I’m not big on nostalgia – if the past was so great, how come it’s history? – but I allowed myself a smirk of reminiscence on reading recently that Ann Francke, chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute (‘a professional body focusing on management and leadership’) has put the damper on the age-old tradition of getting blotto at work parties.
Francke told the BBC that while hanging out after-hours with workmates is ‘a great team-building opportunity’, managers have a responsibility to keep inappropriate behaviour in check. ‘That might mean adding additional activities alongside alcohol, limiting the amount of drinks available per person or ensuring that people who are drinking too much are prevented from acting inappropriately towards others,’ she said.
In the light of recent reports of sexual harassment on the part of male management towards female subordinates at various organisations, this might well be a case of shutting the stable door after the predator has bolted. A CMI survey of more than 1,000 managers found that a third have witnessed ‘inappropriate behaviour’ at work parties; predictably, women were more likely (33 per cent) than men (26 per cent) to have witnessed sexual harassment, as they were far more likely to be the harassed. One has to wonder how many of the men who reported seeing slavering beasts making pests of themselves were unknowingly, in their sloshed state, looking into a mirror at the time.
I can’t help feeling that the defanging of the workplace party is yet another bid to make us all toil at home alone like good little bots, thus further wiping out worker solidarity and making us easier for the boss class to control
But it’s not parties that are the problem when it comes to sexual harassment in the workplace. It’s men. Not all men, of course – comparatively few, in fact – but I’d say a stone-cold sober man is more likely to assault a female colleague than a drunken woman is to bother a male colleague. Watching pornography at work probably doesn’t help matters: in one survey last year an extraordinary 60 per cent of respondents admitted to doing so, and I bet that the majority were men. It’s particularly distasteful when politicians and police are caught doing it; law-makers and law-enforcers, the vast majority of them highly undesirable, being encouraged to believe that women are panting for them at all hours of the day, including nine to five. So really, blaming the office party for bad behaviour is rather beside the point when it’s the white noise of misogyny which makes so many workplaces unpleasant for women.
Ms Francke says that alcohol ‘doesn’t need to be the main event’ at a work do, and on this I agree with her. Of course booze shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all of a bash – drugs also used to play a great part in office parties when I was a girl. How well I recall the thrilling build-up to the Yuletide work bashes of my teenage career at the New Musical Express, and how we little urchins would wait expectantly for the first white stuff of Christmas. More innocent times, when we didn’t need technology to enjoy ourselves. Kids today don’t know the meaning of fun; less drugs, less sex – no wonder they’re depressed as never before.
Writing in the Times last week, Hannah Evans reported that something called ‘sober dating’ is a trend among youngsters for the summer ahead: ‘For an emerging wave of single people, DUI (dating under the influence) is a turn-off,’ she said. ‘Some of them are even lumping it in the same category as smoking – a vice universally acknowledged as unhealthy and, quite frankly, a bit gross. On TikTok, searches for the term “alcohol is new cigarettes” has more than 13 million views and there are hundreds of videos on the app comparing the two. According to research by the dating app Tinder, almost three quarters of people who use the app have stated on their profile they either don’t drink or only have the occasional one.’
Good luck with that; we’re told that drinking causes anxiety, but I remember my robust cohort chucking it back from our earliest teens, and I’m certain we weren’t such poor sad creatures. People aged 16 to 34 are most likely to say that work parties should be organised around activities not involving alcohol, so I was pleased to see the 24-year-old Spectator World writer Kara Kennedy declare that ‘the office Christmas party is the opportunity for a night of true debauchery before you all head off for the festive break, leaving just enough time to live down anything embarrassing you might have done’. If people don’t want to get drunk or be offended, the solution is a simple one: just stay home.
It would be terribly short-sighted to phase out the office party, for the sake of team morale as much as anything else; surely very few things bond people faster than getting drunk together. Of course there’s always a risk of massive arguments, but that very risk is what makes a drunken office party worthwhile – you’re testing your team in the fire of booze, to see if they can still get on with each other once everyone’s said what they really think. I can’t help feeling that the defanging of the workplace party is yet another bid to make us all toil at home alone like good little bots, thus further wiping out worker solidarity and making us easier for the boss class to control.
Besides, the real danger to women in the workplace is now as much bile-fuelled gender-pests as booze-fuelled sex-pests, as everyone from Maya Forstater to Kathleen Stock has discovered. As Julie Bindel wrote for The Spectator this week: ‘Resistance to gender ideology and medical experiments… has come at a huge cost to those of us that have spoken out. Women have been hounded out of their jobs, become unemployable… when all we were doing was trying to expose the biggest medical scandal in the past century.’ So please, leave us our boozy office get-togethers – they’re the least of our workplace troubles now, compared with the witch-hunts of the New Puritans.
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