garote: (zelda chickens)
[personal profile] garote

In that weird train-of-thought ramble in my previous entry, I said that there was a tension in modern culture between protecting women, and women having agency. I also made a bold claim: From one situation to the next, the socially acceptable - the "correct" - side to take seems to be weirdly arbitrary. I thought maybe I could illustrate that claim by telling a story from my past.

About 20 years ago I was working in a small software company, as a programmer. This was back in the days when software was burned onto CD-ROMs or disks and placed in a package, usually with a printed manual. (App stores and large digital downloads were not part of the landscape yet because the internet was still too slow.) We had an employee at the company whose job was to assemble and ship those packages. It was not a very difficult job, so getting it in a college town was more a matter of luck than anything else.

The woman who had that job was about 20 years old, three or four years younger than me. I could tell she found me attractive by the way she lingered by my desk asking non-work-related questions and generally being just a little too friendly and physically close than I was used to. Like most engineers I was bad at reading signals so she had to be very clear before I got a clue and realized that I could ask her out on a date -- which I did.

The date went well. She had blond hair in a pixie haircut, and wore a rough wool sweater in a pale shade of purple that made her intense gray eyes look like jewels. We walked around Santa Cruz, finally settling down in a park, and talked about previous relationships and personal growth. Her movements were calm and measured but I kept seeing little signals that inside she was seething. Something else was going on in her life. Eventually it came out in the conversation: She was just out of a very unpleasant relationship. Right now, her primary goal was to have fun, without getting too intense about it. I said I was fine with that, and by the end of the date we were at second base. We agreed to go on another date soon. That was Sunday, and Monday morning I was back at work.

The office was laid out in a crescent shape with the front door at one end and the stock room at the other. My new friend had a desk with a computer just outside the stockroom, relatively isolated from the other employees, but next to the printers and a big stack of file servers. Part of my job was to maintain those.

Around noon I needed to insert a CD in one of the servers. I walked back to them, and the woman and I began chatting like we always had in the past. But this time, after a couple minutes, we both looked up the hall to make sure no one was coming, and then pulled each other into an embrace.

For the first time, I was dropped into that awkward labyrinth of having a coworker for a romantic partner. (It was also the last time.) We snuggled up briefly and then broke the embrace before we could go any further since we were both too nervous about being discovered. In whispers, we both agreed it was not the best idea to get physically close during work hours. I walked back to my desk and attempted to put her out of my mind.

We respected our agreement for exactly 24 hours, at which point I contrived an excuse to go back to the servers and be near her, and she stood up, looked around, then opened the door to the stockroom and pulled me inside.

I was a software developer with a strong set of skills, working for a relatively low wage, so I wasn't nervous about being discovered. I figured that as long as I got my work done and didn’t interfere too much with hers everything was fine. But I didn’t think about the tenuous nature of her stockroom job. If the boss discovered her wasting time canoodling in the back room she could easily be fired and replaced with someone who didn’t draw the romantic attention of the developers. Even if I had been the one to make the first move, I would not have been the one punished. If I'd stopped to think about it I would have realized it was deeply unfair, and I was being terribly unprofessional. But, we were young and horny people and neither of us had a particular respect for our careers, such as they were.

Over the next three or four weeks we met for some quick hanky-panky in the stockroom on a regular basis. I don't know how many of my coworkers realized it, but eventually I just assumed they all did. The most awkward point was when her boss told her in private one day, “By the way, I don’t care exactly what you get up to back there as long as you get all the orders out,” which was fair-minded but also very embarrassing. So we both agreed to put an end to our hijinks.

Two weeks after that she told me in private that she was going to leave the job.

On the one hand I should have realized that her position would be at risk from any romantic involvement, and rejected her advances and never asked her on a date, for her own sake. On the other hand she seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and if she wanted to risk her job for it, why should I argue? We were both adults; our gender shouldn’t matter. Neither of us was a manager and our duties didn't intersect, and there was no regulation at the office that prohibited dating other employees. But her reputation - her ability to get along with her coworkers in general - was damaged.

