Having Sex at Work

You may or may not want to grant very much credence to a survey about sex in the workplace when it was conducted by a company that makes sex toys. After all, it has skin in the game. It wants to sell more sex toys and uses the survey to recommend that, instead of having sex with a co-worker or a boss, you whip out your sex toy and take care of business that way.

And, we do not know, from the New York Post story, whether the survey respondents were self-selecting or chosen at random.

Dare we mention, even in this gender neutered age, that the market for these toys is female? Or so I assume. So, even if women fell in love with a sex toy, what are men to do? I will leave it to your imagination.

I will not refrain from pointing out that, what with the American workplace having been transformed into a boudoir, the incidence of workplace sexual harassment, whether through the activities of predatory males or through honest misinterpretations, must increase. 

When women decided to postpone marriage in favor of career, they flooded the workplace. The new women employees were young, attractive, looking for romance, even looking for husbands. They were unattached. If they had been older, married mothers, would things have been different? I leave that to your imagination also.

Thus, it adds a level of complexity to the #MeToo narrative whereby men are the predators and women are the prey. Sometimes, women want it too. And sometimes they are more than happy to spice up a dreary workday with a tryst in the broom closet. Speaking of romance….

Of course, even when they were not having sex in the workplace did not prevent large numbers of Americans—44%-- from getting romantically involved with their co-workers. This number stretches credulity... even mine.

Anyway, we now know that over 10% of employees have had sex on the job. Nearly twenty percent of those have been caught in the act. Apparently, discretion has gone out of style, along with caution.

The survey also strains credulity when it suggests that workplace sex improves productivity and morale. We might accept that people who are going to have sex at work might feel more motivated to go to work. And yet, if they are planning their next hookup, they are perhaps less focused on work. True, they say that the sex has made them more productive, but that is self-reported, not necessarily objective fact.

We are more interested to see that 34% of the 14% who have had sex with their bosses did it in order to climb the corporate ladder, thus to advance their career prospects. Does the name of Ali Watkins resonate in this context? It’s so hard to believe that today’s modern liberated women would want to screw their way to the top… but, stranger things have happened.

Among the other fascinating statistics. One in five of those who have engaged in sex on the job lost their jobs. 60% of office romances ended within twelve months. This made the work environment awkward. And yet, a quarter of office romances ended in marriage… so, there’s still hope.

And yet, 34% percent of office lovers were already married or engaged to someone else. How did that work out?

The moral of the story is that #MeToo was not happening in a vacuum. It was happening in an overly sexualized office environment. This does not mean that sexual predators have not taken advantage of the situation and have even committed criminal assault. And yet, information about the context allows us to temper our judgment.