In our effort to create a wholly unhostile work environment, have we simply created an environment that is hostile in a different way? Is it preferable or more productive, is it fostering a more creative or vivid office culture, for everyone to vanish into Facebook and otherwise dabble online? Maybe it’s better to live and work with colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease.Naturally the comments section brims with bland, earnest objections, the bulk of which suggest that said anodyne drone is precisely the goal they seek to achieve. Asked and answered, then. But one fellow sums up the progressive contrition perfectly:
Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from the risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal? Should we aspire to the drab, cautious, civilized, quiet, comfortable workplace all of this language presumes and theorizes?
Hey, I'm no professional feminist, but I'd rather let people decide for themselves what they find acceptable. That might include humoring some people who indeed seem Puritanical and hypersensitive. Who am I to tell them where "the line" is?It does not occur -- or is not said -- that "humoring" the seemingly Puritanical differs not at all from accepting their interpretations and obeying their diktats, and that this achieves precisely the opposite of the free-thinking, tolerant universe that the "Who am I to ... ?" mantra prays for. The (seemingly!) Puritanical and hypersensitive have no qualms about saying exactly where the line should be, not merely for themselves but for everyone else. And they suffer no guilt about enforcing this line with all the power of the law.
Do you possess a mind, capable of distinguishing between good and bad? Then you can say where the line ought to be. Any who attempt to silence you do not share your good will.
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