiple times a day. I think about how we responded to the scandal as a culture, how we talked about, treated, and centered the 22-year-old woman, how sexual harassment charges that initiated the scandal fell away the cultural context, and how it set a precedent for impeachment which continues to mean very little in a practical sense.

I grew up in a Clinton household. My parents loved Clinton and voted for him enthusiastically. As a child, I didn’t have a firm grasp on politics, but my sister and Lisa Simpson played the saxophone, so I knew that Bill Clinton must also be very cool.

File under: revered household horndogs who were cool music dudes.

If you haven’t looked up Lewinsky in a while, I did it for you. From my memory, she pretty much disappeared after the scandal, but after a little digging, I remembered that she did a huge interview with Barbara Walters that broke network television viewing records and she came out with a “handbag¹” line pretty close to immediately post-scandal. Lewinsky is now an activist and advocate who speaks out against bullying, which is to say, the thing that briefly ruined her life is now a thing she’s actively making her life’s work.

This is not a Lewinsky fan account or some kind of redemption post. I am not a celebrity culture girl and I’m confident that Lewinsky isn’t perfect (though of course in contrast to her male counterpart in the scandal, her admonishment felt wildly disproportionate). This is about what I learned as a 12-year-old from watching a women who was only ten years my senior be centered in the news and culture.

At twelve, I wasn’t invested in Barbara Walters or handbags or even watching the court trials. I was too busy absorbing pop culture and I watched how the adults around me reacted to that culture. I learned how funny it was to make fun of this woman for being ugly/fat/slutty/unfashionable from everyone who laughed at Jay Leno. I learned jokes about cigars at a 22-year-old’s expense were met with smug grins. I noted every high five after a snide remark about dry cleaning blue dresses.

I learned that there’s plenty of room for more than one woman to be a punchline when people laughed about Hillary being a frigid bitch and that no one could blame Bill for his indiscretion. I learned it again when people insisted Linda Tripp was counseling Lewinsky because Tripp was jealous as she herself was too ugly and old to be desired.

I don’t recall anyone saying it was Monica Lewinsky’s fault that the president was getting impeached. I’m pretty sure no one told me Lewinsky was a bad person. No one ever said to me, “Monica Lewinsky is getting exactly what she deserves.” because no one had to. She was relentlessly and publicly punished for how she dressed, how she spoke, and what she looked like. We used her to prop up the narrative that women degrade the power of men. Which is hilarious, because I’m not sure how up-to-date you are on your history, but Bill Clinton—an adult with a fully developed brain at the time—continued to be the president. After he lied and after he was impeached. And if anything was done about the very real allegations of sexual harassment, I did not absorb it because I was too busy learning how funny it was to make fun of women in proximity to powerful men.

Wonder if she knows I’m thinking about her. (JOYCE NALTCHAYAN/AFP/Getty Images)

I am keenly aware that given the current state of our presidency, Bill Clinton’s follies seem downright adorable, and we might give anything to have them again. But I also frequently wonder if this scandal served as training wheels for the cultural acceptance of what many of us find unacceptable in our current climate.

One source I came across estimated that Jay Leno made 454 jokes about Monica Lewinsky. FOURHUNDREDANDFIFTYFOUR (who counted these?). How bad of a writer do you have to be to make four point five hundred mid jokes about the same thing? In comedy, when you make a joke about someone with less social status and power, it’s called “punching down” (it’s also called harmful). Jay was telling on himself for being boring, lazy, and obsessed with Monica Lewinsky, but we still laughed.

This to me reads like someone told new kid to go find the left handed keg wrench (PSA: left handed keg wrenches do not exist) and then TELEVISING IT NATIONALLY FOR A YEAR. “Look at this idiot who has no idea how the world works because she doesn’t have experience with how the world works! Instead of showing an ounce of empathy and recognition for a time that I didn’t know how the world worked, let’s shame her and laugh at her expense forever!”

This is why many women are fixated on ensuring everyone likes them. We have seen what happens to women who are not liked.

I think about Lewinsky all the time because I learned how to see myself by watching her and how my value was culturally measured. I learned that women’s worth was determined by their relationship to powerful men. I knew nothing about who she actually was other than an intern at the White House, who had a blue dress, wore a beret, and was called her fat, which I had already been learning for years was the worst thing you could call a woman. She was reduced to a caricature for us to laugh at.

I’m sure there was plenty of reporting about who Monica Lewinsky was beyond the scandal, but if I was exposed to it, I did not hear it. I heard she was a sluttly slut mcslutterton in a slut dress who ruined the country’s favorite dude with her succubus slutbombs and how dare she.

So how many times a day am I thinking about Monica Lewinsky adjacent content? At least two. But you know what else I’m thinking about on a near-daily basis? Maybe one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. And you made it through my anger, confusion, and sadness of girlhood so we all deserve a little treat. Don’t skimp on this one, babes. Get your vitamin Holland. This is 2.5 minutes competency porn.

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1. These handbags were less Kate Spade and more totes it looks like she sewed on a home machine. They were not particularly attractive and it seems like she mostly received criticism for them. Several reports state she started the handbag line to help her pay off legal bills.