Monica Lewinsky: "In retrospect, maybe it wasn't consensual..."

That's a jaded outlook but you probably aren't wrong

That or she would have "committed suicide" by gunshot to the head.

Strangely enough, I agree here. I do think they were both extremely unwise, for any number of reasons.

Then how can the president ever have sex? Everyone is at a power differential to them. He does not have to be a supervisor to use his power. Some people may just feel intimidated by the president of the US. If he held her job over her head that is one thing, but if she wanted to bang him because he is charming and the president then that is just a choice that ended badly. There are sometimes you fuck the boss because you like the boss.

I agree it is unwise and unprofessional. It is probably even ill advised. But it is not always rape. I could go and have willing consenting sex with my boss as a free person and it is not rape. I am not going that far, but I will listen to a person's story to decide if the boss did use coercion that would fall under the category of rape. There is making bad choices and that is not rape.

I cannot say it is not true that he may have pressured an intern into doing something she did not want to do and by today's definitions it would be rape, but back then she would not have considered it rape because people did not think that way back then. That is possible, but I always got the idea she liked him and wanted to have sex with him. I got the idea that she enjoyed it until things blew up and then she was shamed about it. I have never read anything by her that said he was grabby and she just went along with it until now, but there may be something there as Bill is aware of who he is and that stuff was not considered as out of line back then.

I just think with all the investigating she always seemed like that was what she wanted to do rather than her getting caught up in him pushing. I could be wrong and maybe there are statements from her way back then that he was pushy and rapey. If that is the case I would look on it a bit differently but still be somewhat skeptical. I think if she wanted to say it was rape there were a number of people who were pushing her to say that and she could have made those claims way back then. The fact she did not make him out to be that sort of person while so many people wanted her to say that means she probably wanted it to be her, just not the horrible circus that came from it.

Still I could be wrong as I am not normally in that position and am unfamiliar with the pressures women face and how that can make you say things you don't mean at the time to defend a rapist or abuser.

One thing I am going to say is this sort of thing is hard to get from an empowered position, and more from a male position. Empowered people do not take a lot of shit from others and that is why people are saying the power differential matters. Bosses are empowered and don't take a lot of shit where a lower employee is not empower and may take crap because they feel that is how things are done. This is why professionalism really demands you do not date your subordinates. There is just too much you cannot control with it.

Men need to understand there is a huge amount of psychology in how we raise women and what we tell them that pushes them into an abuse victim mentality. Abuse victims blame themselves for their abusers abuse. This happens to boys who are abused also. You ask yourself what you did to set that person off. I realised this year's ago with a guy who was my friend who one day punched me in the face because he was on crack (literally). For a while after it happened I was wondering how I screwed up to make him so mad he punched me in the face. He made a huge thing about it being my fault he lost his shit. I snapped out of it after about an hour because that is not how I normally think, but there I was thinking it. I was blaming myself and sounded like all those people I never understood.

Men are taught to fight back and stand up for themselves more. Women are taught to empathise and that often involves seeing things from the other person's point of view. That can be a great thing, but that can be dangerous when a person is an abuser. This is why a lot of workplace abuse is just tolerated by women because they ask themselves what did they do to make the other person do that. Sometimes the answer to that should be the other person just simply should not have done what they did. I don't care how short your skirt is you did not ask to be fucked by wearing it. Men don't fully understand why it is so dangerous to toss so much back on the woman by saying dressing slutty is going to get you raped because men don't see things in the same way due to how they are raised. If you were a man and some woman grabbed you in a way you did not want you say no because you are not trained to take her feelings into account. Women learn to take other people's feelings into account and that is wonderful and problematic in some ways.