Sex and the Office

Many Otherwise perfectly hip people, it seems to me, don't take the subject of office affairs very seriously. They think of office romance as mere purple puppy passion among some junior clerks and attribute carnal lust only to a few walrusy-faced tycoons who chase their secretaries around the desk.

Based on my own observations and experiences in 19 different offices, I'm convinced that offices are sexier than Turkish harems, fraternity-house weekends, or Hollywood swimming parties---and more action takes place in them than in a nymphet's daydreams.

Who says office romance isn't serious? Dynasties are toppled, new beneficiaries named in wills, stock issues plunge, new corporation heads are elected---not to mention girls getting pregnant, sexually defunct men getting funct and married ladies who thought they had it made finding it's all unmade just because some man goes ape over some girl in an office!

We've got to keep in mind who's saying these things, of course. You know how one person will attend a party and say it was the greatest little party he ever went to in his life and some other guy who attended the same party will say it was a thumping bore. Well, this is my view of the party and I honestly believe these things to be true:

1. No office anywhere on earth is so puritanical, impeccable, elegant, sterile or incorruptible as not to contain the yeast for at least one affair, probably more. You can say it couldn't happen here, but just let a yeast raiser into the place and first thing you know--bread!

2. Practically every man in an office has had, is having, or is capable of having an affair at some time in his life. No matter how fine his character, how much he loves his wife or how happy he is at home, under the right--or wrong, depending on your viewpoint--set of circumstances, any adult male is a candidate. The circumstances would, of course, include being acted upon by a certain person. If she never happened to him, maybe it never would either. But there are any number of "Shes" around in every man's lifetime.

3. Single girls are equally good candidates. In the life of almost every single girl in an office I think you will find a current affair, past affair or contemplated affair. Never overestimate the resistance of Miss Mousey typing away at her desk. You think she'd thrash out like an octopus if a man tried anything funny? Of course she would--if he walked right up to her desk and blurted out an indecent proposal. After sufficient wooing and flattery, however--people have time in offices, they work there every day--she's apt to be in a more receptive mood.

With the exception of engaged girls, very young girls, deeply religious or frightened femmes of any age who have hermetically sealed themselves off from men (I know one who calls her 68-year-old mother every afternoon from work and says, "Is din-din on the table, dearest?"), I think most girls in offices are seeing or will see combat, if only with the man they ultimately marry.

4. Far from being minor, transient, pippy-poo associations, romances and affairs starting at work can be some of the most cliff-hanging, satisfying, memorable episodes in any two persons' lives. Even when things end sadly, a participant rarely says (nor, I believe, even thinks) he would have given his right arm for the affair not to have happened.

5. Most husbands, except utter nut-burgers, don't cheat in the first few years of marriage. About 94 percent do after that. (This is the Gurley Brown Survey, you must remember, not scientifically documented, but a product of visceral research. I was willing to turn all this information over to Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, but nobody asked me.)

6. The girl a married man "succumbs" to is 49 times out of 50--again by my "inside" information--a girl he has met through his work, although she may not work in his own office. She seldom comes to him from his country club, church group, social milieu or alumni organization. She isn't even his wife's best friend.

7. Married women who work and become involved in an affair often draw their partners from some place other than the office. And they don't get involved nearly so often.

8. The blame--or responsibility, depending on the viewpoint--for affairs rests about equally with men and with girls. Though men usually initiate the office affair, girls second the motion enthusiastically--while pretending with all their insincere little hearts they were talked into something. No girl, in my opinion, is ever the categorically put-upon innocent victim of a predatory married or unmarried man.

9. At least once in an important man's career he makes a decision affecting hundreds or even thousands of people--to say nothing of sales, earnings and profits--based purely on whether something is good for his romance. He moves the convention from Salt Lake City to San Francisco because she lives in San Francisco. He says, "We'll be open the day after Thanksgiving," because that way she'll be in the office. On a minor level, things are done every minute in the office not for the apparent business reasons, but because somebody's personal need requires them. One man I know left his neatly typed speech on his girlfriend's dresser and flew to New York without it. His office just had time to teletype the whole thing from a carbon to New York before he spoke.

10. Companies are not destroyed by sex at the office. Except when kings or board chairmen abdicate for the women they love, most sex at the office concerns only the people it concerns. Other people make it their business, though.

