"Ah, But I Was So Much Older Then:" Monica Lewinsky, Molly Ringwald, and the Right to Reassess the Past.

Monica Lewinsky has a new podcast series. Reclaiming launched last month, and I haven’t missed an episode yet. The shows have become staples of the frequent five-hour drives between my mother’s home in Carmel and my little Mid-Wilshire apartment. I like stories of reinventions and reimaginings; I am hungry, as so many of us are, for stories of people overcoming shame. I am particularly interested in how someone builds a happy life after a very public scandal, and it is not hyperbole to say that Lewinsky was at the center of perhaps the most celebrated public scandal of the last thirty years. She knows more than anyone about shame.

This week’s episode has Monica in conversation with Molly Ringwald, the star of a trio of beloved 1980s teen films. In Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink – all written by the late John Hughes – Ringwald plays three different high school girls, each hungry for love, attention, and acceptance. I am almost exactly Ringwald’s age (she’s nine months younger), and like so many of my generation, I adored each of these era-defining movies. In later years, Ringwald would continue to act, though in less celebrated pictures. She later became a respected translator, bringing several French books into English. Ringwald is a mother of three, her youngest now the age Molly was when she was first cast in Sixteen Candles.

Molly and Monica in conversation

I was nervous about listening to this episode. Molly and Monica are well-known for many things, but in recent years, have each offered reassessments of their relationships with the men who made them famous (or infamous.) As both Molly and Monica readily concede, neither would be a household name had they not attracted the attention of a powerful older man. As Ringwald recounts in this week’s episode, John Hughes was a thirty-three-year-old screenwriter when he came across one of Molly’s early headshots. Ringwald was barely fifteen when the photo was taken, but something in her look inspired Hughes to write Sixteen Candles; he taped the headshot to the wall above his desk, his gaze never far from the face of an adolescent muse he had not yet met.

When they finally did meet – and Ringwald was cast to play Samantha --John Hughes told her that her photo had been his inspiration to write the script.

“Was that weird for you?” Monica asks Molly. In the podcast, you can hear Molly’s hesitation as she thinks through her reply. No one, least of all Ringwald, has ever accused John Hughes of sexual impropriety. In 1984, it seemed perfectly acceptable that a man in his thirties might be so struck by a fifteen-year-old’s photo that he would sit down and write an entire screenplay about what he imagined her life to be like.

In the #MeToo era (or perhaps, the post-MeToo era), it is impossible not to declare something amiss about a teen serving as a muse to an adult man. Hughes is dead (felled by a heart attack in 2009, aged only 59), and he is not available to be interrogated, though he may be condemned in absentia. Molly Ringwald doesn’t want to do that. You can hear that she remains deeply loyal to this man who did so much to make her a star. You can hear that she is adamant that Hughes never crossed a line into overt predation. And yet, in 2025, there’s no way to let the Sixteen Candles origin story pass without some pronouncement of judgment. After some hesitation, Ringwald declares “It was peculiar.” She repeats that word twice: peculiar. To her credit, Lewinsky – who has been friends with Ringwald since 1999 – doesn’t push. Peculiar is the final decree, at least for this cultural moment, and Hughes’ legacy is left suspended in the air. He is beloved, he is missed, and he is also, somehow, vaguely suspect. Perhaps that’s the best we’re going to get.

Monica Lewinsky has also reassessed the relationship that made her famous. As late as 2014, she declared that her affair with President Clinton had been entirely consensual. Once #MeToo hit, she came to a more nuanced conclusion. As she frames it now (most recently as a guest on the hugely popular Call Her Daddy podcast), what happened between her and Bill was “Not rape… but a massive abuse of power.” She was twenty-two and an intern; Clinton was forty-nine and the most powerful man on the planet. Where a “pre-MeToo Monica” believed enthusiastic consent was still possible under the circumstances, a post-MeToo Monica no longer believes that to be true.

The title of the Call Her Daddy episode? “An Intern versus the President.” Those of us who remember 1998, and remember the roles played by the likes of Linda Tripp and Ken Starr, are fascinated to find that Clinton is now the sole villain of the piece. The friend who taped Lewinsky’s conversations without her knowledge? The special prosecutor who demanded to know in detail how the president brought Lewinsky to orgasm with his fingers? They are all but absolved so that we can have just one single remaining malefactor in the story: the married boss.

“Your frontal lobe wasn’t even fully developed,” Call Her Daddy host Alexandra Cooper exclaims to Monica during the podcast. One of the hallmarks of #MeToo – and of contemporary pedagogy more broadly – is this belief that adolescent vulnerability lasts at least until age twenty-five. To the truly evolved mind, consent to sex with an older person can only truly be given by someone old enough to rent a car or be duly elected to the House of Representatives. Monica agrees with Cooper that it was so. She had been twenty-two with an adolescent frontal lobe, and not ready for sex with a much older man.

