[This is not meant to be logically rigorous or complete, but to make a credible and helpful web of empirical observations, which could support contentions in other of my blog entries. Some might find this discussion, which tries to establish a ground, as droll, as what ends up a sort of inadvertent test for “what kind of dweeb I am.” But the real payoff for all involved is that when you finally come to a particularly explosive and “not yet resolved” example, drollness falls by the wayside, and relevant people will become securely ensconced on one side or the other of what to make of “sexual improprieties in the workplace,” which in general seems most defined by angry positions taken in live-wire contexts.]
This is an area on which I’ve made observations and had intuitions for some time, but in which I have to make an effort now to articulate clear ideas that sound credible and comprehensive, not just to people who are familiar with what I’m talking about but to people who are less familiar with the phenomena or the relevant types of workplaces.
Introduction
Though my blog might suggest I’m some kind of “male chauvinist” or similar, I actually have been quite different from that for many years. For one thing, I could not have lasted in the editorial field for about 20 years if I was a male chauvinist. More generally and starting beforehand, I felt I was on the same page in some general respects as feminists from about the late 1970s and through the 1980s; as one minor example, early on I adopted “Ms.” as a universal form of address for women in letters. Meanwhile, I always found the “war of the sexes” debates and rhetoric boring. I always felt the best way to deal with women’s rights, men-versus-women practical issues, and so on was practically, intuitively, fairly, and without comment and political posturing, etc.
It is only in recent years, with wildly distorted and unjustifiable behavior in workplaces to which I’ve been subjected, that I have felt impelled not only to take (in a sort of rhetorical way) what may seem a more conservative stand about women’s comportment versus men, etc., but even to amplify my points with rhetorical loudness, some of which is done tongue in cheek.
When it comes to transient behaviors—in the workplace or otherwise—it has long been my experience that I witness a lot of stuff, and only try to comment on it in a systematic way after what seems a long delay. When it comes to an area so broad, subtle, and rich as sexually related behavior in a host of contexts, it can be a tall order to try to make generalizations, even for someone who is more systematically disposed to such a thing. So my first stabs at this may seem incomplete, groping at times, and otherwise less than fully satisfactory; but the point is it should be a good starting point for serious discussion, or a good means to bolster related points in other contexts.
One of the earliest efforts I made in “systematically discussing” certain subtle sexually related behaviors of others was in looking at how “ogling” a female could produce mild reactions in the women looked at, in a later part of my novel The Folder Hunt. I tackled this particular sub-area probably in early 1985, when I was out of college for almost a year. In a general way, this related to (without being consciousness written regarding) Jean-Paul Sartre’s passage on “the look” in his large treatise Being and Nothingness (1956), which I read parts of in about 1985, I think.
Lastly, when it comes to talking about “flirting” in the workplace, this would seem to quickly invite discussion of issues of sexual harassment and the like. It is important to note that where “work flirting” seems apt to go on, it is often apart from—and looked at as distinctly more innocuous than—any particular issues of sexual harassment. And what becomes evident is that a workplace’s culture has certain unspoken rules about what more-positive behavior is allowed (and when), such as flirting, and what less-positive is to be shunned, and when (like sexual harassment). And the real trick is dealing with how some people define these boundaries differently from others, and even individual people can vary their sense of the rules over time.
In my experience, among the dozens of places I have worked at since 1978, there have been very few that seemed to be a bed of ferment of “flirting” behaviors, and it seems safe to say that these are places where in some sense women tend to have some kind of managerial upper hand and tend to define what kinds of behaviors constitute the culture of the place. In my experience, these places are almost by definition media firms—such places, across the board (and regardless of their individual cultures), tend to employ more women than men, and in general they tend to employ creative types, who often can have personality inclinations that can lead to excesses, as you wouldn’t expect to see, say, at a bank. And such bed-of-ferment places also seem to tend to be ones where opportunity and pressure would seem apt to heighten unusual behaviors—especially to stimulate “spirited,” “energetic” behaviors, and to allow certain excesses, i.e., less-desirable behaviors. All American Crafts was one example of such a place, though part of what gave that place the culture it had was practicality-induced extreme pressure and low pay combined with an unusual opportunity for power in the production of media products.
Let me barrel right into my concepts tied to “work flirting.”
Start of a definition
“Work flirting” is one among various types of behaviors—some less common than others, and many transient, i.e., or actions (such as gossip) that aren’t much grounds on which to make a serious issue—that outsiders might consider “boundary-crossing” or “not quite appropriate for a professional office” or such. How objectionable some of these behaviors are will vary with the individual witnessing or being the recipient of them. And just because some people tend to “offer” these behaviors and others “receive” them or tolerate them doesn’t mean the relevant workplace (in its management, or even in some shared sense of what its culture is) tolerates or encourages a lot of licentious or slovenly behavior.
