According to Marty Westerman, author of How to Flirt, "Flirting is for everyone."
We’d like to agree, but what about the workplace? "In an age in which sexual harassment is increasingly an issue in the workplace, Westerman warns office flirts to limit themselves to people they know well and feel comfortable with."
Sound advice. Just one question -- can your reflection file a complaint with the EEOC?
Increasingly, this is accepted as true. After all, you can only do the politically correct thing and ignore the hissing and spitting for just so long. But seven years ago, such was considered heresy.
In 1987, Tara Roth Madden wrote, in Women vs. Women: The Uncivil Business War, that "Rivalry, not cooperation, is the spirit among most women in today’s corporate world. They undermine one another and go as far as lying, character assassination, back stabbing, and sabotage."
She warned against blaming men for all of women’s lack of progress in the work place: "Despite the evidence to the contrary, some people will continue to blame men for women’s career stagnation. Yet, a close look at the men who occupy the cubicles and offices of corporate American won’t support that belief."
Alas, her book was years ahead of its time. She found it extremely difficult to find a publisher, and once it was published, virtually none of the bookstores were willing to sell it.
Though many of us may find this discouraging, those who are most at risk are the very organizations and individuals trying to suppress the truth. "The truth will out," as the saying goes, and when it does, it will burst like an overheated boiler.
Enter Morton Hunt, who, in his 1974 tome, Sexual Behavior in the 1970s, said it just ain’t so: "To the majority of Americans, sexual liberation thus means the right to enjoy all the parts of the body, the right to employ caresses previously forbidden by civil or religious edict and social tradition and the right to be sensuous and exuberant rather than perfunctory and solemn -- but all within the framework of meaningful relationships."
Despite this, for twenty years androphobes continued to lampoon the male libido as disgusting at best and criminal at worst.
Now, a University of Chicago study that will be released by the time this issue goes to press proves what most of us have known all along: most men aren’t the unbridled satyrs of pop-feminist lore. In fact, while male and female sexual behaviors are different, they’re not very different.
For example, while 55 percent of "non-cohabiting" women are virtually celibate, 48 percent of non-cohabiting men are, too. Twenty-three percent of men and 34 percent of women have had one or fewer sexual partners since age 18; 44 percent of men and 56 percent of women have had between two and ten sexual partners since age 18. And while men are more likely than women to think about sex every day, one in five women do, too.
This means that, male or female, our sexuality is only human.
Well, that’s not precisely what they said, but pretty close. According to Eric Monkkonen, a professor of U.S. urban history, it began in the West in the 16th and 17th centuries with an increase in state power and courtly manners. In other words, during the spread of modern patriarchy when "the nobility was transformed from knights and courtiers," and "official justice administered by courts replaced private vengeance."
That changed in the 1960s. The routine of the factories gave way to a "service economy," governmental authority was questioned, and "the traditional family was threatened by things like divorce."
Okay, guys, all together now:
While we’re all for being against domestic violence, we’re pretty sure they’re not thinking about battered husbands.
As a member of the Cowlitz Indian tribe, I personally stand to benefit from this hogwash, and I think diversity is a dandy thing. But when a truck needs to be loaded or a sheet of metal needs to be riveted, it’s not the rainbow hue of the crew that gets the job done, but just getting up and doing it.
You want a strong economy, use the bottom line as your quota and the high moral ground as your yardstick. You want diversity, discriminate.
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