Opinion: When is it smart to have sex with your boss?
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Nobody ever calls San Francisco the place where boys will be boys, but the Fog City’s board of supervisors has decided to spare Mayor Gavin Newsom an umpteenth public humiliation for his affair with a subordinate earlier this year. Reports the S.F. Chron:
San Francisco supervisors voted down a measure Tuesday that would have barred city managers from engaging in sexual relationships with their employees — a thinly veiled swipe at Mayor Gavin Newsom’s admitted affair with a staffer, who also was his campaign manager’s wife. The measure failed with an overwhelming 10-1 vote, with only Supervisor Chris Daly, the legislation’s sponsor, voting in favor of it. ‘It is common practice in the corporate work setting where managers ... are held accountable and these types of relationships are not tolerated,’ Daly said.
Let the record show that Chris Daly has at least once in his life alluded to the ‘corporate’ model as the right way of doing anything. But he’s onto something interesting with his comment. In fact, the private-sector non-toleration of these types of relationships is a custom more honored in the breach, though employers are probably more attentive to and scrupulous about such matters now than ever before in history. And since political office involves tools of coercion the rest of us can only dream about, there’s an argument for holding city officials to the strictest possible standard.
But Daly’s stunt — a fun flipside to the old, equally valid, argument that Bill Clinton was guilty of a workplace indiscretion that would have ended the career of any private-sector chief executive — mainly reminds us that the culture has settled into a pretty sane groove with regard to workplace sex. In the early days of sexual harassment awareness (which, lacking any solid marker, I date to the recording of Frank Zappa’s ‘Sexual Harassment in the Workplace’ in 1981), quid pro quo and hostile-work-environment categories both got a lot of criticism — the former because, as Paul Wolfowitz most recently discovered, it can be hard to define in a consensual relationship; the latter because male hysterics like David Mamet terrorized the nation with visions of men devoured by shrieking, frantic womenfolk — but both are bright lines that have held up pretty well. You and I may differ on whether we think such behavior ought to be illegal, but that it’s frowned upon (and in some respects always was frowned upon) is a sign of mental health.
In a strictly legal sense, Daly’s on the right track: the policing of sexual behavior under asymmetrical power dynamics is a potentially boundless pursuit, and Newsom is as good an experimental subject as any. (An affair with a subordinate is an indiscretion; an affair with a subordinate who’s also the wife of your friend and campaign manager, well, that’s the mark of a man who’s really trying.) In reality, Americans, and not just San Franciscans, have stopped far short of the absurdum, and still prefer to leave latitude in cases where neither party is objecting to the encounter.
Read our Mayor Newsom transcript.