Category: Men & Women

“Never dip your pen in the office ink.”  — old saying

“Total bullshit.” — Kim du Toit, commenting on the above.

This post was prompted by this article, and here’s why I have that opinion.  Outside random encounters with the opposite sex (grocery stores, bars, bus stops etc.) or being “set up” [sic]  by friends with the best intentions, the office is the best place to meet someone of the opposite sex.

And it’s mostly A Good Thing:  when you work together, you’ve seen the person at their best and at their worst, you’ve seen how they get on with other people, they’ve  even been marginally pre-screened by HR — i.e. unlikely to be axe-murderers and the like — and by having social intercourse before sexual intercourse, a whole bunch of familiarity can be acquired without too much effort.

How do they respond to challenges, setbacks, scumbag bosses, back-stabbing coworkers, deadlines?  Are they generally scruffily dressed, or do they maintain a decent appearance?  Do they have good table manners (noted during office lunchtimes) and can they hold their booze (ditto)?  The list goes on, and on.

The workplace has the ability to be a better matchmaker than Tinder, as 1 in 4 workplace romances actually end in a marriage.

Of course, there are all sorts of caveats involved with an office affair, especially nowadays when Teh Feministicals and HR [some overlap]  have labeled such activities as Totally Rape and Unsafe Environments For Womyns and OMG! He Looked At My Boobs! (usually when said appendages are displayed by a low-cut blouse which would make Linda Lovelace blush).  I’m sure you get the picture;  Corporate America has demonized everything that makes business life bearable, such as wonderful institutions like three-martini lunches, office bowling nights, Christmas parties (I’m not even gonna go there) and all the other things which allow us to be, well, human beings instead of cogs in their  fucking profit machines.

Of course, because we are human beings, all their pathetic little rules and all the opprobrium cannot stop 5-10% of people from bonking at the office — even when, according to the article, discovery occurs about 20% of the time.

All that said, I have to admit that I myself have never actually bonked anyone at the office, per se.  I have, however, had several wonderful love affairs with coworkers over the years, all because the circumstances were favorable and my partners willing.  And nothing bad ever happened as a result of any of them, because I made sure to follow all the rules listed below.

1. Don’t be a child, be a grownup.  This means that you need to exercise tremendous self-control when you’re in the office and working — no surreptitious groping under the meeting-room table, no furtive kisses snatched in the break room, and no flirting in the office / cubicle.  And when the affair comes to an end, don’t do childish shit like screaming insults, stalking or (gawd forbid) job sabotage.  Be graceful about it, and move on.
2. Establish firm ground rules.  No affairs with married coworkers (okay, no extramarital affairs period, but it’s especially bad in the office), and of course, if you’re the married one, keep your mouth shut and your trousers zipped / skirt down.  Casual persiflage and banter is fine;  but if you want to make a comment which could even marginally be taken as lewd, think twice and make sure that you know the other person well enough to know how they’ll take the thing.
3. No flirting with a prospective lover unless they give clear and unequivocal signals that your approaches would be welcome — and if you can’t read the signals, you have no business even attempting this stuff.
4. Don’t do it with someone who works in your own department, or with someone who reports to you.  Those little encounters never end well.  Step outside your specific corral, and never with someone more than a single level up or down from yours in the hierarchy.
5. Both of you should understand that one or both could lose their job as a result of what you’re about to do.  If you both think the risk is worth that, then…
6. One last rule:  Never repeat never give in to the urge to photograph your activities.   And if you are going for the in-office bonk, make sure you can’t be photographed by someone else, either.  I shouldn’t even have to explain this, to grownups.

Of course, all this is fraught with danger nowadays, because even a little indiscretion can screw up your job or career.  That is not going to stop this stuff from happening, ever.  Whether Teh Feministicals, HR or the bosses like it or not, 5-10% of employees are going to bonk at the office, and a larger percentage (maybe 25%) will have an off-premise affair with a coworker (as I did), outside the offices of Global MegaCorp Inc.

The biggest thing you have to think about with an office affair is quite simply this:  you’re giving the power over to someone else — that power, of course, being the power to cost you your job or career.

So my quibble with the “office ink” dictum is simply with the word “never”.  All I’m saying is if you think the bonk is worth all the risks and potential minefields which face the two of you, go for it.  Just be aware of said risks and minefields — you know, think like a grownup would instead of a foolish child — but that done, get going.  It might be the opportunity of a lifetime.  Yeah — and I’m talking to the men, here — it might be foolish, but what’s life without risk?  And what if you’re Roger Sterling?

Think she’s worth the risk?

The story in a nutshell:  woman approaches menopause, gets super-horny, needs to get laid three times a day to satisfy her raging libido.  Why?

