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The world slut shamed Monica Lewinsky, but what about the man who was equally responsible? Monica Lewinsky now in a TED talk shares her experience.
The World Wide Web was introduced to the world with a blockbuster story – of Monica Lewinsky, a 22 year old intern in the White House having an intimate relationship with US President, Bill Clinton! At a time, when the whole world was still joining the three puzzle pieces of Ws together, one of the most scintillating stories of the century was unfolding.
Monica had suddenly caught the living room syndrome of the whole world. Men called her names and speculated on how she got away with it, while women despised her for getting so close to a married man; the media ridiculed her with sarcastic jokes, the paparazzi lashed her with their personal questions, and the country tormented her with hate mails. It was a story that not only saw the beginning of a technology but also evolution of a culture of public humiliation, body shaming, cyber bullying, which we now call, ‘Internet Trolling’.
Monica Lewinsky tried everything to do away with the epic public humiliation of 1998. She tried public appearances; she tried being reclusive; she tried leaving the country, she tried to find a job elsewhere. But it was difficult to do away with the past and the ghosts of those mistakes haunted her everywhere.
People seemed indifferent to the fact that their intrusive behavior, their judgmental statements, their easy assessments, abuses, and most of all their refusal to consider her a human being who could also make mistakes, was eroding the private life of a woman in the public sphere. However, as she struggled to pick up the broken pieces of whatever was left of her life together, after a failed suicide attempt, the man in question, Bill Clinton was living his life, almost undisturbed and unperturbed, first denying and then accepting the relationship.
After years of self-imposed reticence, Monica Lewinsky is now hoping to help the victims of Internet shaming. In her TED Gateway talk in 2015, she criticises this culture of rushing to judgment enabled by technology and pummeling the victims into submission and silencing them with gut wrenching rhetoric.
She talks extensively about how these words tear apart the confidence of the individual, shred their dignity and smothers any chance of a normal life. Take a look at the complete speech here:
Image: You Tube
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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