My family and I are watching the president explain on national television that sucking dick doesn’t mean having sex. The first talk about the birds and the bees I got was from Kenneth Starr. When Monica Lewinsky arrived in our cultural consciousness, I was twelve years old, and she was my coming of age story. When Clinton’s affair with Monica hit the news, it felt bizarrely personal, in the way the era’s monoculture allowed everything in the news to feel bizarrely personal. We became a whole nation experiencing puberty at exactly the moment I was actually experiencing puberty. The news, and the public reaction to it, made it seem that America had never heard of sex before; our national conversation imitated nothing so much as a teen finding out their parents have had sex.
Monica
Monica
Monica
My family and I are watching the president explain on national television that sucking dick doesn’t mean having sex. The first talk about the birds and the bees I got was from Kenneth Starr. When Monica Lewinsky arrived in our cultural consciousness, I was twelve years old, and she was my coming of age story. When Clinton’s affair with Monica hit the news, it felt bizarrely personal, in the way the era’s monoculture allowed everything in the news to feel bizarrely personal. We became a whole nation experiencing puberty at exactly the moment I was actually experiencing puberty. The news, and the public reaction to it, made it seem that America had never heard of sex before; our national conversation imitated nothing so much as a teen finding out their parents have had sex.