The Thinking Man's Guide to Working with Women

It used to be the office. Just the office, a dull spot in the Twilight Zone of work, where men went to do a job, pick up a pay check and get on with their lives.

Not anymore.

Suddenly, offices, factories and shops are electrified arenas where the great gender issues of our day are bruited about by angered beasts. It is turf, troubled ground peopled by oppressors and oppressed, where tense flirtations and secret romances live right next door to hurt feelings and rejection. The air is hot and damp with frustration. Memos and reports compete with tears and bad manners. Danger lurks everywhere: Personal ruin can be found in a curly hair on a Coke can.

Once, long ago, when working men would rise from their breakfast tables, kiss their wives and kids goodbye and go to work, it was as much for the company--largely of other men--as it was for the money, which was largely spent on wives and kids. Men's lives were lived on the job as much as at home. Men would tirelessly joke that the trouble with women was that you couldn't live with 'em and you couldn't live without 'em, but you could complain about them either way.

But things have changed. Maybe you still can't live with women and maybe you still can't live without them, but, if you're an average Joe, you must spend all day working with them, which is very much like living with them, except no complaints are allowed.

Making a Mountain Out of Anita Hill

We might as well talk about sexual harassment right off the bat, since the noise surrounding that issue is drowning out all rational conversation. A little background, maestro, please:

The Prohibition impulse: As a social phenomenon, organized feminism--which is, remember, not the natural political state of most women--has a cyclical pattern, like ballroom dancing, 3-D movies or economic depression. Activist feminist movements are spawned by a pressing need to redress a social ill, but they overreact by trying to legislate nice behavior.

For example, the last time women organized for justice, they got the vote, which was a very good thing. But we also got Prohibition, an attempt to use law to make men behave the way politically correct women wished them to behave, and that was a very bad thing.

This time around, we got antidiscriminatory labor and social statutes, and that's a very good thing. But now we're being threatened with censorship (of magazines like this one, for example) and, in the case of sexual harassment, with once again using the law to make men behave the way politically correct women wish them to behave, and that's not so good.

Sexual harassment, either as described by the law or in practice, is meaningless as a fixed concept. Ask 500 people what constitutes sexual harassment and you'll get 500 answers. In fact, during the Thomas hearings, that is precisely what the media did. They asked over and over again what constitutes sexual harassment. They devoted hours and hours to the subject. "This is great," said one female activist. "This is a national teach-in."

Trouble is, nobody learned anything. Nobody knows with any more clarity now than they did before what sexual harassment is. "We can't say in all cases a hug or an invitation for a date is sexual harassment," Fraeda Klein, a consultant who organizes sexual harassment training programs for businesses, told The Washington Post. "But what we can say is that, in some cases, it is sexual harassment. We have to know how the recipient feels."

Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that an action that a "reasonable man" might find inoffensive may in fact be recognized as sexual harassment--but only by a "reasonable woman." That means that sexual harassment is a crime that reasonable men cannot always recognize, that it is a crime that can be discovered only by women, and even then, presumably, only by a specific woman, since it hinges on unwanted sexual advances, which, under different circumstances, may be wanted sexual advances, in which case, a reasonable woman wouldn't mind.

Now, art, not law, is something you recognize when you see it. As a law, this won't work--and certainly not as a crime, the mere accusation of which can destroy families and marriages and ruin careers. It's the sort of thing that divides reasonable men and activist women, especially since some feminists have sought to put sexual harassment on a par with rape--something that rape victims must find grotesque. Imagine if "sexual provocation" to gain a personal or professional advantage--a certain glance, plunging neckline, short skirt, too-high heels, a coy invitation for coffee--were a statutory offense that could be comprehended only by reasonable men, and even then, only by those who were annoyed by such behavior.

Men get it, all right: Confront a politically correct woman on this subject, and bereft of logical argument, she'll tell you that men "just don't get it."

She'll be wrong, of course. Men understand that sexual harassment is simply a bogus invention used to fuel bad political rhetoric. Reasonable men recognize that genuine sexual harassment actually involves two wildly different transgressions, namely extortion and bad manners.

It's extortion when a man says to a female colleague or subordinate, "Give me a blow job and make it a hummer or tomorrow you'll be out of here."

It's bad manners when a man says to a female colleague or subordinate, "Nice hooters, hon," or whines for a date or plays Siskel and Ebert with Longdongophobia.

Extortion is a crime everyone understands. You can go to the slammer for extortion, and it would serve you right.

