And Just Like That, Sex Talk Comes to Work
When Vanessa Van Edwards told a group of workers to ask their colleagues about the most exciting thing they did over the weekend, the communication trainer wanted to spark chitchat and collegial bonding.
She didn’t expect that one co-worker would be treated to details of a colleague’s Saturday-night sexual escapades in response.
A lot of young people are going to get a lesson in why we tend to separate various aspects of our lives–and, for example, not talking about our sex lives at work. Especially nowadays when HR is clamping down so hard after the “#MeToo” movement: because unless your sex life lies within a very narrow band of sexual activities that are considered “normal”, you could very well trigger an HR investigation. Or at the very least find yourself excluded from the rest because you’re too “weird.”
And that goes towards the conservative end of the spectrum: “I’m saving myself for marriage.”
And that goes towards the wild end of the spectrum: “Me and my wife got together with Becky down in accounting, and her husband invited three other people over for an orgy. We’re trying for a child, but we’ve decided to play ‘pregnancy’ roulette, especially after learning Becky has a breeding kink.”
The problem is, it’s often difficult to read the room–and it can become problematic because, especially in a work environment where people come from a diverse range of backgrounds, one person’s “oh, gosh, that sounds like fun!” becomes another person’s “hostile work environment.”
As an aside, I do want to note it’s one of the things that, as a Gen-Xer who learned the various rules of engagement in a business environment in an earlier era, bothers me. Not because I actually care that Becky in accounting has a breeding kink. But because in a real way, we all wear masks. And not for our own comfort: I honestly do not care what other people do to make themselves happy. We wear them for the comfort of others, in environments (such as when interacting with members of the public or with folks you meet at work) where you are surrounded by a variety of people from different walks of life.
I’m amused when the mask slips. But I also understand others would see it as overly problematic.
It’s also my primary concern with the multi-pronoun “woke” movement: again, I do not care what you do to be happy with your friends and family. And I personally don’t care what you want to call yourself or if you self-identify as a sexual cat in heat, complete with little pointy ears.
But the masks we wear for strangers, for the public, for those we interact with at work: they’re designed to smooth the interaction with people from all walks of life–and they are designed to smooth the interactions we have with others whom we have not quite yet allowed within the inner private circle of our own personal lives.
To discard all of this because you want others to acknowledge you in all your private sexual glory strikes me as terribly narcissistic. And to force those others to jump through non-obvious hoops–for example, having to commit to memory your pronouns are “ze” and “zis” on pain of an HR “sensitivity” meeting (or worse), when there are 50 other co-workers and the person has a problem remembering names and when you so obviously present as a woman–that just deliberately sprinkles the workplace with social landmines that almost designed to torture others for your own narcissistic pleasure.