On social media and web forums, users called for jurors, judges and prosecutors to be killed after the former president was found guilty on 34 felony counts.
If you aren’t Monica Lewinsky, I’m not really interested in hearing your opinion about the consent. She’s more than capable of talking about her agency in that interaction, on her own. It’s too bad she’s never talked ab–
Talking about it in these terms makes it seem like she’s just a puppet. She’s a person, and she made choices. (Which she regrets, but she still owns that she made those choices.)
Okay, but she was a freaking intern and he was the president. It’s an inappropriate professional relationship. You get fired for pulling something like that at most companies simply because there is a reporting relationship.
When a power imbalance that vast is concerned consent doesn’t exist.
At the time, sure. However, over a decade after the fact:
Maintaining that her affair with Clinton was one between two consenting adults…
So if the power imbalance was why she consented, you’d think she’d set the record straight and say she was pressured or forced into it despite saying yes at the time. But she didn’t. Ergo, she consented and your argument is invalid.
Did she not? She says it “constituted a gross abuse of power”.
“Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern,” Lewinsky said.
“I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot. (Although power imbalances — and the ability to abuse them — do exist even when the sex has been consensual,)” she wrote.
“But it’s … very, very complicated. The dictionary definition of “consent”? ‘To give permission for something to happen.’ And yet what did the ‘something’ mean in this instance, given the power dynamics, his position, and my age? Was the “something” just about crossing a line of sexual (and later emotional) intimacy? (An intimacy I wanted — with a 22-year-old’s limited understanding of the consequences.)
“He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet. He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college,” she said.
Do you think maybe the problem is your entire argument hinges on a 2014 article and as she grew older she changed her view on the matter?
“Sure my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship,” she wrote for Vanity Fair in 2014.
Four years later, she wrote for the same magazine changing her position on whether that consent was relevant given the power imbalance between an intern and a president.
If you aren’t Monica Lewinsky, I’m not really interested in hearing your opinion about the consent. She’s more than capable of talking about her agency in that interaction, on her own. It’s too bad she’s never talked ab–
oh wait, she most certainly has: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-speaks
Talking about it in these terms makes it seem like she’s just a puppet. She’s a person, and she made choices. (Which she regrets, but she still owns that she made those choices.)
Okay, but she was a freaking intern and he was the president. It’s an inappropriate professional relationship. You get fired for pulling something like that at most companies simply because there is a reporting relationship.
Sure. Inappropriate, a firing offense, etc. All true. She even describes the treatment she received after it came out as “abuse”. All valid.
Still consensual. Still not someone else’s place to talk about whether it was her decision or not; it was, and she has said so.
When a power imbalance that vast is concerned consent doesn’t exist.
At the time, sure. However, over a decade after the fact:
So if the power imbalance was why she consented, you’d think she’d set the record straight and say she was pressured or forced into it despite saying yes at the time. But she didn’t. Ergo, she consented and your argument is invalid.
Did she not? She says it “constituted a gross abuse of power”.
https://apnews.com/article/ab9adc492bf54cd4abcf8d162ed099b3
Do you think maybe the problem is your entire argument hinges on a 2014 article and as she grew older she changed her view on the matter?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/monica-lewinsky-calls-bill-clinton-190025758.html