OK, let’s assume you’re working in a big corp and all the women at the corp are into porn in a big way. A lot of them have screensavers with stiffies. They’ll sometimes get together and ogle pics of guys, and of guys and gals having sex. There are a lot of calendars with pics of handsome hunks on the wall, some of them with their butts hanging out. (No stiffies on the wall calendars, though.)
Would this bug you?
Wouldn’t bug me. Guess because I woudln’t feel threated by it. I’d find it, well … kinda funny.
But others may differ here. That’s why this is a poll.
what John Corrado said. It’s not professional and it means I’m having to pick up the slack for …well… a slacker.
I use to work in a very tight nit group and if someone got a humorous email with some flesh in it I wouldn’t get upset, but that rarely happened. We discouraged people from sending stuff like that for the obvious reason (but we did all have a sense of humor).
In our corporate dictionary, you look up “harassment,” there’d be a picture of a porn site, except that’d be harassment. This is so far over the border you can’t even see it from here.
However, it wouldn’t bother me if it happened. And, although I would feel somewhat jealous if the women were allowed this and the guys weren’t allowed to have pics of women everywhere, I probably wouldn’t avail myself of that recreational option were it available. I get little enough work done during the day as it is…
There is a time and a place for everything. Porn at work is simply not appropriate, period. I’m not bothered by porn, but I wouldn’t want to see it in the place where I work.
A lot of people say it’s wasting time, etc., but I don’t see where the OP said they were neglecting their work. There’s only one sentence about them getting together and chatting and I don’t see how that’s much different from them getting together and chatting about Lost.
I don’t really think I want to have people (of either sex) ogling porn continuously and publicly in our open space. That said, our internal mailing list (to which people can subscribe or not as they see fit) is so NSFW (in American term)…
And yes, we get the occasional male pic/vid on that list, too. And we’re all grownup enough to understand that: [list=a][li]You don’t go through the latest entries on the list when your project is late! [*]You don’t complain about “inappropriate” content. Don’t like it? Delete it from your freaking inbox and let those who do like it enjoy it![/list][/li]Yeah, we’re a High-tech startup. Why are you asking?
Let me just state explicitly that although the women feel very free to view porn and they have a fair amount of it, it isn’t interfering with anybody’s productivity. Productivity is not the issue here.
Yes, it would, and one of the reasons is that these kind of images demands from you to take a stand of some sort, and the reaction you show will be noted, anticipated, and talked about. So you can say that you’re very cool about pornography and all, but since this is a place where you usually don’t have these kinds of images everywhere, and is a place where you’re usually expected to be professionally neutral, and since it is well known that they are offensive to some people, you are expected to show some kind of personal reaction. Therefore it is highly unprofessional and disturbing as such, because you’re probably there to make some sort of business as a professional.
On the other hand, if I were having a coctail and a chat at somebody’s places, and there were images of cocks all over the place, I wouldn’t care much, but at work I would have a conflict of personas. And that would bug me some, because I don’t want to make a stand, and don’t want to experience a conflict, and don’t want to react in this or that way while making business. Once again, during after work, I don’t care much what pictures are on the wall.
Note that it would bug me more if the office were filled with guys with images of female genitals on the wall – so it has nothing to do with uncertainty regarding one’s own body, etc.
I don’t think there’s much chance I’d feel physically threatened. Even if they start looking at me and other real guys like we’re 3D pinups, I don’t think I’d feel much concern about involuntary sexual activities, sexual harassment w/threat of rape implicit, etc. Body dimorphism does matter sometimes.
For the rest of the range of possibilities, so overwhemingly much of it would depend on the emotional tone of the place and of the women’s attitudes toward me (and other guys), and also on who was running the office.
If I was a male paralegal at a law firm headed by all female attorneys, and in addition to leering at the boypix the women in the office treated the female paralegals like thinking people with a future in the org while using me and the other guys only to do lousy repetitive scutwork, I think it would rapidly get to the point that the ‘leering at boypix’ part all by itself would totally creep me out.
Similarly, if it were a pink-collar ghetto environment and there was hostility towards males (I’ve been an LPN trainee and once did a rotation on an OB/GYN floor in Athens GA which was like that), and they were doing the ‘leering at boypix’ thing, I’d imagine it would contribute towards making me feel even more like an outsider who wasn’t going to fit in there.
It would be okay with me as long as I didn’t have to see it. If I can’t see your computer screen from your doorway, I don’t care what’s on it.
If your desk drawer is full of goat sex videos (or Chick tracts, or Backstreet Boys CDs, or autographed pictures of Heinrich Himmler, or pictures of your grandchildren…), that’s fine, as long as nobody else has to see or hear them (and they don’t affect your productivity).
A few of the women (and men) I’ve worked with in the past probably would have been more pleasant to be around if they’d taken porn breaks every now and then.
Sam, even the most Draconian of offices give their employees breaks every couple of hours. They look at it on breaks, maybe on lunch hours, of if they spend a lot of time on the phone waiting for people, as many office folks do, they look at the eye candy while they wait. Etc. etc.
I worked in an office full of women, many of whom had worked together for a long time. They were quite used to letting their hair down and discussing – um, stuff – among themselves. At times I had to remind the boss that while I wasn’t offended by their conversation, I felt that it would be inappropriate for me (as a man) to join in.
At one point I actually said “I’m feeling very uncomfortable with the direction this is going.”
Openly posted porn in the workplace is the very definition of a Hostile Work Environment. If an employee files a sexual harassment complaint, the EEOC does a tour of your workplace and finds visible porn, your company is cooked, nailed, fried. Even if the complaint had nothing to do with the porn, it constitutes a hostile work environment, and you lose the case. It’s expensive.
Now, would I be offended? No, I don’t think so. Porn doesn’t offend me. I’d be worried if I worked for people stupid enough to open themselves to such a legal risk. If the men were denied promotions or favored jobs, that would offend me.
I agree with John Corrado except for one thing. He says it’s bordering on harassment. Isn’t it actually harassment? Porn prominently displayed in the work environment, I would imagine, is a definite hostile work environment. I, personally, would be offended by the porn.
Now, there is one job where I can understand people being required to view porn: porn provider (such as porn mags, porn websites, etc.). And, no, I wouldn’t work in that industry.
