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News & ArtsWednesday, October 7, 2009
Sex What She Said
Posted by Dan Savage on Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 8:16 AM
In an ideal world, bosses would refrain from sleeping with subordinates, so as not to cause jealousy and tension in the office. But we’re not in an ideal world. Otherwise, we’d already have health care for everyone and Glenn Beck wouldn’t have any influence over the White House.After David Letterman acknowledged that he’d had flings with young assistants, some commentators talked about it in the same breath as Roman Polanski, who drugged and sodomized a 13-year-old. That’s outrageous.
Sexual harassment entails pressuring or penalizing a staffer or making the office atmosphere hostile. Despite the blustering of the attorney of the alleged execrable extortionist, Joe Halderman, there’s no evidence yet that Letterman was guilty of that.
People sometimes fuck people they've met at work. Unfortunately it simply isn't possible to decree that interns shall only fuck interns, assistants shall only fuck assistants, staffers shall only fuck staffers, managers shall only fuck managers, and the boss shall... well, the boss doesn't get to fuck anyone at work, ever. In an ideal world, like Dowd says, no one would fuck a subordinate. But real life is messier. So we have to judge workplace romances/dalliances on a case-by-case basis. The question isn't, "Did someone sleep with someone with less power?" but this slightly more complicated series of questions: "How was the affair conducted? Was the power imbalance exploited by the more powerful person—or, as is sometimes the case, was the power imbalance exploited by the less powerful person? Is there a pattern here? Pressure? Predation? Is this a hostile workplace environment?"
Two people can have consensual sex even in the face of a power imbalance. It infantilizes the less powerful person and makes a cartoon villain of the more powerful person to insist that mutual consent isn't possible.
And for the record/trolls: No, I've never fucked an intern or a staffer at the Stranger. And I've never fucked anyone on Ann Lander's desk. And I've never made love in the sun. And I've never been to paradise. And I've never been to me.
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If so, that really puts the power dynamic in a whole new light.
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I agree with you and Dowd on this one. However, it is good counsel too avoid not having affairs at the office (literally and figuratively). The reasons are fairly obvious. And, I believe that asking (read: hitting on) someone out the FIRST (and only one time if that person is an adult) time doesn't constitute sexual harrassment. Your second paragraph (Two people...) is especially succinct.
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What you never address in this dispatch is: if the less powerful person receives benefits that do not accrue to peers who did not fuck the boss, do those peers have a right to complain? I believe that, without infintilizing anyone, they do.
(To her credit, Dowd at least raises this point, and seems to resolve it in Letterman's favor).
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What you never address in this dispatch is: if the less powerful person receives benefits that do not accrue to peers who did not fuck the boss, do those peers have a right to complain? I believe that, without infintilizing anyone, we can acknowledge that they do.
(To her credit, Dowd at least raises this point, and seems to resolve it in Letterman's favor).
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Don't ruin our image of you. Please.
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2)notice he says he did not FUCK on the AL desk...this gives him an out so he doesn't have to admit to the non-stop salad tossing/frottaging/dirty sanchezing that occurs at every opportunity.
Or that Dan's theorizing out of sex-advice-columnist thin air? If you'd ever been herded like cattle into a room in a big corporate workplace and forced to suffer through hours of indoctrination on this subject, you'd certainly get the impression that nobody of disparate rank should get it on. Heck, I came out of those classes almost convinced I shouldn't even talk to the opposite sex...
Of course, the males in my workplace who needed that education the most didn't change their behavior one fucking whit, so it may have been a waste of hundreds of employee hours.
This is lawyer turf, alas. We can have all of the opinions we want about libidos and romance and such, but this is all lawyer turf now.
This is the entertainment biz, not the offices of Citibank. If Dave violated some rule (or, much less likely, the law), he should be punished, but he probably pays more in speeding tickets every week than anything he'd be docked for this behavior, which I predict will be $0.
Let's get back to talking about cutting off Polanski's balls.
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