An office affair doesn't necessarily undermine office morale, either, except for the person who had his eye on one of the participants for himself, or in cases where the head of the organization falls into the hands of a ruthless, power-mad girl barracuda. That's bad, of course, but usually they both get fired pretty soon and things settle down.

11. There is no more sex in the office now than there was 25 years ago. It's just come up from underground.

12. Some of the people who cluck-cluck the loudest about office affairs are ex-participants who played and knocked off--or didn't knock off, got their divorces and married each other--and are peculiarly hard put, in their dotage, to remember that this sort of thing happens to perfectly nice, normal people.

Those are my personal primary conclusions about sex at the office. Now here are my secondary conclusions:

1. It's impossible to chart what kind of people will get involved with each other. Girls you know to be as wholesome as peanut-butter sandwiches will walk willingly straight into the arms of a lecher. The chandelier-swinging office party girl who plans to marry a millionaire can get hooked by the office janitor.

2. Timing is everything in office affairs. It depends on who's looking and who's there to be looked into. For the first 12 years of a man's marriage he is immune to Sophia Loren bringing in his breakfast coffee. The next year he goes off his rocker for a file girl with a receding chin, crowded teeth and a 24-inch measurement--around each kneecap.

3. When a married man has an affair, it's probably less likely that a particular girl got to him and marcelled his Samson curls than it is that he was ready to be happened to. His affair is a symptom of a troubled marriage rather than an irresistible urge to merge with a lovely new girl.

4. Office affairs are not the hurry-up, gobble-down, hit-and-run things people on the outside think they are. Only a Don Juan, and maybe an occasional conventiongoer, would gobble. The grand passions that cause the stock-market dips and new marriages to form often develop after the two people have known each other for several years. (One friend of mine began her affair with an office crony after they had tried 22 tax cases together. Another saw her now-husband rise from stock-room boy to display manager to president of the store to head of the chain before their liaison began. Very patient girl!)

5. Office affairs don't often go on in offices--behind locked doors, on top of desks, in cloakrooms and that sort of thing--as the uninitiated think. They root at the office but blossom at tennis, in seaside villas when two people are on the same business trip, in penthouse apartments, Chrysler 300s, or wherever. One man and woman I know--he is married to somebody else--have managed to rendezvous with each other in practically every major city on two continents since their affair began in 1951.

6. The office affair usually has more going for it than just sex. People who think it consists of clammy little half-hour episodes--people sneaking off to a motel and that sort of thing--are fuzzy observers. Many an affair is grounded in friendship and mutual respect and has deep emotional and intellectual rapport going for it. That's why office affairs aren't so easy to bash in the head. Marriage may be the only legal male-female relationship, but it is far from the only meaningful one.

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7. Participants in office affairs are not always dashing, young executives and their beauty-contest-winning young assistants. A magazine publisher of 56 I know has been having an affair for 14 years now with a woman who is motherly and about as chic as apple pandowdy. She is 52, softly sensuous and very kind. Friends of this couple say he'd come apart without her. She makes it possible for him to get through the day.

8. Offices are yeasty because everybody is at his best--clothes, make-up, perfume, brains, jokes and energy. No girl ever sees a man in his scrappy pajamas and scrappy early-morning disposition, and he never sees her wired for sound in her curlers (not early in the game, anyway). The hours spent together in offices are limited, and therefore a little mystery can prevail indefinitely.

9. There are no friendships between virile men and womanly women anywhere, in my opinion, completely devoid of sexual overtones. A man always wonders what a woman is like in bed. She wonders the same thing about him. All this speculating among men and women in offices causes sexy waves.

• • •

Nobody worries much about single men and single girls becoming involved with each other except people who don't want anybody to have any fun in bed anywhere. There are such folks, and I think the whole lot should be put in a big polyethylene bag and offered to the next cleaners-and-dyers convention for experiments. Everybody seems to worry about married-man-and-single-girl combinations, however.

The popular version of why married men pounce on girls at the office is that they are lecherous, spoiled, licentious, neurotic, treacherous, lascivious, selfish, undisciplined, lustful and immoral.

I think they do it because they enjoy it. Some men are all those adjectives, to be sure, but some aren't. There are men who, if there isn't anything else around to chase, will chase and eat their own tails like the live lobsters do when they're shipped from Maine to California without enough ice. More often, however, I think married men become involved with girls at the office because men are human. Can any attractive man really go through life attracted to just one woman when waves and waves and waves of lovely girls continue to wash up against him every year at work? We keep pretending he can, but I don't think so.

