Sex times are tough these days, and ironically so. We live in such a sexed-up, hornified world that you can practically Seamless some sex, talk to your mom about anal and openly marry a hologram, yet the young people are having less actual sex than ever. To this an era of general anxiety about consent and appropriate sexual contact, and increasing awareness of fraught workplace power dynamics, and sneaking off to get it on while pressed up against the photocopier seems about as retrograde as, well, having a photocopier. So you had to ask, do people still have sex at work?
It’s a go-to fantasy for a lot of people, who can look at a fluorescent-lit cubicle hellscape and instead envision a screwball comedy filled with quippy sexual tension that turns into a blazing hot quickie in a huddle room. But in spite of the fact that lots of people do fantasize about sex at work (a recent survey found that 56 percent women do, and 61 percent of men), and say they’d do it if only Debbie in accounting would give them the signal, some signs point to no on the actual doing it.
There is an increasing number of offices that are banning the sort of holiday parties where booze is involved. That’s good for quelling sexual harassment, but bad for perfectly consensual office hook-ups, too. A number of men in offices have admitted that they feel uncomfortable mentoring women at work, but extra uncomfortable even being alone with them. Men and women are dialing it back on socializing outside of work too in light of the current mood, which also means fewer odds of interoffice romance, much less casual sex on the clock.
Just try and Google it, you’ll also find a number of cringe-inducing tales of people getting caught having sex at work, and it’s enough to put you off it forever. People boning at work after hours, filmed without their knowledge because they failed to close the blinds at work. The boss unaware the conference call video is still one while he bangs his underling on the table.
For the people who did something sexual at work, it was after hours. Another did so during the workday. The real shocker, some got to work early enough to do so before the place even opened up. Again, we still don’t know from any of these results how recent these occurrences are.
Another guy told me privately that he and his girlfriend had begun with an office hook up that included sex in their offices. The key, they had their own private offices with locking doors, and they snuck off during companywide meetings where they’d be less likely to be missed. Even still, he admitted it was dumb, and I asked him if he was worried about getting caught. “Oh, of course,” he said. “That’s part of what made it hot. “But that was way back in 2018.
But one thing he said struck me as a likely universal element in most of the tales of office sex. Only young, new relationships carry that kind of ‘oh-my-God-I-need-you-now-damn-the-consequences’ kind of sex.’ That makes sense because office sex is the sort of thing you’d need to be discreet about, given that the consequences for being found out can be particularly dire.
Most of the anecdotal stories I’ve heard about office sex involve much younger people in lax environments, or workplace affairs that suffer from fewer location options for doing the deed. The intern fucking her married boss on the down-low. The 26-year-old receptionist who has sex in an office corridor with her boss. The 22-year-old mommy blogger doing it on an office table top.
It’s not that people in open, socially acceptable relationships don’t want to get a naughty thrill from sex in illegal or frowned-up places. It’s just that most of the time they can actually go somewhere else. The affair turns everyone into a teenager on a first date f@#*king in cars, sneaking around into alleyways and turning every moderately private location into a bedroom.