Bad manners, well, that's something else: Everybody understands bad manners, too, but vulgarity, bad breeding and coarseness are part of life in our particularly brutal age, and they aren't gender-specific. By and large, even jerks understand when they're being rude, and if they don't, there's certainly nothing impolite in telling them so. People guilty of egregiously rude behavior--whether it's making stupid comments to colleagues, stubbornly refusing to take no for an answer or running around the office making fart noises--should be warned, reprimanded or fired. And if a business allows extortion or bad manners to go unpunished, it should be held liable.

Women, of course, are as accomplished as men at manifesting bad manners or committing extortion.

Bad talk: Both of those violations contribute to the real crime in this situation--bad communication between the sexes. The organized feminist view of what constitutes sexual harassment can also be seen as a simple failure to communicate across gender lines. Women react to men, sometimes accurately. Men react to women, sometimes accurately. But most of the time, something's going to go amiss, especially when there's an undercurrent of potential sexuality compounded by a decided lack of perspective and humor.

Here's the news: Women really do seek to gain the attention of men. Shocking, yet true. Some women--maybe nobody you know personally--actually hope the right guy will initiate a conversation that will lead, ultimately, to a badly wanted sexual advance. Sexual provocation and sexual harassment are sometimes officemates. Sex is everywhere in this culture. It is a vital, engrossing, transcendent, sometimes charming fact of our common lives. It's not only on TV, in the movies, on radio and in art and literature, it's also in Bible camps, under the bleachers and on top of the Great Smokies. It's in stores and supermarkets. Is it any surprise that it's also at work?

Men go to work, sense sex in the air and feel compelled, from time to time, to react to it. Sometimes this can result in an unwanted sexual advance. But such advances are a way of life for most men. It is most men's experience that almost all of their sexual advances are unwanted. Men, perforce, are empiricists when it comes to experiments in sexual chemistry: It's all trial and error, with errors outnumbering successes 20 to one. Men just hope that when rejection comes, it won't be extraordinarily painful. Certainly, they hope it won't come with an arrest warrant.

Maybe women have been right all along: We just don't talk anymore. How did it get this bad?

Fern Offices

Women invented fern bars. Then they went to work, where the same transformation is underway. Instead of the pickup bar, we have the singles' water cooler.

The secret life of men: The sexualization of the office was inevitable as an unprecedented number of women baby boomers came of working age. Relatively well-educated and prosperous women rejected their mothers' examples and headed straight for the amusements of the work world, where they hoped they might find the same rewarding life they were certain that men secretly must be leading. Women (continued on page 156)Women(continued from page 118) see men playing the games men play. They see men swallowing the fallacy of self-importance and they want to taste it themselves. Women, of course, find no more meaning in work than men do, so their irritation grows, along with their belief that something is being held back from them, some crazy, rewarding thing that makes sense out of life. They think this thing is hidden around the office somewhere, and the more they fail to find it, the more they hate men for hiding it.

The secret life of women: If women are defined by what they are, men are defined by what they do. This essential meaninglessness for men leads to an affection for diversion, which is why work was invented in the first place. Men know it's just a place where a guy can pleasantly waste his life.

Women looked for the meaning of life at work, and it wasn't there. But what women did find at work was men, and that did not please them because they resented the way men worked. When the vicissitudes of working life went against them, they placed the blame on men--sometimes fairly, sometimes not.

Be nice to your sister: The unfair accusations and resentments of women sparked equal resentments in men, many of whom, after all, spent a childhood of enforced sexual equality playing football with rules altered by mom to make sure their little sisters could play without getting hurt. Which ruined the game. Men quickly discovered that women at work were like sisters on the gridiron: They could be as aggressive and mean as they wanted. They could kick and hit if they got mad, secure that the boys wouldn't hit back for fear of parental wrath and peer dishonor. Women also discovered that they could play victim whenever it suited them. In consequence, the boys would play a little less roughly. This tactical advantage wasn't lost on women, whose continuing denial of its existence is only part of its exasperating charm.

Women will be girls: Girlishness is more than just the cloak of coquetry that envelops women of all ages. It is also the most lethal weapon in a working woman's arsenal. Of course, many girlish traits are worthy of men's admiration. But remember all the unpleasant and unfathomable characteristics girls had when you were in fifth grade?

They're back.

