Compared to Monica Lewin sky, Hester Prynne got an easy ride, if you'll pardon the expression. The shame of having to emblazon a scarlet letter A - signifying adultery - on your bosom is nothing compared to the 1999 media version: saturation ignominy everywhere in the galaxy within range of TV.

Over the past 12 months, the media have falsely painted Monica as a gold-digging, dumb, Hollywood bimbo who manipulated her way into the oral (sorry, Oval) Office of the US President.

Monica's TV interviews were her shot at redemption via TV confessional, with Barbara Walters as Reverend Mother and Jon Snow as besotted priest. ("Did you tingle?" he asked. Thwoar! did she what?) If Snow's audience with Monica proved anything, it was that we, the media and the media-consuming public, have been the fools.

And worse - we have stood back and sniggered in complicity while this troubled young woman was "humiliated" and "violated" (her words, and apt ones) by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, a man who, with his right-wing Republican cronies, was trapped in a bizarre trance of sexual McCarthyism. Monica - with her expressive, smily, heavily made-up face - has been made out by the media to be, there's no other word for it, a confident little slut.

The Snow interview revealed that Monica's sophistication is superficial and that in retrospect, her polished veneer did her no favours by hiding her inner terror and insecurity. As portrayed in the media, she evolved as a fat clown, instead of as the tragic figure she now appears to be.

You can see how this happened. The full Monica is the kind of woman that other women love to hate: a bubbly, bright and optimistic type that many a man would love to be stuck in a lift with (or so I'm told). She would jolly you along, sing songs, share her Tic-Tacs, tell jokes and - if you were lucky - show you a glimpse of her thong.

Only once, during the Snow interview, did her face darken and then, for a moment, she looked like a completely different person. You can fake tears - but you can't fake that. She was talking about the "worst of day of her life", when she seriously considered jumping out of the window of the 10th storey hotel room where a nine-strong gang of FBI men had imprisoned her. It's positively medieval when you think about it.

And there's a strange kind of connection to her own family history in her victimisation by the US right wing. Monica's Jewish grandparents escaped the Holocaust, and she became a victim - admittedly in a far less serious way. As a child, Monica was "a little adult", she told us. A voluptuous woman-child, she craved love and approval. In her own words, she was "eager to please".

Her family relationships were so dysfunctional that she walked herself in to the mess of the century for the simple reason that she wanted a Daddy to love her, because her real father emotionally abandoned her.

Probing her relationship with her parents, Snow asked. "Did you get what you wanted?"

Monica replied: "From my Mom, yes. From my Dad . . . not so much."

God only knows why her mother ever let her anywhere near the White House. As Monica told Snow about her parents' marriage, you could imagine the self-effacing Monica as a child, learning to negotiate deftly the turmoil of her parents' marriage, playing the hero and putting their feelings first.

This is the classic strategy of the child of unresolved marital strife. Monica has so much in common with Chelsea Clinton in that way that you have to ask whether Bill was looking for a daughter as much as Monica sought a father figure.

"The President seemed to me to be an emotionally needy person and I can relate to that," Monica said, smiling self-deprecatingly. She confessed that her parents' marriage was a sham during her childhood, but that until they got divorced, "I could pretend".

Monica was the self-deluding glue that held her emotionally estranged parents to gether as a family. Self-delusion was her modus operandi. She was the family rescuer who needed to be rescued but - typical Monica - she blundered. She went after a prince who was in a White House on a white horse. Fol lowing her hungry heart, she stumbled into history, "pretending" that the President loved her, and history devoured her.

Until Thursday night, we dismissed Monica and her pain because Monica wasn't real. We still tend to see women either as virgins or as whores and Monica, in the view of many, will always be in the second category. "The sex was very one-way," Snow suggested. "No it wasn't," Monica insisted.

When a woman confesses to feeling lust rather than love, as Monica did on Thursday night, she has set her fate. As a culture, we're not comfortable with women declaring their lust - outside pop songs, that is.

The peculiar American ambivalence to wards female sexuality is as old as The Scarlet Letter. The underlying theme of Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel was that the US was founded on a hypocritical Puritanism, underlain by an exuberant and dangerous sexuality.

In the 20th century, this ambivalence has been personified by Marilyn Monroe (singing Happy Birthday Mr President in her childish voice) and exploited by Madonna. Monica, the latest sex icon, is a child of this deep-rooted confusion which Americans have about their sexuality. If only she knew it.

"My generation are more comfortable with our sexuality," she told Snow, adding that such sexual freedom needs to be "honoured and cherished". It was the saddest part of the interview to learn that Monica sees her sexual function as worthy of honour, while it is perfectly obvious that Monica, the full person body and soul, has never felt honoured and cherished in her life.

Her language around sex is oddly teenaged - he was "so cute", she says of Clinton. She got involved with a married man without a single scruple, but when she began to love the President, she wanted a moral context for the relationship. She "hoped for a future" with him, but there was never any chance of that. Monica naively told Snow that people would understand her if only they could see that she and the President had a relationship between a man and a woman.

Monica hasn't figured it out yet, but she will eventually. Her "relationship" with the President was a fantasy. There can be no relationship when the man is old enough to be the woman's father - and happens to be the playboy of the western world to boot. The dalliance of the President and the intern was a dance of power, with the young person inevitably being exploited. Gender was irrelevant.

The exploitation is so obvious, that it is puzzling why so many people, women especially - want to string Monica up by her semen-stained dress. Will her TV interviews change their minds? Maybe, maybe not. Monica - with her Hollywood wardrobe, giggly Beverly Hills 90210 accent and her view of marriage as a career goal - is as politically incorrect as you can get.

The PC female role model of the moment is Hillary Clinton - an intellectually brilliant rider on the political storm who has come out on top. Monica - the White House intern who talked dirty instead of talking politics - makes feminists uncomfortable, because when she had the ear of the most powerful man in the Western world, she talked sex instead of equality.

When Starr figuratively raped her, no one leapt to her defence. Monica told us that she wanted nothing more than to find a man with whom to have a "meaningful relationship", leading to marriage and children. As she said this, both the yearning and the knowledge that this dream may never come true were written across her face.

The sub-text was pure 1950s - you could almost hear her thinking, "now that I have been vilified as a sexual adventuress, will anyone want to marry me?"

Monica came across, above all, as a woman in dire need of prince on a white steed. Some day, she will grow up to realise that the world doesn't work that way. Iconic women like Monica, Monroe and Diana, who have experienced the "surreal" (Monica's word) loss of anonymity which is unique to the 20th century, tend to come to a bad end.

"What do you know now that you didn't know 13 months ago?" Snow asked Monica. "I am disappointed in myself. I still find myself being too trusting," she confessed.

We can only wait and watch for the next instalment, to see whom she will dare to trust next.

More than 500,000 people watched RTE's simultaneous broadcast of the Channel 4 interview on Prime Time. Twenty two per cent of women watched the interview compared to 18 per cent of men.