But these behaviors can, in practical developments, mean that some people may make an issue out of something that does not bother others, or that there can be so much variety in what is engaged in by some, and so much variety in what ideas there are of enforcing “lines that may not be crossed,” that it becomes almost too hard to say what kind of standards are expected or enforced at such a workplace. It may seem there’s a little too much “democratic liberalism” allowed in the workplace, and, thus, how do you take a stand on what is appropriate and what not?
“Work flirting” is not flirting in the usual sense—a sort of preliminary to more pointedly romantic behavior. Women will engage in work flirting at least as often as men, I think, and it involves a sort of playful, passing style of exchange that may or may not have some element of rudimentary romantic interest.
Some of this may comprise manners of exchanging looks or giving greetings.
I should quickly note that to the extent that I’ve drawn conclusions about this based on my own experience, I am not flattering myself that I have some sexual attractiveness to a widespread array of females who pass my way. I feel I am about as “sexy” as a cross between Woody Allen and Inspector Clouseau (but without a lot of the fun humor). I may be someone that a range of women feel they can make “common cause” with or readily be collegial with, but not usually in a sexually tinged way. (Years ago, in 1988, when I worked at a local newspaper, a young woman I worked with likened me to a court jester, at a time when I was apt to make a fair amount of jokes there. I think this is a good way to describe how I appear to many—somewhat droll, like a court jester, but not an obvious “sex object.”)
The fact that there is some kind of romantically tinged or erotically tinged aspect to work flirting, when it happens, could be because, very broadly speaking, sexual inclinations leak into American ways of communicating so often anyway (just look at advertising). More specifically, in the arts and media, creative types tend to have personalities, or get into frames of mind, that have more in common with “sexually charged up attitudes” than is typical of people in more austere or boring types of work. A quick-and-dirty way to characterize what is going on is that “hypomanic” behavior is stimulated in these contexts, but because the term hypomanic relates to mood disorders, it seems a little too strong and clinically based to use so freely here (though there are particular cases when it would be quite appropriate).
With creative work, especially that which is verbally oriented, the mental “flywheel” is spinning fast; people can be talking unusually quickly; they may seem “caffeined up”; the dopamine in them is going great guns; and not surprisingly, sexual inclinations are ramped up more than they would be, say, at a funeral or a boring lecture. Of course, good workplace sense tells you not to let this get the best of you; you can’t do a Harpo Marx thing where one minute you are sedately following one course of action, then suddenly hop into a different mode and go chasing after some attractive female.
With this sort of background of conditions, obviously people vary as to what they will dish out as work flirting behavior, or as to what they want to receive. Some people are “classier” or more restrained about it than others.
Some dimensions to the “work-flirting” area
The professional woman’s firewall. An important dimension along which to judge things here is what I call the “firewall” that women develop between being career women and “romantic partners.” Not that I am such an expert in female psychology, but I have learned quite a lot about female psychology from being in the media world about 20 years. One thing you do learn is that you don’t learn everything, and when you think you’ve seen it all, you can realize that no, here is something new I haven’t experienced before.
On the other hand, this is an area, I think, where some men who are not in the relevant industry (especially the media), who are very dour professionals and who won’t brook “nonsense,” would find there to be too many variables in terms of how different women act, sometimes an individual woman acting vastly differently at different times, for them to want to get mixed up in this industry.
But women in general, those that become professionals (and often this is to be seen among those with college degrees, whereas more professional types, with M.D.s or Ph.D.s, are probably more rigorously—and unexcitingly—professional), develop a “firewall” between being a professional and “mate material.” One way this gets revealed is when they interpret some communication you make as being more suggestive of “romantic interest” on your part than they want to hear. They may respond as if it isn’t appropriate in the ongoing business at hand, or as if they aren’t interested in hearing from you (or from any male at work) as a potential date.
Women can have certain nifty methods for getting this across, which are especially interesting when immediately ongoing things are more ambiguous or subtle: they drop little hints—like swatting efficiently at a pesty fly—like references to their boyfriend, their husband, or their children. You can tell they figure that one little dropped reference like that, almost like a relatively innocuous gun brought strategically into view, is enough to give the importunate male the clue. This is all acceptable enough, and often makes (in my mind) for passing comedy (with you the butt of the joke, or in some sense the warning female for her being under a passing illusion). Some women can show their insecurities in being apt to drop more little “get lost” bombs in a context than are really needed.
