vagina-dialogues: tehbewilderness:kylobentrashchild:mysharona1987:mysharona1987: Didn’t
vagina-dialogues: tehbewilderness: kylobentrashchild: mysharona1987: mysharona1987: Didn’t they have to put her on suicide watch? When things got *really* bad? After she nearly threw herself out a window? You *all* very nearly drove a young vulnerable woman to her death. Over some stupid extra-martial fling. Let’s think about that. She was 19 years old. Let’s also think about that. At best, what she did was stupid. Let’s think about all the stupid shit we all did when we were 19. At worst, what Bill Clinton did to her was rape. He was in an extreme position of power over her. Calling what he did to her coercion is being lenient. She was 19 years old. Society nearly drove a 19 year old girl to suicide because she was coerced into oral sex by a grown, married man who could have been her father. We like to talk about far away countries that kill girls who are raped and how uncivilized that is. We did the exact same thing. She is still looked at as a joke (“he Monica Lewinsky-ed all on my gown”). We continue to do the exact same thing, to her and to others. We need to be better. I remember to this day the image of her leaving a restaurant surrounded by male reporters grabbing her and groping her and jerking her off her feet. Predators. In her TED talk (link) she talks about how, when the scandal first erupted and her life fell apart, her mom spent every night by her bedside and insisted that she shower with the bathroom door open. For months. Her family was terrified that if she was left alone she’d try to commit suicide. The whole second season of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast is a deep-dive into the scandal and resulting fallout. It’s really well-done and educational (especially since, for most of us, we either hadn’t been born yet or were too young to really be aware of it at the time), but I had to stop after two episodes because it was making me so incredibly angry. The extent to which this young woman was betrayed by people she thought she could trust, abused by a system that claims to be a paragon of justice, and abandoned by a general public that was apathetic to her plight at best (and actively relishing/contributing to her abuse at worst) is, frankly, overwhelming. It broke my heart. We treat her story (and Anita Hill’s, and many more) as though it’s the product of some sort of bygone era. As though we’ve evolved. That’s such a fucking joke - as anyone who watched the Kavanaugh hearings knows, something exactly like this could (and, in all likelihood, will) happen again tomorrow -- source link