Exactly. I’m also that age, and it was widely accepted that if you got drunk and went to a guy’s room, that *was* consent. (Though even then, I think a lot of us would have said bringing his friends in crossed the line to rape.)

Yeah, but if Monica had understood that secrets stopped being secrets when you told someone, Linda Tripp wouldn't have been in a position to tattle to start with. I'm not faulting Monica — she was young, and there's no way she could have foreseen what would happen. But she wasn't discreet.

That’s a fair point too. (And I’m not sure how much power Monica would have had to rally people, even if she had wanted to.) I like to think I would have been less of a jerk if backing her didn’t also mean backing Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich, but there’s no real way to say.

This isn’t going to be very flattering to me, but I was in college when the Lewinsky story broke and (at the time) hated her. My logic was that if you were going to hit on a married man and then run your mouth about it, you deserved whatever happened. The fact she was an intern and he was president struck me as…

I found one source that says 17 women, but that includes women who later denied their claims and complete rumors.

I just don’t know what else her motivation could be, if not to advance her career. She certainly does not seem like a submissive apologist who believes her husband can do no wrong.

I don’t know what to say about Broaddrick. I believe she had sex with Bill Clinton in 1978 that she didn’t want to have, and that could now be prosecuted as rape. I can’t dismiss her when she’s been consistent about that for almost 40 years. (I’m less inclined to believe her new claim Hillary Clinton intimidated her.)…

Same. I was a huge music geek for more than a decade. I had Opinions on every new band, I mail-ordered things on obscure labels from Portland before there was an Amazon, I spent half my life reeking of cigarette smoke from club shows.

See, it’s funny — I feel like the older I get, the less mental energy I have to spend on hating random celebrities who aren’t actively trying to hurt anyone. There are so many actually awful people to hate, I can’t spend time at almost 38 being irritated that random pop singers exist.

And he’s married to Cobie Smulders, so they’re kind of like a second-string Amy Poehler/Will Arnett without the divorce.

Fair point, thanks. I don’t have that kind of historical perspective.

Ah, got it. That makes more sense!

I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think the Olympics let people in for symbolic reasons. She has to be one of the 3-5 best in her country to make the team, and her country’s team has to be one of the 12(?) best in the world to make the Olympics.

I was actually talking to a friend who grew up in the USSR about this the other day — she said that in some ways, they did a better job of encouraging gender equality than the western world. For example, her mom trained as an engineer in the early ‘80s, and her class was 50/50 male-female. When my friend decided to go…

His wife is 42, so she’s in the age bracket where pregnancy’s getting more unlikely by the month. I’m sure that makes it even easier for him to say.

I would be much more willing to give him points for consistency if he was also talking about funding round-the-clock nursing care and a lifetime of free medical treatment for children born with microcephaly. But I promise you he hasn’t thought that far, so he’s just being an ass.

Right. And I can’t imagine European models at the time spent too much time verifying their exact immigration status, either. When you’re 20 years old and somebody is offering you a lot of money to get your picture taken in New York, and you know if you don’t go for it there are 50 other girls lined up to take your…

Okay, so it couldn’t be that somebody handed her some papers without really explaining the rules and she signed them and that was it. There goes that semi-excuse.

This is so deliciously ironic.

It’s an old rumor about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett, too.