In past years, women could show their “firewall” in this way in a pretty decent, unmenacing way. Also, not surprisingly today, some young women—meaning, those in their early twenties—who are new to the work world show they are new to the issue of developing a firewall, and others can show they don’t have it yet at all, which is to their detriment. This is an area I would definitely like to come back to.
All this should seem pretty reasonable. Where things get more complicated, or ambiguous, or sometimes a setting for downright disservice or worse, is in the irregularity of how “work flirting” or women’s firewall is shown, witnessed, or understood by other parties in a context.
“Work flirting” that looks like more normal flirting. Some women can be “work flirts” in a way that phases into actual, or virtual, flirting of the more romantic/sexual kind. Especially among types of jobs that have a sort of “charming”/facilitative/pandering role, like (in some cases, or at some companies) the “trafficker” of an advertising agency, some women can blur the line between the two types of flirting, such as to sit on a desk near you, the proofreader, while you’re working, and engage in small talk with you (that seems a tiny bit beyond usual workplace time-killing or boredom-chasing).
One could probably get into an analysis of how such women maybe are among certain tried-and-true categories, where a (minor) sexual component is part of their typical ways of operating—among the spoiled/upscale, the homecoming-queen type, or the like. Leave that aside. I find that usually, such women are not too hard to deal with—there is usually no immediate and discrete need to feel you want them to tamp down their “flirting” behavior lest it be misunderstood by others, or such.
There have also been women whose job was not, like a trafficker’s, a facilitative/pandering type, such as a new part-time editor at a newspaper company I was at in 1996-99, whom I was supposed to train. One weekend, when I typically worked virtually by myself in the office, she came and sat on the edge of my desk when I was working, and was chatting with me a bit (she distracted me a bit in my task, because typically on those weekend days I had a lot to do; and, more generally, she was difficult to get to learn what she was supposed to be trained to do). This was someone who—though I hardly worked with this young woman long before she quit, amid a complex situation that should be discussed in its own right elsewhere—wasn’t really fit for her job, and who maybe could have been considered to have bad habits to be willing to talk in such an ostensibly flirtatious manner. This latter could have been said to be her way of exercising some power over a situation that she was not warm to—she didn’t really want the part-time job as it was being laid out for her by a higher-level manager. (This is a situation on which I could offer considerably more detail to show why it wasn’t quite as trivial an instance as it may seem here.)
Inconsistencies within the “work flirting” horizon followed by one particular woman. Another problem is with a particular woman—and this usually is someone who normally doesn’t “work flirt” a lot, but sees herself as a pretty serious professional—who can “work flirt” at some times, but at other times gets puritanical or self-righteous about how much “work flirting” she will accept from you. In short, she can swing back and forth in her inclinations along these lines, and she looks, over the longer term, either hypocritical or unstable. One possibly good example of this in my experience is “Lori” of the Lavon Smith story I put in a June 1 blog post.
An added complexity is that Lori, in particular, was of the mind where, quite conceivably, she would have denied she even engaged with me in something that could be called “flirting” (not that an issue between us over this particular term came up). I say “conceivably” because in writing on her in this blog, I almost have felt that if she has been looking over my shoulder, she would flintily argue over my terms in a way that seemed an almost unexpected firefight over semantics, while in general, my overall intention in writing is mainly sympathetic to her. But one particular, actual example of her arguing over use of a term is that when, amid discussions of how I handled work with her, I referred to one practice of my doing “favors” for her, as if I was then considering that such a thing was to be reduced (for largely practical reasons), she objected right away to the use of the term “favors,” which made me wonder if she thought I was implying something more personal about what I was discussing that I should have been. I think that over the long term in looking at our work history, this was a fair enough term to use, but it didn’t necessarily mean I was breathing down her neck with some untoward, overly personal intent. When I reframed the concept with “special requests,” this term she seemed to readily accept, and she even seemed personally disappointed that I was suddenly cutting this avenue off.
This gets at what a complex situation working with her could be, and I defer further discussion of it here. Suffice it to say that she engaged in a kind of work-process partnership with me that was, for one thing, much more apt to happen (in my experience) with a young worker (like herself) interacting with an older one, with a sort of whipped-up work-oriented friendliness. In my experience, further, I always feel that if things get a little out of hand with such a worker, it is imperative that we try to iron this out among ourselves, particularly as it happens that the actual work issues involved, on the craft level, are something we know much better than others. Thus, for a manager to intervene and not only be crude with respect to the interpersonal issues but to be oblivious to, or even contemptuous of, the craft-level work issues, is counterproductive at least and nihilistic at worst.
