I just saw a tweet that was like “the GOP impeached Clinton over a blowjob but won’t impeach Trump over armed insurrection” and maybe we can, uh, stop minimizing what was very obviously an inappropriate and abusive relationship with an intern?

You can think the impeachment of Clinton was in bad faith *and* think that Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky was more than just “a blowjob” FFS

I was 16 when Clinton was impeached — 15 when much of the gossip about Lewinsky was swirling around — and I really have to wonder how much it warped me to see the most powerful man in the world soliciting sex from an intern written off as just an affair.

*Let alone* the messages I received about Lewinsky being the powerful one in that dynamic

BTW if you are too young to understand how the media narrative could have presented Lewinsky as the powerful one, a lot of it was rehashing this hoary old trope of “men are powerless against the lure of the pussy,” which was aided by the fact that Lewinsky *was* flirting with him

I want to be very, very clear about this: Monica Lewinsky did stuff like intentionally show off her thong in front of Bill Clinton because she had a crush on him and she felt validated by his sexual attention. She thought she loved him. She was still taken advantage of.

I’ve talked about this before but you can be an abuse victim and also be a person who feels like you had agency and intentionally pursued what was, ultimately, an abusive relationship with an intense power imbalance. This shit is complicated and taking away victims’ agency is bad

When I was a 19 year old intern at a media company a staff writer hit on me and I felt flattered, but then things rapidly got weird in a way that had negative consequences for me, the person with less power, and I realized that even attention that feels *wanted* can be harmful.

Reducing abuse/harassment to *exclusively* unwanted sexual attention erases the way that many people, and especially women, are coached to see sexual attention as necessary validation in a way that makes them incredibly vulnerable to harmful situations.

Like thinking back to when I was nineteen, it’s very hard for me to parse “I liked that writer and was flattered by his attention” from “I believed that a man paying attention to me proved I was a worthy person,” and that is *dangerous*, especially in the workplace.

What does it even really mean to “want” sexual attention in a society that makes it a necessary precondition of your personhood?