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Notes -
Since you mentioned The Office, one of my favourite moments in the whole series is the episode where Toby leads the office in sexual harassment training. Michael's boorish friend Todd Packer visits the office and spends the episode making crude comments about everyone and everything. By the end of the episode when Packer is directly insulting Phyllis's appearance, Michael finally seems to grasp that Packer's behaviour is unacceptable and tells him so - and then, being Michael, he takes it too far and starts lavishing praise on how gorgeous Phyllis is, to the point of claiming to have an erection.
It's easy to imagine the high-concept writer's pitch for this episode: "Michael is so aggressively opposed to sexual harassment in the workplace that he inadvertently ends up committing an even more extreme kind of sexual harassment". But it does say something about how sweepingly these policies are written. Explicitly telling your colleague that you want to fuck them (or implying it) is sexual harassment; explicitly telling your colleague that you don't want to fuck them (or implying it) is also sexual harassment. Take it to its logical conclusion and it suggests that every employee should have zero opinion on their colleagues' attractiveness (or lack thereof) whatsoever - perhaps we could issue everyone burqas to expedite the process? From my understanding, the Anglosphere is something of an outlier in this regard - in Italy, jokes, banter and playful flirting are seen as an ordinary and desirable part of office culture. I know it can be taken too far and there are severe downsides to that approach, but the modern Anglosphere approach isn't costless either, and when you think about how deracinated, sexless (in the literal and figurative senses) and adversarial modern Anglosphere working culture is, it's hard not to think that something lovely was lost along the way. Not too long ago, playful banter between two colleagues which eventually escalates into a passionate kiss at the Christmas party was one of the predominant routes to nuptials - now it has largely fallen by the wayside, in favour of the "superior" option of the Tinder algorithm doing the legwork for us.
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