Some men do stay faithful to their wives, but the reason doesn't have much to do with their desiring only that woman--in my opinion. Some men stay more faithful than others because they are not powerfully sexed. The factory was kind of shut down in childhood by too many parental don'ts and mustn'ts and naughty-naughties, and they marry a girl who has also been "undersexed" by the same influences and live happily, unsexily ever after. I honestly think nobody has any idea how many husbands and wives simply don't go to bed with each other at all and don't go to bed with anybody else either. The "undersexed" man can be shored up, however, if a patient, enthusiastic, possibly predatory woman happens to wiggle-waggle into his life. If it happens, she will usually be somebody he met through work.

Other men abstain from extramarital sex because other things in life are more important to them and they have too much to risk. In the case of the high-placed government official, the desire for girls may just not rank with the fear that an enemy could get something on him. Every so often, however, one of these stable heads of dynasty or state does drop off the vine into the arms of the woman he loves, and hypocritical noises are heard from those who have yet to be found out.

(Some married men do not get mixed up with other women because they prefer boys.)

There are men, however, and I admit it, who never have anything to do with girls at the office because they are genuinely nutty about their wives. These obviously are well-adjusted--emotionally, sexually and every other way--men. Bless them! They, too, can be toppled! It can happen on a business trip with 20 lonely nights ahead, 20 lovely girls in the firm they're visiting, et cetera, et cetera. Yeast is no respecter of persons.

A man who insists he never has a twinge for another woman, never fantasizes about other women, is only horny for his wife--after 20 years of marriage, mind you--is, in my opinion, a phony. Even the young husband who ostentatiously loves his wife but shuts out all other women from his friendship, kindness, affection and concern probably doesn't love anybody from the gut--including his bride. He's cold as Kelsey's. (That's a seaweed, not another sex survey.) Either that or he isn't sure of her.

Aside from feeling a natural attraction toward many women in a lifetime, I think men also stray for these reasons:

1. Husbands and wives get to living in different worlds. The girl at his elbow while the P. & L. statement is shaping up nicely may also get to be the girl at his elbow at martini time. (Husbands and wives who share business ventures often stay more closely knit.)

2. A man may live so far way from his office he's too woofed to be a decent mate when he gets home--yet nobody, and especially his wife, will hear of selling Twelve Acres and moving to an apartment closer in. Earlier in the day at lunch or cocktails, before his charm and energy ran out, there were other girls around to be impressed by him.

3. Husbands and wives get used to each other. She can finish his sentences. He can start and finish hers. They get bored with each other in bed. As for becoming a sexy new her, as the female magazines promise she can, a zebra doesn't change stripes. Even a 29-year-old zebra--I mean wife--is still the same wife in new black lingerie. People are stunned when a man strays from a beautiful, gracious lady to a creature with knobby elbows and no eyelashes at all. But, you see, she's a different zebra.

4. Men stray because they get cut off from sex in marriage. A friend tells me that in the chic New York commuting town he lives in at least 75 percent of his married cronies have been expelled from the conjugal bed. Nothing sudden, just a gradual shutting down of the shop. If he's anywhere near telling the truth, and apparently some of these men compare notes, that town alone could be liberating as many as 50 or 60 deprived males into the havens of advertising, public relations or the law.

5. Wives get older and men prefer younger women. They find the most convenient supply of fresh young beauties in offices--with new shipments every June when colleges let out.

6. A man strays if his marriage is really unhappy; I don't mean the fight-scrap-scream-kiss-make-up, standard-marital-spat scene. I mean the man who's had it up to there. He meets a girl at the office who really seems to prefer him alive to dead, and the yeast starts rising.

These are the reasons men get involved at the office. What about the girls?

• • •

With "everything to lose," why does a single girl fall for a married man with whom she works? Because a lot of single girls decide finally the only thing they have to lose by falling for a married man is their loneliness, that's why! Any girl who's been single a few years, or single again after being married, knows how long it is between live ones.

Two attractive friends of mine were discussing this man-shortage thing at my house the other night. "We got out a pencil and paper recently," Polly said, "and decided to chart the men in both our lives since graduating from high school. Jean averaged one good eligible man about every three years and two months--somebody she could marry or fall in love with. Mine were slightly further apart--one big possibility about every four years."

No, these girls were not losers. They were attractive women who liked men but found that big gaps between eligibles is just the way the ginger crystallizes.

