The sad demise of the office romance

No one is having any fun anymore at the office.  As I have blogged, people fall in love and have affairs at the office all the time and a lot of it is welcomed -- by both parties.  I used to sympathize with the young guys I worked with in later years because they couldn't even say a woman looked nice because that would have been an automatic "sexual harassment" charge.

No it isn't, but fear has killed the delightful, flirtatious workplace art of parlance and parrying.  I remember a guy I worked with in the seventies once saying how good I smelled.  He was complimenting my Oscar de la Renta scent of course, but can you imagine a man uttering that today!  Jail time would follow.  

Phobe Maltz Bovy had a great column in 'The Globe and Mail' yesterday, lamenting, "The unfortunate death of the office romance".  She was writing about Toronto Mayor John Tory's resignation after revelations he had had an affair with a younger staffer.  In my world, that's a "so what!"

"If any of Tory's cavorting got in the way of his fixing public transit, for instance -- more specifically, if his thirst somehow prevented him from reinstituting the streetcar up and down Roncesvalles Avenue -- then I'd be angry," she writes.  "But if the reporting doesn't bear that out, should we really care if this was a fairly standard office romance?"

No, we shouldn't.  Who knows what the state of Tory's marriage is?  I don't and I don't care.  #MeToo has unfortunately killed any hope of finding love -- or lust -- at the office and that's too bad.  I found both my husbands at the office.  Was I sexually harassed?  Absolutely not.  But I did find myself in somewhat of a sticky wicket when a minister of the Crown, for whom I worked as a freelance speech writer, made a job-threatening pass at me.  It was between marriages, so I could have said yes, but I didn't find him particularly attractive.  Problem was he had the power of my job in his hands.  I won't divulge how his attempt at an evening of horizontal mambo turned out; I am only recounting the clever balancing act I had to maintain to keep both him happy and my job secure.  

Let's face it, it's not exactly a boon to feminism to infantilize women of consenting (or not) age and assume all passes are assault.  Women have the power.  We can say "yay or nay".  It's the exploitation that's the problem, not the sex itself, so let's all grow up here.

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A word about Brenda Lucki.  As you know, I have blogged countless times about the many messes she has made on numerous files over her four-year catastrophic term as head of the RCMP.  Trudeau's ludicrous Affirmative Action appointments have led to all kinds of screw-ups and Lucki was just another in a long line.  In fairness, she was parachuted in over the heads of much more senior, better-qualified officers and was just not up to the job.

She blundered through the Nova Scotia mass shooting, mishandled the trucker's convoy mess, actually claiming at one point she wasn't familiar with how the Emergencies Act worked!  I could go on, but realizing the Rouleau Report on the calamity with the truckers is to be released this week, Lucki knew she was in for a public shellacking and hard time in the stockade in the public thoroughfare.  So she ducked out in the nick of time.  

Like Julie Payette -- another botched AA appointment by Trudeau -- Lucki has put one more nail in the feminist coffin.  Payette was the first and only governor general to have had to resign or be fired because of gross incompetence, staff bullying and harassment.  I am pissed off when women f-ck up.  Some of us worked very hard many years ago to get you to where you are, so why do you keep blowing it?!