During the perimenopause, the slow countdown to infertility which can begin up to a decade before your periods cease, oestrogen levels fluctuate and fall.
But there’s a period in which testosterone remains relatively high. This is because, while testosterone peaks in your 20s, and then halves by the time you reach 40, the decline after that age is less dramatic.
At this point, when there are fewer hormone binding chemicals in the blood to dampen its effect, there’s effectively a testosterone spike.

As the Church Lady would say:  “How conveeenient.”

And of course, everyone is all sympathetic because womanhood, instead of calling her a ghastly slag.  Why do I feel so little sympathy?

“I learned that dating sites for married people were places to interact with potential partners without the harassment and judgement they received on other sites from those who view the issue of infidelity as black and white. I see the many shades of grey around the topic.”

So she was only interested in quickie knee-tremblers, not long-term affairs with married men.  How noble of her.

Here’s the clincher:  this foul woman is the editor of something called Erotic Review Magazine.  So her elevated testosterone (if that’s what it was — I remain skeptical) and her impending divorce were coupled to her reading smut on a daily basis.  What other outcome was possible?

And here’s the kicker:

“But in the future, when I’m partnered again, I will bring up any desire I have to stray outside that partnership.”

When?  How about if ever, and I’m backing never.  I foresee an unending string of “pump ‘n dump” encounters in her future.

Myself, I’m just curious what the grounds for her divorce were, or whether she was just being dumped by hubby for [insert your salacious reason here].  Whatever, she sounds like a dreadful, self-centered person, no matter how scientific and gyno-sympathetic her “condition” sounds.

…but sadly true in today’s world, measured in 20 Memes. (Link contains NSFW material, btw.)

The key words are “in today’s world”. Of course, it wasn’t always that way — hell, it was never that way before now. Which takes me back to Cappy’s excellent take on living in a 1950s world:

However, I have a bit of good news for you, and it is one of those rare bits of good news indeed. For while “we” as a country can’t and never will return to the 1950’s, YOU as an individual can. And there’s nobody who can stop you.

It’s an excellent, thought-provoking piece and I urge you to read it and reflect. The critical nugget of wisdom in the whole essay is this sentence:  “YOU as an individual can.”

Albert Jay Nock’s precept comes to mind, that one can never and should never try to change the whole of society. The way to effect massive societal change, Nock suggests, is to present society with one complete individual (that individual being, of course, yourself). In a larger sense, of course, one tries to make not just oneself a better person, but one’s family as well: by example, by education and by rearing. (Just understand that as one moves those efforts from oneself out to others, the results may not be perfect, nor even realized.)

And that’s Cappy’s point. Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as he points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great:  patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on. The purveyors of this indoctrination seek to replace all that with (initially) chaos and nihilism, followed closely by an omnipotent and malevolent State which would control our lives.

But what this indoctrination cannot do is stop you from living according to those values. All you have to do is eschew those aspects of modern society which repel you —   rampant promiscuity, immorality and amorality, hyper-materialism, greed, etc. (you know what they are: they’re the Seven Deadly Sins) — and replace them with the values of the 1950s, both for yourself and for those closest to you. That begins with family, and extends to a close circle of friends (always understanding that at some point, others’ values and your own may come to differ slightly or even quite a lot — and you can reassess the benefits of those relationships as they do).

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves.  To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own pasts, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving.  Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

The whole purpose of civilization has been the freeing of individuals, whether of their physical being or their minds.  What I’m seeing in the modern world is a massive attempt to reverse that — and while the 1950s were often derided for their societal conformity, that conformity was largely benevolent. The conformity of today, as imposed by the Left, is largely malevolent — it is suppression and oppression, all while the Left is claiming (falsely) that it’s about escaping oppression.

This, in fact, is precisely what the 20 Memes link above is describing:  how women were supposedly “liberated” by the tenets of feminism, but how that liberation has come with outcomes that are both horrible and demeaning — for women.

So while the diagnosis is depressing, the prognosis for you as the individual is not. You just have to make it happen — and I know for a fact that a great number of my Readers already have, and all power to them. (WeetABix’s ears, for one, should be burning about now.) Just because society is the way it is, that doesn’t mean you have to conform to it.

I’ll leave you with this piece of the 1950s, a ’55 Chevy Bel-Air station wagon:

I’m not saying we should all go back to driving one of these magnificent beasts. What I am saying is that if it were equipped with just a few safety features from today (e.g. seat belts), we would not be substantially worse off by driving one.

Now apply that attitude to society in general, and you’ll see what I mean. The best part of what I’m saying, however, is that you get to choose those parts of modernity you want to keep — and then discard the others completely.