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"Don't go fishing off of the company pier," my buddy warned me, plunking his empty beer bottle on the bar. "Even though I'm not going to stay at this job for very long?" I pleaded, peering into my wallet. "Oh, in that case," he said, smiling as I paid for the fresh round in front of us, "rape and pillage!" Clink. My interviewer at the small, upstart media company (which I'll call "The Content Producers") is a tall, good-looking maniac. We share a mutual friend. On our tour of the Content Producers' overstuffed, understaffed office, I can't help admiring his broad back and powerful, satyr-like haunches. "Here is a man," I think to myself, "who would not look out of place playing the Pan pipes while frolicking in a sun-dappled forest clearing." Our subsequent talk goes well enough that he calls two days later and offers me the job. I consider inviting him to a party I'm co-hosting that night, but a sudden pang of shyness overtakes me. It is the last time I will feel such a thing for several years. Over the next eighteen months, I will take the Content Producers by storm, a gleeful and impulsive Viking Conquerer of Love on an erotic tour that will eventually lead me up and down the office phone list. The place is not exactly corporate. Major funding for our first project comes from a man who wears his money and power with such arrogant charm that he can still call underlings "Sweetheart" and "Doll" without getting his ass handed to him. On my first day, the whole staff is giggling about a couple from the office downstairs who have stopped the service elevator to indulge in a quick oral sex sampler during the lunchtime rush. All the Content Producers watch them on the security monitors in the lobby, hooting their encouragements until the doorman has to intervene. My first crush happens later that day, when Ernie looks up from the copy machine to smile, then blush, at me. I stand, tax forms in hand, instantly smitten by the dark, curly-haired son of a gentleman doctor from Maine. My gut-churning crush on this earnest young soul will be quashed within weeks, but not before we spend a day riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. The Human Resources guy probably gave me some sort of Content Producers sexual-harassment policy when I started working there. But maybe not. He was also the office manager and the IT guy, so he was constantly fixing the color printer before the art department had a collective meltdown, or explaining to the Fire Marshal why the mailroom guy was the only person on our floor who participated in the mandatory fire drill. Only then could he get around to pesky matters like payroll and potential lawsuits. But I doubt I would have bothered to read it anyway. Twenty-nine years after the first Title VII sexual harassment case was resolved in D.C. District Court, a company can't afford not to have a stated policy against sexual harassment. Individuals whose unwanted sexual advances create a hostile work environment face humiliation, termination and/or litigation. And yet, a recent survey conducted by CareerFinder.com found that 56% of American workers have dated someone on the job. If you factor in repeat offenders like me (31%, according to the same survey), assuming a workforce of approximately 150 million, you have to wonder why anyone bothers to put clothes on before heading off to work. "The conventional wisdom is that unless the relationship interferes with the work, management has no business
As a reasonably well-educated thirty year old, I came up professionally among peers for whom gender equality is assumed. In this atmosphere, a sexual advance is no more threatening than it would be in a bar. Bawdy jokes told around the water cooler are entertainment, not oppression. Does this mean that sexual harassment is going the way of those monstrous '80s-era power suits? In another survey, this one run by teen site Alloy.com, a large majority of respondents answered that "touching and groping" is not necessarily sexual harassment, and that "sometimes that stuff is just good clean fun." If you ask me, the kids are alright.
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