Aagblog posts a personal letter from the author of The Beautiful Kind, who blogged explicitly about sex without revealing her name, occupation, employer, or face, and who got fired for it due to a “social media glitch” that associated her name with her content on the day that her employer googled her.
I don’t know her personally and I didn’t know about the blog or follow it, but I am so angry, and moved, by her letter, that my hands are shaking as I type. It’s hard enough to fire someone for underperforming — you should see the hoops that human resource departments have to jump through to protect the company from potential wrongful termination lawsuits.
But if you are “a 30-something bisexual atheist vegetarian sex goddess” and “a passionate sexplorer when it comes to kinks, fetishes, BDSM, swinging, polyamory and perversion,” apparently none of your work abilities matter. And I suppose in cases like this, bosses can feel pretty safe about lawsuits. Employees most likely won’t sue because then their face and identify would be revealed not only to the town but to CNN and The Enquirer.
If this were France or Holland, no one would give a damn; they grok that one’s employer should not control one’s personal life, and that married monogamy is only one of several contexts for healthy sexual expression. (Hell, in France, married monogamy might be a fetish in its own right.) Of course they also think that everyone should have access to health care and that two weeks’ vacation per year is the barest minimum, so who on earth would want to live there?
No one forces you to read any website outside of work time, including this one. And if you’re surfing recreationally at work even Cute Overload is hardly authorized.
For all I care, a client could be the most popular Rush Limbaugh fanblogger in the world, as long as they do it outside of work, where I can choose to ignore it. I can’t help but think that TBK would not have been fired for a strongly political blog or an overtly evangelical blog where every sentence is a call to Jesus or a quote from the bible.
At work, we need to be judged on the quality of our deliverables, our ability to work productively with our teams and customers, our job-related talents and performance. Not what we publish on the internet. Especially not what we publish on the internet under a nomme de net.
And especially not about how we conduct our sex lives with other consenting adults.
4 responses so far ↓
1 dandellion // Apr 30, 2010 at 7:00 am
What really puzzles me in the cases like this one is the motivation of the boss.
Is he just a poor bastard that is jealous on the employee’s adventures? Kind of guy who’d like to get into that kind of fun but never got courage so he’s going to smite everybody that had.
Or is he some poor righteous freak that think that everybody should conduct the way he’s been thought to?
Or he just thinks that “it should be that way”, never actually thinking about it, that employees shouldn’t talk about their sex life, not even anonymously, following the morality of the herd? In which case he thinks that people who are actually talking about sex are not employed, living in some parallel universe or whatever.
Not that answer to this question changes anything. He’s committed a crime and motivation doesn’t change much about that. I’m just curious.
2 regina lynn // May 4, 2010 at 11:33 am
I know what you mean. It’s easy to jump to “reading the blog turned her on, she’s suffused with shame, which makes her afraid, and she’s expressing that fear through anger” — but things are never that simple. In this case I think it wasn’t so much that it was sex as that it was kinky sex. BDSM just looks like people hitting each other with fancy sticks, to those who have never experienced it, truly, from the inside. Any erotic content with the power exchange or humiliation or other attempts to describe the parallel universe that one enters into during a scene just sounds crazy from the outside.
It fits in with my feelings that researchers cannot truly research cybersex unless they have tried it and gotten into it, deeply. Researchers may think that they research sex independently of personal experience but most researchers have actually had sex; it’s such a “normal” thing that they don’t realize how much it colors their supposed objectivity. But cybersex is not considered “normal” yet — and it is such a cerebral, intense experience (if done well) — and it looks ridiculous in transcript. LOL
3 SexToyJenn // May 5, 2010 at 1:24 pm
I’m sad to say that getting fired for having an adult site isn’t a new phenomenon … my own career in the adult industry started with my walking papers.
in 2001, I was about to be interviewed for an article about the adult industry in Austin — and being the good worker bee I was, I told my day job about the possible press. They gave me their blessing, as long as I didn’t mention where I worked, what I did for my day job, or anything that would connect me to them, or any of their clients.
But the day the article ran, I was called into the owners office and given 24 hours to shut down my (5 page, all text) sex ed/erotica site for women. I resigned — on my friend/lawyer’s letterhead — and the resulting severance funded my move to California and entry into the adult arena. Can we say blessing in disguise?
I’d hoped in the 10 years since our world would change, or at let our private life be our private business — but remain gun shy about publishing too much online. My site and log are not just neglected but broken, and fear of employers (or future partners) misinterpreting my sexual slant on life has kept them that way.
I too have contemplated a completely anonymous blog to share my journey without such retribution, so this news makes me just plain sad.
4 regina lynn // May 5, 2010 at 1:29 pm
I’m hoping that when today’s 20-somethings get into management the attitudes about personal expression will relax. Hard as it is to have hope, given the power trip of being able to blackmail or control another person’s life based on what you think you know about them because you read it on the internet.
My columns and this blog have no nudity and are rarely explicit, but they are personal. I do leave out anything about my own relationships that the other people involved do not want shared. (It’s only polite! LOL)