Another example of a self-inconsistent woman in the “work flirting” area is the more bluntly identified hypocrite or manipulator: she gets paranoid or self-righteous with you about what could be considered unwanted “flirting” on your part; but meanwhile, at the same basic time, she engages in quite clear flirting with another person of not just a “work-flirting” type, and she favors this other person in some way (in part, over you)—to the point where even management will infer that she has a “thing” for coworker X who is not you. This is, I think, typically more indicative of a troubled or narcissistic personality, and it most grossly was exemplified by a 22-year-old coworker pseudonymed “Alison” I worked with at Reed Reference Publishing in 1995-96.
Others’ (peers’) misinterpretations of “work flirting.” As I didn’t really think was a problem till about 2006 or so, others with whom you work—who have no stake in misinterpreting “work flirting” you may engage in (such as to be inclined to fire you or such)—can misinterpret instances of this, perhaps because they are not familiar with, or do not understand enough, the phenomenon (or because, maybe, you overstepped your bounds in the given situation without your being conscious of it at first).
One good example concerns a remark of a male friend, with whom I exchanged e-mails—often about work issues, and (after we had worked together sporadically between 2002 and 2003) usually at places we were not at at the same time. At one point, some years after the fact (I think), he remarked that I “like[d]” a Jen C., who was a sort of admin at a division of a large agency at which we had both worked as freelancers in 2002-03. This man and I had exchanged very occasional e-mails about Jen, starting in 2003, that were connected basically to work issues—such as what she had said about upcoming work, or such. Never was there talk along the lines of “She likes you” or “You like her.” The one personal thing of note that I recall before the “You like her” remark was my commenting that I had seen her in a supermarket and that she had the same quick, efficient way there—which was almost too much—that she had at work.
Well, I tried to think what led him to say I “like[d]” her, and I recalled how, when I talked to her about work issues—what hours were coming up when, or such—I would stand near her in her cubicle to talk (a situation that was rather dictated by the physical circumstances, not due to me being so apt to “cross personal boundaries”); and I would try to touch base in such person-to-person contacts maybe a little more than some of the other freelancers on my same level, in the given, transient work situation. Though I knew this was part of my trying to have a good working relationship with Jen—and given the larger circumstances, my dealing with a family member who had been treated for cancer recently, and my being new to the hard-to-predict vicissitudes of medical-media scheduling in 2002-03 (as would also be the case after), I probably wanted to be sure I cemented a good rapport with her as an immediate supervisor, for what work-related benefits it would bring.
This is actually part of my way of securing work, maintaining work relationships, etc., that I have done essentially since about 1979, which has been a long learning experience, and which, due to the lack of good opportunities I have had for many years, has involved a huge toolbox of many different techniques. And one thing I can tell you is that, with whatever other skills I bring to the table, being “sexually attractive” or “playing a sex-related card” has never been an avenue I could rely on for work—due not least to my being sexually unattractive, certainly in my younger years. In fact, this is one area that I have long felt makes me worlds apart, though I try to have a more serene outlook on it now, from young women who, not surprisingly (and not that it makes them entirely blameworthy), can advance their interests with the sex card much more easily and effectively.
But I mulled over what this friend said, and I thought about how I would stand near Jen in her cube—and I thought, did I cross boundaries with that? Did I let others think I “liked” her? And this friend with the “like[d]” comment was about nine years older than I—he seemed as if he should know what he was talking about.
More as seems able to test the point, Jen and I had had some brief friendly exchanges in mid-later 2003 about movies—purely what I thought at the time was small talk, to be friendly in a work-related context. We talked a bit about this at work, and a bit in e-mails. Once I had seen her at a theater where we both, by sheer coincidence and not sitting near each other, had seen the movie Seabiscuit. I never thought of this talk of movies as pre-come-on talk. In fact, in July or August or September 2003, Jen suddenly informed some of us freelancers that we—three of us who had been employed through one placement agency—were suddenly not going to be used, because her firm was cutting ties with the agency. And with that, basically the movie-related exchanges stopped (which, again, I never saw as anything more than as a consequence of the work connection’s stopping).
It wasn’t like I never worked with Jen again. In fact, after sending follow-up letters to her in late 2003 and/or early 2004—merely to get work, in a dry time—she tipped me off to a new placement agency, the (pseudonymous) Gary Laverne Group.
But that “You like Jen” comment by my e-mail friend made me think. It wasn’t sufficient—or real justification—to change anything about what could be considered my own “work-flirting” behaviors, but it made me realize how such stuff could be misinterpreted by others who didn’t see the full context for something like a way I had of communicating with a given worker.
And this was, obviously, before the 2008 financial crisis, when, generally speaking, people were less bitter and paranoid in the work environment.
