The girl mocked into silence by a devastating shaming campaign is speaking again.To claim the right to tell her story. She, who became fodder for 49 rap songs, recalled in a recent TED talk, with poise collected over the span of a decade or more, the names she was called by the media, by online participants of what was a, ‘public stoning.’ But then her own name had become a slur and her life, reduced by the President of the United States of America to one damning line, ‘That woman!” Yes, that is what Monica Lewinsky had become. THAT woman. What she does not say in her talk that is now attracting world-wide attention, is how she was the only one to pay for a mistake she did not make alone.
The man at the centre of the maelstrom survived unscathed. While Lewinsky at 41 remains unemployed despite a degree from the London School of Economics. When you watch her talk about her ordeal, there is no trace of self-pity and she does not target individuals responsible for diminishing her selfhood. She instead addresses us. All of us who participate in the culture of naming and shaming people we don’t know in public fora, just because we can.
And how the digitisation of human stories has made privacy porous and turned a real person into as she says, ‘a click that reverberates around the world.’ She was the first victim perhaps who because of the Internet, “lost personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.” Said she,“I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, that woman. I was seen by many but actually known by few. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken. But she was not the last.”
She points out that when a person loses their dignity in public, they sometimes lose their life too. Said Monica,“I lost almost everything, and I almost lost my life.” Imagine, walking in someone’s headline, she said. Imagine transcripts of your intimate conversations aired on TV and the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ of your life floating across the Internet.
This was in 1998 but since then, as she rightly points out, we have with our acceptance, normalised, “the stealing of people’s private words, actions, photos, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context, and public without compassion.”
And so now a private action can have public consequences. Sometimes with tragic implications. She cites the example of 18-year-old college freshman Tyler Clementi who killed himself because he was webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. When he could not take the public ridicule, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge.
His death reminded Lewinsky of 1998, when both her parents feared that their daughter would be humiliated to death. Tyler’s death also gave Lewinsky a perspective and made her realise that everyday on the Internet, “young people who are not developmentally equipped, are so abused and humiliated that they can’t imagine living to the next day, and some, tragically, don’t.’’
This culture of “technologically enhanced shaming” should make us all introspect as to why rape videos go viral, why we wanted to see the paparazzi pictures capturing the last gasps of Princess Diana in a car wreck, why the doctored images of Nirbhaya went viral online after her rape, why Suzette Jordan was humiliated by people who did not know anything about her, why shows like the AIB Roast are made, why insults are enjoyed by millions on reality shows. People tweet insults. Post obscene messages on websites and as Lewinsky says, “Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that’s a lot of pain.” She also points out that public humiliation is now a ‘’commodity’’ on gossip websites, in paparazzi pictures, on reality shows, even in politics, and on news shows.
And she points out something that no one remembered when she was made the butt of universal ridicule. She says, “In this culture of humiliation, the public shaming does not measure the cost to the victim. This invasion of others is raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it.”
The onus in the end is not on the makers of this industry of shame. But on us, because we consume it and by perpetuating it, endorse it. Said Lewinsky, “Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop. Even empathy from one person can make a difference. In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation.”
And she brought forth the key question about the freedom of expression. “We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression, but we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. Let’s acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. I know it’s hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself. We all deserve compassion, and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world, “
A click can be an empowering thing or strip someone of their identity and when that happens again and again, it can take almost a lifetime to survive the fragmentation of identity and for someone once dismissed as a ‘slut’ and ‘that woman’ to become, Monica Lewinsky, TED speaker and the spokesperson for everyone who has ever been shamed into silence.
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be silent with her cats