(cross-posted from my tumblr, in response to http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/05/nonprofit-fires-woman-for-blogging-about-sex.html)
This kind of awful nonsense makes me furious. And is part of why I’ve always kept it fairly easy to find some of my less savory writing on the internet. Hell, within the first page or two of posts on my blog there are scraps of a fiction piece that includes a drunken lesbian sex scene and drug references and lots of swearing.
I went to a job interview yesterday, and should be hearing back soon. It is a job I would love to have— pleasant, intelligent, interesting people; work that is neither back-breaking nor totally without demands. Fingers crossed. But the job search process always makes me think about this kind of thing. Of course there is an element of… not deceit, but the adoption of particular demeanors. You are of course not the exact same person at work as you are elsewhere. But the fact is, I sometimes write about sex, on the internet and elsewhere (hell, I’ve been naked in the New York Times), and any job that would fire me for doing so is a job I do not want– or at least one in which I would not last very long.
Point: over-reachingly sex-negative work environments make me super pissed. Yikes.
