Monica Lewinsky receiving a standing ovation at TED, and looking directly at Al Gore sitting next to me.
Some quotes from her #TED2015 Talk that just went online: http://go.ted.com/A8h
“At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss, and at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.”
“You’re looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that’s changed, but only recently.”
“a surprising thing happened. At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy. I know, right? He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again. (Laughter) I realized later that night, I’m probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.”
“What that meant for me personally was that overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.”
“My mom… was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.”
“A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. We’re in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it, and the more numb we get, the more we click. All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else’s suffering.”
“Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop.” “We need to return to a long-held value of compassion and empathy.” “Shame can’t survive empathy.”
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