On a scale of 1-10, how hard is it to keep your dick in your pants at work?
I just don't get the mindset that results in someone thinking "yeah man, it is totally ok to make a pass at a coworker in a professional environment"
I just don't get the mindset that results in someone thinking "yeah man, it is totally ok to make a pass at a coworker in a professional environment"
That was, however, the first and probably last time for me. And given the context, we were both kidding ourselves as long as possible about the mutual attraction. By the time anything resembling a pass happened, it was obviously desired on both sides.
The truth is that we are human. No matter how much people try to avoid romantic entanglements at work, it happens. Regularly. And sometimes they don't work out. The challenge is how to handle that situation. And this is a difficult challenge indeed.
and some of these stories...
Like your opening day at a company having received an IM from your immediate boss/hirer, by lunchtime saying "Hey, btw, I think you're attractive, I'm in an open relationship and maybe we can have sex sometime." (which, although paraphrased, is still startling close to the verbatim exchanges alleged to have occured).
Exactly. Like simply wait for enough (obvious) green lights before making a move. Like, you know, mature, consenting adults. A modicum of tact and subtlety couldn't hurt, either ;)
No matter how much people try to avoid romantic entanglements at work, it happens.
And indeed, it's silly (and borderline delusional) to pretend otherwise.
The standard male cognitive bias is to become convinced that there are green lights when they may not exist. And a bias towards pushing the point so that women who might be convincible can be convinced.
This makes evolutionary sense because there is little cost to receiving extra rejections, and a definite reproductive benefit to a hard to predict acceptance. However this bias means that women naturally receive more unwanted offers than wanted ones. And dealing with unwanted offers on top of workplace dynamics (particularly when there are power dynamics) is a real problem.
In short, biology ensures that men will tend to screw up. And workplace requirements make it important to push back against this natural tendency.
As an analogy, you can weave in out of traffic at 120 mph or drive appropriately. The crazy driver would sound absurd if they explained it by saying, 'driving is a necessary part of modern life; lots of people do it'.
What gets me is the poor judgment on display in all of these cases. Yeah, you did Gwen in HR, good job. I hope you guys blew the roof off the house, because now you get to deal with the entanglements that come with sex in a place you spend most of your waking hours. Are these people truly unable to think that far ahead? If their judgment is so poor in this arena, how am I supposed to trust their judgment in professional matters?
It boggles the mind.
(Also, are you btilly from the xkcd forums? If so, long time no see!)
Yes, we dealt with it fairly well. BUT not perfectly. And having gone through the emotional rollercoaster, I cannot fault anyone else for doing it poorly. Particularly (as didn't happen in my case) if the relationship failed to work out.
Looking back I can't feel pride in success. Only humility from knowing how lucky I was to avoid disaster. And said humility has taught me to be less quick to judge others as people, while being painfully aware of the importance of being firm with the consequences of their actions.
I have a personal bar of acceptance in the work force but it's different for every person.
What is a problem is if you keep doing it even when the other person communicates a lack of interest and a desire for you to stop. That and, of obviously, other forms of sexual harassment. Note though that "sexual harassment" has a specific legal meaning and it doesn't necessarily include every incident that sometimes gets reported as such.
To be fair, though, that's a relatively recent perception (one I hasten to add that I agree with!). Up until fairly recently no-one saw anything particularly wrong with a man marrying his secretary (or a professor his student, or similar situations), or just found it a bit off-colour rather than 'automatically wrong.'
As a product of our generation, I have a knee-jerk, 'no no no heck no!' reaction to subordinate-superior relationships, but that's just my culture; there are others in both space & time.
The odds are pretty good that I'm older than you, and I do not recall a time that someone running off with their secretary or student, married or not, was not cast in a negative light. Maybe the secretary would be okay under the right circumstances, but student-professor has always been creepy. It's "wrong" now that we've codified that creepy feeling into law.
EDIT: it came to mind that I haven't heard the phrase "sleeping her way to the top" in a long time. It used to be used commonly amongst those around me. IOW, manager-subordinate relationships were often not viewed positively. Of course now that we "just don't do that", I haven't heard the phrase in ages.
> To be fair, though, that's a relatively recent perception ...
That doesn't make it any less important or wrong. On the historical timescale, democracy and the evil of slavery are recent perceptions, yet we don't say that's just my culture; there are others in both space & time.
Combine that with the socially inept male dominated software environment and you can pretty much expect scandalous things to happen.
Two things occur to me: 1) neither of those things means those students were engaging in "flirting their way to favor": maybe, just maybe, they were dressing comfortably for them or they absorbed our discussion better by sitting closer and my biases and (mis-?)perceptions were at work; 2) even if they were "flirting," as a responsible adult male it was my responsibility to ignore it, or even raise a concern if I felt it were intentional and damaging to the student-teacher relationship.
The socially inept thing probably accounts for a lot of the problem.
Coworker or not, consent and respect is essential.
I've had sex with coworkers and never been accused of inappropriate behaviour, turns out if we're all adults it works out.
And definitely a reality of most industries, especially if you spend a lot of time in the office and little time socialising externally.
Maybe that's the problem.
Kids will be kids.
That means this is where they learn to be adults and make mistakes. They will make occasional misjudgments in this context, and when they do, we should offer them an easy out.
And to answer your question: sexual assault is not one of these cases. Partaking in this safe space kind of presupposes that your kid knows how to tell the difference between right and wrong.