The Puritans: The Original Cyberbullies

In 1998 Monica Lewinsky went viral. In an instant a woman with a childhood and a soul became to the world nothing more than a symbol, a beret her scarlet letter, reeking immorality, promiscuity, and oral sex. Tart, slut, bimbo, hussy, portly pepperpot, tramp, tubby, ditsy, and predatory were among the darts hurtled at her from around the globe. Late night talk show hosts Bill Maher and David Letter-man pummeled her. No one spared her. It was so easy to castigate her, so titillating simply to picture that act with “that woman” in the oval office. Who could resist? Before anyone knew her, no one wanted to.

Women, too, threw stones. In 1998 Clinton’s confidant Vernon Jordan helped Monica get a job at Revlon where she worked briefly. On MSNBC Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi remarked that Lewinsky had been “sleeping her way to the bottom of the Revlon empire.” Feminist Susan Estrich wrote that after Revlon came “a $2 million modeling offer and the status of the most-sought-after woman in the world. Not bad, some might say, for someone who can’t type.” Even Gloria Steinem who empowered women with a voice—yes is yes, no is no—exonerated Clinton perhaps because the act was consensual or because she wanted to uphold the political power of someone with an abortion agenda in line with her own. Lewinsky is the first to agree that the sex, however we want to define it, was consensual; she takes responsibility for her actions, she fell in love with the President. Still, it’s naïve for us not to consider a stratospheric difference in age and power. Even if we agree with Steinem that Monica had the agency and subjectivity to say yes, that she was not Anita Hill being coerced day in and day out to endure things she didn’t want to endure, what about the aftermath of the act? What of media gender bias? Slut shaming? Ostracism? Stigmatization? Both Monica and Bill said yes. One went underground for a decade, couldn’t find work, considered suicide; the other got re-elected, made millions.

Hawthorne could have told us all of this. In fact, he did in The Scarlet Letter. But students who have grown up with cyberbullying make no connection between protagonist Hester Prynne’s plight, wrought in Victorian language they find painful if not utterly obtuse, and the fates of young Rebecca Ann Sedwick, Hannah Smith, and Jessica Laney, all of whom were savaged by the Internet and killed themselves as a result. Hawthorne knew all about the insidious and enduring effects of shame, the objectification of the target of shame, the power of shame to drive one to consider suicide, and in the case of sex scandals, the likelihood of men getting away with it and the woman paying the price. Cyberbullying, in essence, isn’t new. Although we blame it on the advent of technology, it has been in the American psyche since the founding of the country.

When The Scarlet Letter opens in 1642, Hester emerges from prison, her illegitimate baby, the token of her sin, in her arms. While waiting years for her husband to arrive from Europe, she had an affair with the town’s esteemed Reverend Dimmesdale, though no one at this point knows the identity of the father. Dreary puritans in their dreary garb have gathered around to enjoy a degradation ritual as Hester stands on a scaffold before them. Her hands and head are free; she isn’t locked in a stockade because Hawthorne knew that the real pain came from the scalding stares of the townsfolk, “the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne.” Under the bald midday sun Hester calls upon her inner reserves merely to keep standing “under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure….” Hawthorne reiterates metaphorical weight, as if iron chains were dragging her down, or some monolithic structure resting on her shoulders, blocking her from the heavens and ensuring her...