In between eligible men there are, of course, the spooks and submen whom single girls do go out with but couldn't marry or have an affair with. Meanwhile, back at the office, during a spook and submen dating period and before an "eligible" shows up, girls keep running into adorable, whole, hale, hearty, smart, attentive married men who are supposed to be frightening, bad, revolting, scruffy-moraled, taboo--but who can remember?

As for the built-in "safeguards" that used to keep girls from getting involved with any kind of man before marriage (and sometimes after marriage), a lot of them just don't exist anymore. A young friend of mine who works for a women's magazine says, "Modern girls are too informed and too comfortable with men to be as frightened of them as you'd have to be to stay completely physically clear of them. We've danced, fought, studied, played and necked with them since we were teenagers. How in the world are you going to be frightened?

"Girls know about the pill and diaphragms and how babies get here and all that, too," she adds. "They also know their own anatomy and show off quite a lot of it in a bikini every summer. You just can't pretend your own flesh is some strange foreign substance that doesn't belong to you the way girls did 50 years ago. We can't go back to pretending we're untouchable and marble-coated."

Would girls in offices stay more coldcream pure if men didn't tempt them? Just watch a girl get rid of a real creep who revolts her. When a girl doesn't say no to a man, it's very likely because she doesn't want to.

The attitudes of girls who are bewildered and shocked by a man's physical interest in them seem to me a little spurious. Girls happen to have a powerful, built-in allure for men. It's there and God gave it to them. To pretend to be outraged and petulant because a man wants them "that way" is like having the Maltese Falcon buried upstairs in a dresser drawer and acting surprised because Sam Spade and a bunch of hoodlums are milling around outside the door.

Whether a girl says yes or no to a man in the office, it's my opinion she's not really insulted by his desire for her. Unless he's a real cyclops with one beady eye in the middle of his forehead or has long green hair all over his back, I think she'll remember her propositioner not unkindly. Somebody wanted her. Somebody flipped.

• • •

Aside from the fact that office affairs come about because men feel needy and girls, while pretending to be fortresses, actually cruise around with all their available lights turned on, what other reasons cause girls to get involved?

1. A dynamic executive reminds a girl of her father--the one she lost or never had. If she works close to him, she finally gets to him and they become a thing.

2. A man has power and money--more aphrodisiac to some girls than the physical endowments of Mr. Universe. These girls have no particular wish (unless buried very deep) to be that powerful person, but find a certain thrill in thrilling a tycoon. The "dear friend" of an automotive tycoon--a girl I've known for many years--says, "To have this kind of man excited by you brings out the sexiest, most womanly quality in you. In bed you are the tycoon. Not that he is weak or unattractive or lacks potency, but that suddenly, simply because you're a woman whom he adores going to bed with, you become quite, quite power-laden. In his office, he is king. In your bed, you bestow favors; you are queenly and in command, even if you are as highly sexed as he and need the lovemaking as much as he. It's delicious!"

3. A barracuda girl may want professional power herself but not have the capacity for it--or her company won't hear of it. She takes on a lover who has the power she wants, gets inside him like a parasite and starts sapping. After she's sapped awhile, he gets skinnier and skinnier, and the business doesn't look so robust either! Nobody can get the guy on the phone. His own lieutenants can't get in to see him, and heads start rolling from the bodies of anybody who threatens his girl advisor. Pretty soon his is one of the heads (management will stand just so much), and usually the girl barracuda's rolls along with his.

4. Sometimes an office affair provides a girl the opportunity of getting out of herself. You don't change leopard spots, of course, but you may discover some new spots you didn't know you had just by having your coat brushed a bit.

"I'd always been such a nice girl," Evelyn recalls. (And of course this is a true story; with so many real ones to choose from, I don't need to make any up.) "I'm kind of a Sunbonnet Sue--the one all the mothers trust to take their kids to the circus and even wives don't worry if their husbands have dinner with me when the wives go to Portland to visit their sisters.

"Well, last year my company sent me to Detroit to do a drug survey, and the first day I was there I met the general manager of the drug chain. Usually I have to badger managers to let me talk to their clerks, but this man was extremely interested in the whole thing. He stayed while I asked all my questions and I followed him back to his office still yakking away. I don't know what came over me that day or how I knew--I'm not one of those sexy broads who expects action--but it came to me: This man is asking to be led astray--and by me. I mean, he was so sincere ... so nice ... so attractive.... Or maybe it was just because I was away from home and found some new courage. Anyway, it was as though I heard voices saying, 'If you don't do something about this man, or at least try, you'll regret it the rest of your life.'