Molly Ringwald is far older now than John Hughes was when she served as his muse. Monica Lewinsky herself is now older than Bill Clinton was when their affair began. When Ringwald avers that she can’t imagine being inspired by a photo of a teen boy the way Hughes was with her headshot, Lewinsky says the same about the idea of an affair with a much younger man -- perhaps someone the age she was when she first set foot in the Oval Office. These declarations are, I concede, fairly typical for middle-aged folks who have led colorful lives. When we look at our younger selves, we tend to think that we had too high a regard for our own agency.

“Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.” Bob Dylan was twenty-three (with a not-fully developed frontal lobe) when he wrote those famous lines. Bob already knew that adolescent certainties could fade quickly to young adult doubts. (See Taylor Swift’s “Nothing New” for an identical sentiment.) As women in their fifties, Lewinsky and Ringwald are more than entitled to acknowledge that when they were young, they vastly oversold their own autonomy to themselves. They are entitled to declare what once seemed normal and flattering to now be “peculiar” or “predatory.”

The listener might well ask Ringwald and Lewinsky, “How much of this reassessment is because of your own inner work, and how much is a response to the shifting Zeitgeist?” And the reply might well be that those two things are pretty damn difficult to untangle.

Molly and Monica in 2014, pre-#MeToo

For years, I have been open about my fear that someone from my past will come back into my life to offer a reassessment of our relationship. Sexual relationships with students cost me my career, my marriage, and my family’s economic stability. The price has been incalculably high. One small consolation is that no one ever accused me of unwanted advances. No one ever declared that these relationships were not consensual. Since #MeToo began, I have been terribly afraid that one of these women will come forward and declare that with the passage of time and hours in therapy, she now believes that I was more predator than partner. If Monica can reassess Bill and find him predatory– and if Molly can reassess John Hughes and decide that in hindsight, he was “peculiar” – then surely someone from my past is bound to pop up one of these days and offer a harsh reframing of what happened between us years ago.

But so what? Am I so enchanted by my own fragility that I must deny everyone else the right to reconsider as they grow? A gentleman does not insist that everyone walk on eggshells around him lest he do something drastic and irrevocable. That’s emotional blackmail. No matter how painful it may be, good manners must include more than a soft tone and a formal bearing. It must include a willingness to hear hard truths.

I finished listening to the Molly/Monica episode just as I drove through the intersection of Highways 41 and 46 in eastern San Luis Obispo County. Seventy years ago, a very famous twenty-something died in a car wreck on that spot. James Dean never got a chance to reassess his own celebrity, but those who are lucky enough to grow up and grow older have a right to rethink the choices and relationships of their youth. Every wise parent knows that an adult child may present petitions of grievance about how they were raised. My children are teens; within the next decade, I can fully expect to be confronted by their realization of what my mistakes really cost them. I had better be ready for that.

Like millions of older Gen Xers, I grew up in a parasocial relationship with Molly Ringwald – or at least the characters she played in the Hughes films of the mid-1980s. A little more than a decade later, barely into my thirties, I saw the Clinton-Lewinsky affair unfold, and decided that the blame lay solely with the prigs who exposed it rather than the lovers who engaged in it. That a new generation now considers Sixteen Candles to be racist and rapey, or that Ringwald herself has mixed feelings about serving as muse to her director? That Lewinsky now sees her older married lover as the primary villain of the piece? That’s their right. It doesn’t mean that I must abandon all my own views and accept these reconsiderations as Gospel truths. It does mean that I must give these reassessments a fair hearing and refuse the temptation to react with anger or despair.

At the heart of what it means to be human is to live in relationship. At the heart of relationship is change. The child grows, the parent ages. What was once unquestioned is now doubted. What was once welcomed is now… less so. I can grumble about #MeToo and cancel culture all I like (and I do), but reevaluation is a cultural, historical, and individual constant. Molly Ringwald knows she is forever famous as Samantha Baker, but she also knows she is not defined by a role she played as a teenager. Monica Lewinsky knows she is forever famous for an extraordinary scandal, but she too refuses to have her potential limited by a single story from her youth. If they can reframe and reconsider, so can we all. And if we are to reinvent ourselves, and do new and unexpected things, we must be willing to have those whom we love (or just once loved briefly) tell us hard truths about ourselves.

Thank you, Molly, and thank you, Monica, for helping me see this.