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I'm finally getting around to reading How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Needless to say, any attempt to chat up the goddesses at Conde Nast is completely taboo. I discovered this shortly after I arrived when I made the mistake of cracking a faintly risque joke during a tour of Conde Nast's headquarters by a woman from "human resources." I was thrown in with a bunch of other new recruits and, at the conclusion of the tour, I asked her what we should do if we ever got lost.
"You could always consult the model in the lobby," she suggested.
"Which one?" I quipped.
Nobody laughed.
The following morning I found a memo on my desk headed "Policy on Harassment." . . . It went on to list various forms of conduct that would "result in disciplinary action up to and including dismissal." They were:
Sexual remarks, advances, propositions
Touching or other physical contact
Repeated requests for dates or other social engagements
Comments about an individual's body
I was flabbergasted. I pointed out to [coworker] Chris Lawrence that if Romeo had stuck to these rules he never would have ended up with Juliet. . . . How were we supposed to get dates with the women at [the Conde Nast building] if not by flirting with them and asking them out?
"It's all bullshit," Chris explained. "They just don't wanna be hit on by dweebs like us."
It's true. With the $3,000 handbags and mink collars, the fashion plates at Conde Nast can hardly be descibed as politically correct. The company's policy on sexual harassment isn't a concession to the feminist sensibilities of its female employees; it's designed to protect them from men who earn less that $500,000 a year. They don't spend all those hours getting their bikini lines waxed by Brazilian beauticians just so they can go out with journalists. They want to date movie producers, club owners and investment bankers.
11 comments:
Well yes, women would like to be protected from constant romantic advances from men that they are not attracted to. If a woman goes to work in order to work, she should not have men pestering her.
Some women, of course, consider the prospect of being asked out by a man to be so odious as to constitute harassment. That's obviously a bad thing. But that doesn't change the fact that some men don't take no for an answer! They pester and prod and annoy long after it is apparent to everybody but him (and maybe including him) that it is making her uncomfortable. Other men use sexual jokes and make suggestions about a woman's sexual impurity (or rigidity) as a social weapon.
The problem with sexual harassment is that it's so difficult to draw the distinctions between earnest advances made in good faith and actual harassment. Any rules you draw can be exploited by a guy that manages to harass without breaking them or by a woman that's more than a bit too sensitive to attracting men that she isn't attracted to.
That doesn't mean that the rules are created solely to oppress undesirable men.
Here is the classic Tom Brady skit.
- Thursday
Toby Young is a bit of a throwback to an earlier era. When I was in college, sexual harassment was defined exclusively as using power over subordinates to extort sexual favors.
And then came Anita Hill.
I remember the seemingly endless lectures on the new definition during the early years of my career, and I remember thinking then how it gave a whole lot of power to women in deciding not only what behavior constituted harassment, but when a particular behavior constituted harassment. Toby Young understood almost exactly how that power would be used: it would create a class of crime of which only betas could ever be guilty.
As regards your alternative scenario: I have heard women make this complaint, mostly in our blogring, but at least one woman among my offline acquaintances. (Yes, I have some!) I'm not disputing these accounts, although I have never personally witnessed them. But the psychology behind the behavior still mystifies me. Personally, rejection is its own punishment, and the mere probability of it is a sufficient deterrent. Sure, there are plenty of annoying young women in the world, but the idea of punishing them by asking them out overtaxes my imagination. I'm not saying that there are no men that would do this, but it would seem to reflect a level of social maladaptation that sheer natural selection would ruthlessly suppress.
Of course you are correct about sexual humor, but since it almost always goes on behind a woman's back, it's not covered by harassment law in practice.
Have you witnessed men getting reprimands or punished for asking a girl out or something relatively innocent? Toby is getting irate over a memo. I think that harassment does need to be relatively broadly defined because a wide variety of acts can make a woman uncomfortable depending on how exactly it's executed and how it's percieved. When it comes to behavior that can result in firings or verbal reprimands, though, the standard needs to be higher.
Just about everywhere I've worked, anything that can be intended innocuously results first and foremost of a warning and it's only when it's continued despite the warning that it becomes an issue. I'm going off employee handbooks and seminars, though, because I've never actually seen actions taken.
Very few women are going to press forward with complaints willy-nilly. Not just to keep some well-intentioned but unattractive oaf away. Why would they want to make waves and get management involved with personal disputes if they can avoid it? On at least a couple occasions I've witnessed a woman that actually had a case for management intervention to get a guy to leave them alone and neither stepped forward. In one case it was so blatant that eventually we (I was in a "leadership" position) rearranged the cubicles anyway... but she never said a thing.
I can understand the wave of fear that came over when these first policies were first implemented. There was a lot of understandable concern about what would happen. Would men have to watch every little thing they say for fear of being tossed out on the street without any ability to defend himself? But it's been nearly a couple decades and we're still standing and the only people that live in constant paranoia are the people that tend to be paranoid.
I've never asked out a coworker, but I can't say that I ever refrained from doing so on the basis that it might be sexual harassment.