The fact that we willingly stopped our canoodling in due time should have demonstrated that she was taking the job seriously, and her coworkers should have left her private life alone. But the three other employees that she directly worked with - three women, all slightly older than her - felt obligated to respond, each in a different way. She told me later that one of them made crude remarks to her and was clearly outraged. Another one got uncomfortably maternal and started asking all kinds of personal questions about our relationship, perhaps to see if I was exploiting her. And the third stopped talking to her, except through terse emails, as if to distance herself from a disaster. Her workdays became stressful and rather than swim against this tide she was moving on.

Did she need protection, or did she need to learn a lesson, or was she an adult taking a calculated risk? We drifted apart rapidly after she left the job, and broke up a few weeks later. It took me another 10 years at least before I started believing that I should have turned down the relationship for her sake, and then gently explained why. And not for any ironclad rule like “never date where you work,” either: It was specifically because we were both too young to navigate it well and that was going to cost her the job. Ideally, I would have known that, and simply dated someone else. But I didn't know that. Did that make me guilty of failing to protect her?

Even 20 years later, I am still sad that it cost her anything. I was good at my job, and so was she. By that metric, every consequence of our brief romantic involvement was bullshit. But I also know, practically speaking, you can't separate the sex from the employee, so you better separate the sex from the workplace. It was guaranteed to bother other people no matter how well it went for us personally.

The no-duh lesson here is "don't date where you work." And if you want to play it safe, check all the other political correctness boxes too: Don't ask your food server out, don't ask your doctor or dentist out, don't ask your attorney or professor or coach out, don't try and date the person who walks your dog, delivers your mail, paints your house... You get the idea. In fact, you should probably stick to dating people who live in another time zone.

So now that you know the story, try swapping all the genders. Would the stock worker I dated still have been forced to leave? Whose "reputation" would have been damaged, mine or his?

Part of me wants to argue that, no matter what the dynamic or the age difference, when a man and a woman get involved at work the woman is always risking much more than the man - even if she's the CEO and he's the janitor - and so we should be finding fault with the man involved for putting her at risk. Another part of me wants to back up a step, and fight against the gender biases that make it more risky for the woman in the first place. But that fight involves declaring a level of agency: CEO or not, her sex life is none of your damn business, so unless you think you're being passed over for promotion because the other guy (or girl) is good in bed, and can make the case in court, then shut up and get back to work. In other words, we shouldn't be concerned with protecting her, we should be concerned with disabusing you of your biases. (And that applies whether the "you" in this hypothetical is a man or a woman, because there's plenty of bias to go around.)

Then, I can back up yet another step. I can say, agency or not, women on average are more susceptible to social pressure than men, so we need to be unbiased and we need to protect them at the same time. That means the correct moves are: Teach men not to be so pushy, and teach women to be more assertive and independent. Except, codifying this into a consistent standard of action is messy, because as I said before, one of the things we can all take as gospel is that there is more variation within the sexes than between them. Some women have no trouble being pushy; some men struggle terribly with being assertive.

So ultimately, stepping all the way back, I arrive again at respecting personal choice. My co-worker and I chose a risky relationship, we learned a few lessons; next time we'll choose differently. We revealed the bias around us: She was scrutinized much more intensely than I was, based on her gender. Her choices were less respected, so she was subject to more pressure. That was wrong. That needs to change.

This strikes me as the sanest path to walk in a world of high dynamic range, even though it also feels like an endless one. I want to move towards a world where, for example, there are as many female fire fighters as male, and a daycare run by men will get just as many customers as a daycare run by women. Do I think we'll actually get there? To be honest, I don't, unless technology eventually completely overhauls sexual reproduction. Until then, we fight the good fight, so everyone who wants to work, can work.

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