When a woman comes to work, she brings with her all the mysteries of girlhood. The same wild jealousies, the same suspicion of other women, the same tendency to want to play the rough games of boys and the same urge to cry if the game gets too rough. Even the forensics of childhood become familiar in the office: Where men tease to be friendly, bluster to complain and collect evidence to gain advantage, women ridicule to be friendly, whine to complain and scold to gain advantage. In fact, scolding is the default mechanism that sends women into mom mode whenever misbehavior is suspected.

Five Jobs Women Can Do Better than Men, or Could Do Better than Men if they Really Wanted To

1. Any professional, skilled or semiskilled job that doesn't involve heavy lifting

2. Selling cars and boats

3. Game-show letter turner

4. Mom

5. Topless go-go dancer in white thigh-high boots, with breasts that defy gravity and a tiny black-lace G string and innocent eyes as blue as the sky smiling right at you

Women are better than men at listening carefully during a conflict, keeping an open mind, understanding divergent points of view and taking revenge.

Men have their strong points, too.

Five Jobs Women Apparently Can't Do as Well as Men, No Matter What They Say

1. Broncobuster

2. Philosopher

3. Politician or Roto-rooter operator

4. Interior lineman

5. Pope

Also, men are better than women at getting jokes, hanging out, poking fun and working well with women.

How to Tell You're Working with Women

Evidence of female co-workers is easy to spot. Watch for these signs:

• Small potted plants, often wrapped in ribbons.

• Silver-foil balloons bearing slogans.

• Coffee cups with cartoons on them.

• Figurines that double as paper-clip holders.

• Plenty of photographs and other personal souvenirs.

• Lots of Breathing Zone signs.

• Really personal things stuffed into desk drawers.

• Women also read the fine print on calendars, so holiday and seasonal decor is another sure-fire indicator.

Around an office, men decorate, to abuse the word, either by hiring women to do the job or by a system that might be called random placement of artifacts--a burger wrapper on top of the file cabinet, on the wall a ticket stub from a ball game, maybe an old Air Wick in the corner under the desk. Women, on the other hand, bring little bits of America into their cubicles, which become colorful places decorated with a hint of Hallmark.

The look of a working woman: Until 20 years ago, millions of women dressed for work without thinking about much more than what they would wear. But working women became part of a constituency. What they wore became a personal statement and the morning routine got a lot more complicated.

Until quite recently, they wore the uniform of Working Women, which looked as if somebody had sent the contents of a guy's closet off for a sex-change operation. These women walked down the street like little gray refrigerators on parade, and offices looked like the set of Honey, I Shrunk Dick Butkus.

Now, work looks like an oversexed bridge club. Women have gained the confidence to dress like actual women, and, suddenly, working women look lovely, sometimes even sexy--an observation a careful man will keep very much to himself. There's something slightly inebriating about walking into an office where the air is rich with perfume and great-looking women are everywhere. Fat Ottoman Turks must have lived like this once, you think. To yourself.

Defense, Defense, Defense and Deportment

Be careful how you deal with women as co-workers. Good manners never change: You should try your best to maintain a certain amount of polite deference and courtly behavior, even though some traditional gestures may have to be abandoned. Normally, for example, a well-mannered man might be expected to stand when a woman enters his office. If you do that with a working woman, she won't even ask you where you are going. She'll just take your place.

There are a few common-sense rules that should always apply but have special relevance in the workplace:

• Ensure the safety and security of women at work, especially in dark parking lots and passageways.

• Discourage other men in your company from making lewd comments at women or making animal noises in the presence of women. Try not to be an embarrassment to your gender.

• Avoid touching a woman in any way that you wouldn't touch a man.

• Do not allow women to feel slighted, patronized or ignored in the normal course of business.

On the other hand: You can't abandon gender distinctions, either.

• Women take most things personally: If it's nine o'clock and you're reading the paper and sipping coffee, you can't ignore a woman the way you would a male colleague.

• Always, in dealing with women, remember that the emotional factor is close to the surface and that women won't shrug off insensitivity the way men will.

• Men should know they must tailor their conversations, however subtly, to take women into account.

• Finally, do not expect to share an easy camaraderie with most women; don't yell, "Yo, momma," across the floor at a woman. She may have to hear it all night at home.

The safest way to treat women at work is politely. Which is, of course, the same way you should treat them elsewhere.

Getting personal: Women often turn conventional disagreements into personal conflicts. One Manhattan D.A., when told about a defense attorney's rather impersonal view of a case she had prosecuted, began her rebuttal by sighing to a reporter, "It's so like Jack."