Regarding things said about the woman and all that, things said behind a woman's back still affect her. If she finds out about it, I think that she has a case to make. Men that frequently spread sexually derogatory comments far and wide about her in the work place should not be able to use "But I didn't know she would find out!" as a defense. Those that make their observations judiciously have less to fear... but also are causing less damage.
Innocent? Well, no. But then, I tend to take a dim view (officially, at least) on workplace sexual banter irrespective of "consent". It's not so much that I would defend the kind of behavior that gets punished. It's that I can recall behavior much like it that was "cute" and "playful" and "edgy" when other people did it.
And yes, we're still standing. We white men look around, figure out what the real rules are and try to stay out of trouble.
Post Paula Jones, we began to see a bit of pullback on sexual harassment. One of the ways this was articulated was that it was incumbent on "victims" to first make clear to "perpetrators" what their standards were. So yes, starting around 1999, warnings became better built in to the process.
Let me express it this way. It is widely recognized that sexual harassment is bad for workplace morale. But it is also bad for morale when sexual behavior gets a wink and a nod when the "cool" people do it but a reprimand when the "un-cool" people do it.
But it is also bad for morale when sexual behavior gets a wink and a nod when the "cool" people do it but a reprimand when the "un-cool" people do it.-----
This is a problem if it's banter between two cool people getting a pass and banter between two uncool people getting a reprimand. But if it's one woman and two guys and one is welcome and the other is not... well, what's to do? Comfort level is important in these sorts of things. If she's not comfortable with the uncool dude, uncool dude needs to watch his comments around people that are not comfortable around him.
Having coworkers that are not comfortable with you hurts you in 100,000 ways, sexual harassment law being one of the least important among them. Sure, it's unfair that some guys get all of the luck and can get away with saying things that we can't, but I should note that it's often the case that they have cultivated the relationships allowing them to do that. It's possible that the dweeb never had the opportunity to cultivate said relationship... but sexual innuendo and risque jokes and all that is a poor way to try.
And if we're talking about inappropriate advances or whatever... what's the solution? A woman that accepts overtures from one must accept it from all? She chooses to flirt with one employee and therefore she can't tell another one that he's making her uncomfortable?
At some point it becomes like that plain-looking secretary that feels put-upon because the men at the office are always flirting with the hot one and barely notice that she's there and she gets funny looks if she tries to initiate the flirting (which hot secretary never has to do). Sure. Sucks. But what can you do?
Life is simply less fair to the undesirable. That doesn't mean that they can inflict discomfort as their revenge.
This is a problem if it's banter between two cool people getting a pass and banter between two uncool people getting a reprimand. But if it's one woman and two guys and one is welcome and the other is not... well, what's to do?How about telling all three of them to knock it off.I'm not trying to buy a pass for dweeby guy to take revenge on the cool people. And I'm not even advocating that legal liability for "hostile work environments" be expanded to cover the dweebs and the homely secretaries who feel left out. Our present legal regime may be the best we can do.
But in terms of how an office sets its own policy, which is what Toby Young is talking about, I'm uncomfortable with saying, "yeah, work is one big party in which you're forbidden to participate, but you're a dweeb so suck it up."
Most places I've worked have had "guidelines" for how to conduct yourself with the opposite sex in an office environment that have discouraged the sort of thing that you're talking about. I think the employer's take is that the more that employee's look at the company as a dating pool, the more likely it is that Bad Things Will Happen.
However... most of the time these rules go unenforced. Mostly because someone has to complain and nobody really does (not in an official capacity, anyway) I think because nobody wants to be "that guy". Of course, fear of the social repercussions of lodging a complaint is the same thing that keeps non-consensual sexual harassment accusations in check, so it's a feature as well as a bug.
Interestingly, I have actually seen this sort of situation play out. A couple employees a couple employers back ("Falstaff" in the Mormon west) got a little too obvious with their flirting and somebody complained and they got a talking to (informally). We're pretty sure the complainant was another would-be suitor of the girl... whose pursuits was one of those cases I mentioned above where management was waiting for her to involve them in getting him to chill out.
The not-entirely-relevant epilogue to that story is that the couple was never actually a couple but was just excessively flirtatious. When she eventually quit, the dude went on to marry her successor. They conducted their relationship in a pretty low-key fashion, though.
So anyway, I think that the dweeb and the homely secretary actually do have grounds for complaint. It depends on what exactly they're doing, though. In addition to the social pressure not to, it's hard to pin down what is sexual flirtation and what isn't. It's too much to ask everyone to keep business relationships entirely professional (I don't even do that with my male coworkers... friendship happens and this is a good thing) and a lot of potential couples and flirty non-couples are going to walk around in that gray area.
But anyway, back tot he point. I agree with the actions of my former employer. The only person in the world who may have been offended was the rejected suitor, but asking them to cool it at work was fair (which, since they didn't have a relationship outside of work, was cooling it altogether). But I think it takes a bitter rejected one to lodge the complaint in the first place. As well it probably should.
That reminds me of the episode of The Office where Toby, nursing a secret crush on Pam, files a complaint against Jim for "excessive flirting" (or something). My impression, though, was that the episode did not invite us to feel sympathy for Toby in that situation.
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