Work and Fucking

Michael Gray’s 2004 UK dance track ‘The Weekend’ is a paean to the glorious sometimes hedonistic end to the working week. Less of a ‘Thank God it’s Friday’ song, it’s more ‘You mean it’s only bloody ‘Wednesday?’ and seethes with a midweek frustration that the phrase ‘hump-day’ does little to mitigate. While the tune is never likely to feature on this writer’s i-Pod, it has a definite empathetic appeal, especially when accompanied by this music video; it emphasizes that near-orgasmic explosion of joy experienced on clocking off, Friday 6pm. Watch it. It’s fun.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR8jOJZERhs* (click here)

See? Would I lie to you?

Of course the video does more than show the girls cutting loose as they ‘blow it all away’ in a club on Saturday night. It mainlines into that tension between clock-ticking office tedium and unrestrained self-expression, particularly that of a carnal nature. If your day-job is a purely creative one and gives you an immediate sense of achievement, I’m very happy for you, albeit somewhat envious. For the greater part of any nation’s workforce, however, Monday to Friday means the kind of monotony captured with such brilliance in both UK and US versions of ‘The Office’. Weekends inevitably feel short, tauntingly so, and it’s small wonder that Friday-night joie-de-vivre bleeds tormentingly into the rest of the week. We sizzle with desire for freedom and that desire manifests itself most frequently in thoughts of sex.

In the same way that the Lenten season turns a faster’s thoughts obsessively to chocolate, so a dull workplace causes us to fixate on all things carnal. Check the video—hot secretaries getting their freak on around (and on top of) the photocopier surrounded by oppressively lowering (rhymes with ‘cowering’) file-cabinets. The juxtaposing of mundane with full-on sexy is irresistible, no? We’d all love to burst out of the restraints of professionalism and convention and get nasty in the middle of that grim environment simply to spite it. Well not just to spite it—the nastiness would be fun in itself, but it would be heightened ceiling-high by sheer inappropriacy.

Here’s the problem with all this workplace sexual fantasy however. It’ll get you in all sorts of professional hot water if you let it. Recent high-profile sexual harassment cases in the UK have highlighted the treacherous nature of work-based flirtations and relationships. An excellent article in last Saturday’s Independent spelt out the dangers innate within common work-based sexual scenarios; it was a tough-love kind of feature, reminding us worker-drones and corporate executives of the kind of litigious minefield into which we tread when making any kind of sexual advances at work.

Nor can we easily dismiss the modern culture of litigious culture as ‘political correctness gone mad’. The UK corporate world is owning up right now to decades of a horribly sexist culture in which executives were sleazing with impunity on their junior female colleagues. It was fucked-up and wrong and the inevitable result is a swing to an oppressive working environment where we’re paranoid about how we interact with each other. And this exactly at the point where performance reviews and league tables are making us feel the need for workplace relief so sharply. I do mean ‘relief’.

Fiction to the rescue. There’s a reason why work-related sex stories are so popular. If we can’t misbehave for real in the office, we can damn well do it vicariously. While we mightn’t dare get ribald with a colleague over the water cooler or brazen with a new secretary while giving dictation, we can revel in the fantasy and work off the resultant tension in private. Or in some appropriate situation once we’ve finally made it to that blissful weekend. So behave yourself, stay out of trouble, and only think about scenarios such as these:

I’ll try to help (or possibly stoke the furnace of frustration). Next week I’ll attempt to outline a few sexy workplace tales of my own. Hopefully I’ll get around to writing one or two of them in full…