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Notes -
Painting someone's house is unmistakably a normal job, but if your boss demanded that you paint his house, that would be inappropriate.
The actual criterion is how much the boss personally benefits. It's true that the boss probably enjoys playing golf, so his benefit isn't precisely zero, but it's probably not that hard to find a golf partner and the main benefit is the socialization, not the fact that the boss really, really values golf.
Counterpoint: my maintenance man dad has done quite a bit of (paid) work on his boss's house. And, contra ControlsFreak's point about
my dad's boss is a small landlord — a guy who owns several buildings — and it's a "sole proprietorship"-type thing. His boss is the company. (Is there really that much of a difference, in this particular case, between "fix what needs fixing on this apartment building your boss owns," "fix what needs fixing on this house your boss owns and intends to 'flip' after it's fixed up," and "fix what needs fixing on this house your boss owns and happens to live in"?)
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I think this is only partially relevant. It explains that your boss making you paint their house or offering career advancement in exchange for being a tennis partner is bad, but not why the same situation but with sex would be even worse.
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I think the usual argument against such arrangements is not anything to do with the seriousness of sex or anything. Instead, it's about theft. Your boss is often also an employee of the company that is employing you. You're being paid to do work for the company, not for your boss. If he's getting you to do personal benefits purely for him, then some of your compensation (or hypothetical compensation that would need to go to your replacement in order to attract an employee into that position) would be misappropriated to his benefit rather than the corporation. Of course, principle-agent problems are everywhere, we can't always root out every de minimis misappropriation of benefits.
That said, we can widen the scope and even remove the personal benefit aspect without difficulty. Suppose the boss really wants to improve team cohesion for the team underneath him. He doesn't even think he needs to participate; maybe it would be better for the employees to build some camaraderie without any supervisory presence. So, he contracts a company to provide equipment and set up a little tennis "experience" that his team goes to, without him. There is still a lot of pressure for all the individual team members to go. Here, there's no misappropriation going to his personal benefit. I would again think that people might find this annoying or off-putting, but I can't imagine the response would be anything remotely like the outcry if he set up an event where the team (without him) went to a strip club... or an "orgy experience".
It is my impression that taking employees to a strip club was, if not common, not unknown either, before the women's movement complained.
I think there are two ways to proceed. Either we can tell the women's movement that their complaint is dumb, that sex is like tennis, and that we're going to reject their complaint and roll back to the world where sending employees to strip clubs is A-OK (and make this cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in)... or we can accept the women's movement complaint, and, uh, figure out how to make it cohere conceptually with the rest of the project we're engaging in.
Regardless, I think you skipped right over the "orgy experience" hypo, and I don't think you're going to be able to minimize that hypo to the point of throwing it away completely by just casually saying that it's a dumb women's movement complaint.
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