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She also describes her difficulty with finding employment, even after she earned a master's in social psychology in 2006 at the London School of Economics. It's hard out here for a woman named Monica Lewinsky.

Most recently she delivered an 18-minute speech against "The Culture of Humiliation" last week (March 18) in front of a Vancouver audience for the TED Talks website.

Check it out. She had me when she asked for a show of hands by anyone "who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?"

Right. How about 32? 42? 52? Et cetera?

Lewinsky drew sympathetic laughs by recalling how, at age 41, she was "hit on by a 27-year-old guy" at last year's Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit who promised to make her "feel 22 again."

"I'm probably the only person over 40," she said sighing, "who does not want to be 22 again."

But, as a New York Times headline on a recent profile put it, "Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It's on Her Terms." She's taken up a cause that is appropriate to the treatment she received in digital-age media: cyberbullying.

If anybody knows what it is like to be bullied in news, political and entertainment media, it is Lewinsky.

But she's not alone. We're in an age when actor-activist Ashley Judd, among others, is pushing back against the obscenely sexist rudeness of internet trolls. And a new generation of young women has taken to the streets in "slut walks" to push back against the "slut-shaming" that plagued Lewinsky.

Changing times have made it harder for her old critics to be mad at Monica. She calls herself "Patient Zero" in the epidemic of Internet-fueled scandals that routinely devastate personal reputations on a global scale almost every day. She's hardly the first scandalized figure in American politics, but hers was the first scandal to break over the Internet in a scoop by the Drudge Report about a story on which Newsweek was working.

Since then, private political lives have become more public than ever before and the line between news, politics and entertainment have become increasingly blurred.

But what can be done about it? The coarsening of our politics, the heckler's veto of cybertrolling and other nuisances is obvious, but the remedies are less clear. We can't legislate good manners, but we can speak out to isolate and condemn the rude, crude and callous whenever we see it or hear it -- or that's all we'll have left.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.