Personalizing conflict is highly efficacious, as anyone who ever had to argue with an aunt, mom or sister will recall with some pain. Lowering conflict to a personal level allows for no rational response. It creates a sort of instant suspension of the rules and moves the debate to an emotional plane, one that most women find more comfortable. (It must be noted, however, that this feminine conceit wasn't lost on Ronald Reagan, who adopted it in the course of his pivotal debate with Jimmy Carter, when he responded to one of Carter's policy statements by saying, "There you go again," which was the 1979 equivalent of, "You just don't get it.")

Women in positions of authority perceive their positions to be embattled. For them, personalizing conflict doesn't resolve the conflict, but it often does win the debate--and often, that's enough.

The Feminine Warrior

Office politics is largely a matter of who knows what about whom and how that knowledge can be used. Because many women are geniuses at gathering and trading information, they have a huge advantage in the office game.

So that's another good reason to live your personal life outside the office. Once you start circulating office memos on the end of your dick, you're looking for big trouble.

Trust: Women, however, are as trustworthy as men, with an added dash of loyalty. As a rule of thumb, you're better off trusting a woman co-worker you know well than you are trusting a man. Men play to win. Women often play to tie. Or, to put it another, less savory way: Too many men go to work the same way they go to war. Too many women go to work the same way they go to bed.

Caution: Sex at Work

The good news is, work is where all the women are. The bad news is, work is where all the women are. If you try to ignore the obvious, you will only fail, since sex-neutral behavior is for automatons. You can pull it off for a while, but as a way of life, being the office eunuch ultimately is unrewarding. People soon grow to distrust and dislike the utterly sexless. Those who try and make sexlessness an office policy only breed complaining castrati and dour, sere broads. The result is a hostile work environment, almost as though sexual harassment were the office policy.

Besides, despite all the recently fashionable hysteria about office sex, most people understand that work is the best place to meet a potential lover. The reasons are obvious:

• You get a chance to know someone better than you would in most other circumstances, so you won't have to face any troubling surprises--like an armed boyfriend at the door--when you take her home.

• The conversation for the first few dates comes with a built-in cushion that precludes awkward silences.

• The tension of a secret office liaison is a mighty little aphrodisiac. As one professional noted, there's nothing quite so arousing as sex on the office broadloom.

If you get involved with a co-worker, make sure you understand the boundaries of permitted behavior. This is a highly situational thing, of course. In some offices, interdepartmental intercourse is just part of the big, bad world, while in others, it's grounds for derailing not just one career, but two. You can rely on instinct, but you should double-check with Personnel.

Romances with a subordinate are the junk bonds of office affairs--easy to get into, expensive to get out of. Unless it's love and marriage at first sight, be careful on the first night. When you get involved with your assistant or your secretary or your boss's secretary, you not only take on the high-risk burden of conducting a courtship at work, but you also take on the higher-risk burden of one day having to end it. No matter how hard you try to be aboveboard, when you end an office affair, the shit doesn't just hit the fan, it goes through the whole climate-control system.

One-night stands with co-workers are even worse, because no matter who seduced whom, somebody's feelings are going to be hurt, and it's more likely to be hers than yours. If she dumps you after a one-nighter, tough for you. If you dump her after a one-nighter, the whole apparatus of social policy comes down on you: Imagine how much she'll hate you. Imagine what she'll be thinking when she looks at you. Imagine what she'll say about you to your co-workers. Imagine what she'll say about you to your boss. Imagine she is your boss.

Sleeping with your boss finds many parallels in the real world. It's sort of like, say, walking into a casino with all your children's college money, finding a roulette table and putting the whole pile on 16. It's like falling in love with a really beautiful, drop-dead sexy Moonie. It's like stepping forward to catch a baby thrown out of the sixth floor of a burning building. Many men enjoy high-risk activities. Few enjoy looking for a job.

On the road to mayhem: Being on the road with an attractive workmate may lure you into believing that your passions can have a free ride. Forget it. The yawning abyss of self-destruction is just as dangerous on the road as it is in the office. And your danger only increases with other complications.

Calculate your risk: Let's assume that sleeping with the officemate of your daydreams merits 100 on the risk scale, and that any liaison that scores 200 or more points is sure death:

• Add 25 points if the romance starts on the road, since the return to reality can be a rough re-entry.

• Add 55 points if the romance that started on the road wouldn't have started at all if you hadn't been on the road.

• Add 65 points if the romance that started on the road is with an immediate superior or immediate subordinate.

• Add 70 points if she's happily married, or if you're married at all.

• Add 90 points if you fall in love with her but she thinks you're a jerk who took advantage of her.