" 'Look,' I said, 'I'll have all my surveying finished by this evening. If you'd like to look it over I could leave it some where for you.'

"He took the hint and said, 'Why don't you come back here about seven o'clock? We'll grab a bite ["grab a bite" is what a man says when he doesn't want dinner to sound like a big deal] and I'll look over the stuff.'

"Well, I finished the survey, went back to my hotel and put on the closest thing to a witching dress I own. We had dinner--it wasn't just grabbing a bite; he took me to an elegant restaurant--and we still talked about the drug business, but for practically the first time in my life I felt kind of 'lady of the evening.' I thought I might be having the same effect on him as Sadie Thompson had on that missionary. Where I got the courage I'll never know, but I said, 'Why don't we go back to my hotel for a drink?' and he said, 'Fine.'

"We never even stopped in the lobby; we just got on the elevator without saying a word. I never did turn on the lights when we got to my room. The minute we were inside the door I put my arms around him. I said I'd worn the closest thing to a wicked dress I owned because he was so attractive. I also said I'd worn the least possible amount of underwear because I wanted to be a slinky, sultry minx, which I'd never been before in my life but he inspired me. In other words, I sort of told the truth so he'd know I knew I wasn't a sexpot but that it was he who brought this on.

"I wasn't a desperate old maid or anything. I'd had men before, but they always made the advances. I just kept murmuring and purring this sexy stuff which I honestly felt toward this nice, middle-aged man. I was enjoying myself utterly because I was seducing him instead of getting mauled by some Adonis who was getting around to me simply because I was a girl--but maybe number three thousand and two on his list. I brought it off and it was wonderful."

A woman may also have a fling at the office to prove she isn't getting any older, to prove to herself and observers that she likes men (not girls), to sink into a man so he'll marry her. Married girls in offices have affairs, too, but I think they're more likely to stray for the same reasons men do.

• • •

Married or single, doesn't a girl indulging in an office affair ever consider what she might be doing to a man's wife? Technically the girl isn't damaging the wife if the wife never knows--and many a wife never knows.

A man who cheats flagrantly year in, year out usually doesn't stay married. One affair, however, doesn't necessarily make a divorce. By the time it happens, the marriage, paradoxical as this sounds, may be a pretty rock-founded institution which a man isn't about to dissolve and thereby disrupt his life. Too awkward. Too expensive.

"I used to think a man couldn't have anything to do with another woman without his wife being dashed to bits," a close friend told me. "It isn't true. I've found that a casual encounter with some bar broad isn't the least bit important to me or my relationship with Tom. I did ask early in our marriage that he never embarrass me by telling me about it."

Another friend says, "You can't help but know, and I've even giggled over the fact. Men think they're so smart at concealing these little peccadilloes and then practically spell it out for you in bed! Every man has pretty standard bed patterns. Well, suddenly something new is introduced or suggested and you know damned well he hasn't been reading any book on sex, so where did he get that idea? From some other dame, of course."

If a man and his wife are not conjugally occupied, his office friend may just be doing the man's wife a favor by supplying a commodity he doesn't enjoy at home. Many a girl who wants the man to get a divorce and marry her may not realize that instead of unhinging his marriage, the commodity is what's keeping the marriage glued together.

Rightly or wrongly, some working girls feel that if a man is attracted to them, they're entitled. Husband luring is like landing a job in the Depression. There weren't enough jobs then. There aren't enough eligible men now.

Girls rationalize that if a woman loses her husband she deserves to. The Jezebel may have something there. We all know husbands set adrift among models, starlets and barracudas who do not start affairs. Are they more moral? Probably they are happier at home.

One wife with a faithful husband reveals this technique:

"He thinks I'm a sexpot. Since the day we were married I have pretended to be out of my head about going to bed with him. Perhaps one time out of six I have a good time myself. The rest of the nights I do an Academy Award--winning performance. And this has been going on for thirteen years, Helen," she says. "Sometimes I'm so weary at the end of the day I think I would pay $100 to turn over and go to sleep, but he never knows. If I can lift my big toe off the bed, I respond. Jack is even a little bit afraid he doesn't supply me with enough sex and I've never tried to talk him out of the idea."

Despite everything, I think wives still have the best and biggest piece of the pie. But don't think this report doesn't make me nervous: Remember, I'm a wife!