Sex Jokes

Sex Jokes

There's an old Slavoj Žižek joke I quite enjoy.

A man is driving a woman home after a first date (swap or change genders as you like). The woman, smitten, says to the man: "Would you like to come up and join me for some tea?" The man rather obliviously responds: "No, sorry, I don't like tea." The woman then replies: "That's okay, neither do I."

(Doesn't reading that makes you feel old and young at the same time?)

Anyway: The joke is partly about the bumbling obliviousness of men, but it has a slightly deeper message about the value of what is indirect, or implied, when we communicate. The joy of flirting is the joy of keeping the most important things unsaid. Flirting lets us play a game of interpretation. It lets us figure things out for ourselves.

Flirting is a way of respecting someone's intelligence.

People are Smart

Good jokes assume people are smart. They assume we can distinguish text from subtext. That most people get jokes tells us this is a fairly common (though certainly not universal) ability.

Of course, our workplaces also need to be direct. This isn't a simple case of valuing the indirect *over* the direct. Rather, it's about how the things we talk about indirectly prepare us to talk about them directly. It's hard to talk about sex. It's also hard to talk about dissatisfaction, bad results, and poor leadership.

The most uncomfortable things start as subtext before they are made explicit. Flirting happens *before* explicit discussions about consent. Employee disengagement happens *before* resignation. Employee resentment happens *before* sabotage or resistance.

The indirect isn't more important than the direct, but it does come first.

Read the Room

I've had a few clients lately who have asked, rather specifically, that they would like their people to be better at reading the room.

I love this request. It's one of the few times that comedy parlance is used in ordinary workspeak. To read the room is to pick up and be able to respond to subtext. It's flirting as a competency.

When we read the room, we can figure out the conversations we need to have before they become too big to deal with. The route to a direct conversation is often an awareness of the indirect conversation.

It's easier to talk about tea than sex.

What's the conversation you're not quite having at work?