• Add 101 points and die immediately if she is your boss and if she was drunk when it happened and if she angrily denies it happened when she sobers up.

No frills: There is a practical side to coed travel, as well. Quite rightly, women crave security when they're on the road. Respect your colleague's wishes if she says she wants to spend the evening in her room. For good reasons, most women aren't as adventurous as most men, and the idea of exploring all that Denver has to offer after dark may not be as alluring to her as it is to you.

Who's on Top

Many men--especially those in service and information industries--can go through a large part of their careers laboring under the supervisory eye of a woman boss. Many of these men know that just as women can make great friends, they can also make great bosses.

But some women can also make bitter enemies, tyrants who wear their insecurity with electric ostentation and who will kill you before they accept the responsibility for a mistake they made. They can be martinets who rule without mercy and play the game of work with a stubborn blindness turned toward concepts of fair play--irrelevant concepts they claim men learned in little league.

There's also a bottom-line inscrutability about many women bosses, some silent acknowledgment that no matter what, you can never go to her and have a buddy-to-buddy chat. It's the same unreadable quality that helps women excel in office politics. After all, most men avoid getting personal with their bosses--or with anyone else. When, because of some family emergency or some similar catastrophe, men find themselves wailing the blues in the boss's office and the boss is another man, the situation is dealt with expeditiously, with a tacit agreement that the encounter will disappear from the calendar of events almost instantly and will never be a part of permanent memory. Men don't deal in the commerce of emotions, so your slobbering confessional isn't a convertible currency with a man. Not so with a woman.

There's another nuance here as well. During the Seventies and early Eighties, when men were trying to cry their way into women's hearts, women learned that sensitized men were wimps who cried all day and were useless all night. Now, women despise weakness in men, and not just in their lovers, either. If you really want to get a cold shoulder from a woman, any woman, try crying on it.

If you're the boss, you're a lucky chap, since women as subordinates have the clever ability to organize all those troublesome details that men customarily overlook, often with disastrous results. Women, as mentioned above, are more loyal, more likely to afford you protection when you need it. They make better co-conspirators and are less likely to trade your hide for a cheap shot at a promotion. Hence, the women who work for you should be treated in a friendly fashion--yea, in a fraternal fashion.

The Unspeakable

There are a number of bizarre aspects to working with women, aspects about which we must never speak.

From time to time, you may walk into a female co-worker's office, say "howdy" and watch in bewilderment as she breaks down in tears. You will be well-advised not to notice this sort of emotional enthusiasm, doubtless a consequence of P.M.S. or some other gender-specific inconvenience. Women will earnestly and repeatedly deny that menstrual stress influences their behavior. Yet P.M.S. is occasionally the basis for defending murderesses, and the women of America support a menstrually related drug industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars. There's a chance that a woman's behavior may be altered by biology. This is not news, of course. It is one of the great unspoken truths that, if uttered, subjects the utterer to ridicule, defamation and possibly sudden loss of income.

Flirtation: Women often use flirtation, innuendo, coyness--sexual harassment, if you will--to accomplish goals and achieve aims at work. Eventually, this may become part of the hideous public debate over sex at work, but smart men will wait until somebody else brings up the subject.

Intuition: This is an absolutely irrefutable feminine manipulation of logic. If it's your subordinate who is suddenly overcome with intuition, ask her to put her case on more verifiable grounds. If it's your boss who has the sudden stroke of intuition, say "Go with it, chief."

Two Problems

First of all, apparently nobody is keeping busy enough. While the Japanese nip at our right leg and the Europeans go for our left, America's businesses, sucked into the distraction of what the rest of the world sees, quite rightly, as a pubescent issue, are obsessed with solving girl problems and boy troubles while trying to make sure nobody's feelings get hurt. Soon we'll be a nation of florists.

And second, reasonable men recognize that there will never be a perfect truce between working men and working women. The sexes will never be indistinguishable at work. And that's probably good. Sex is the Mrs. Dash of office life. In even its most subtle shadings, sex makes quarterly plans and client lunches a little more interesting.

No generalizations: Any judgment of women--as co-workers or as anything else--tends to be overly generalized. Most women will argue vehemently that none of this pertains to them, that women are not different from men, that the only problem with men and women working together is men. Women say men are jerks. Men say women just aren't good guys.

But maybe women are right to a certain extent, at least about making sweeping claims. Generalizations are unfair.

There are some women to whom this handy guide does not apply:

• Margaret Thatcher

• Jeanne Kirkpatrick

• Mother Teresa