Who Owns Your Ass?

Le sigh.

There is just so much that seems to be wrong with this story that I’m just not sure where to begin.  In case you’re not much of a link clicker, lemme break it down for you. . .

An anonymous sex blogger, who worked under the pen name The Beautiful Kind, made a mistake at some point in the past and had her real name linked to her Twitter account for about 5 minutes.  When she realized it, she went in and changed the profile and removed her name.  Eventually, some social media crawler thingy located the cached Twitter profile that had her real name and her pen name.  Her enterprising boss Googles the employee; finds the cached page; locates the blog; and fires her ass for being kinky.

You good?  Good.

There is just so much fucking wrong with this.

If you read this from The Beautiful Kind, which she posted on another blog as hers has been taken down, she talks in some detail about the actual firing “event.”* Although she doesn’t state as much, her description leads me to the unfortunate conclusion that her boss is a judgmental fuckwit.  While the company line as to reason for the firing is that it could make the organization look bad, one can’t help but read the sentence ‘”How COULD you put that stuff out there?’” and wonder if the boss wasn’t just skeeved out because her employee didn’t strictly go for lights-out , missionary position, penis-in-vagina fucking.

Ugh.  As far as I’m concerned, there is one acceptable construction for sentences beginning “how could you.”  That is, “How could you be so fucking stupid?”  And maybe that’s what TBK’s boss was saying–that it was foolish to ever link the real name to the online persona. Without getting into whether or not I agree that doing such a thing is foolish, I don’t think I buy that reading.  If the real issue was the risk that someone was going to Google this group’s fucking admin pool (and who has that kind of time), then the boss wouldn’t have freaked the fuck out the way she did.  She could have asked the blog be taken down OR, you know, just fired the woman like a damned grownup instead of scolding her like a child.

Instead, I think this particular “how could you” was the more commonly used construction of “How could you do such a thing?”  As in, how can you be such a pervert?  How can you talk about sex?  How can you talk about your pussy on the internet?  HOW CAN YOU NOT BEHAVE LIKE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BEHAVE?

This?  Is truly, truly, no fucking employer’s business.

Here’s the thing, I care deeply about the activities of one vagina in this wide-world.  It happens to be mine.  The sole penis with which I concern myself is attached to the dude sleeping next to me.  I admit, I do like to know when hypocrites with a history of hate get caught with their dick somewhere it doesn’t belong , but that has to do with my dislike of hate and hypocrisy and not my feelings surrounding sex.  As to the rest, whatever goes on between or among consenting adults is none of my damn concern, and it sure as shit isn’t the concern of someone’s employer (unless one works for a fucking hatemonger, in which case, one has much bigger problems).

The corollary:  my vag?  No one’s business but mine.  Even invited guests don’t get an ownership interest.  Of course, this sole pussy proprietorship thing is not a terribly popular idea.  Women’s personal and physical autonomy is infringed so constantly that much of the time we don’t even notice when its happening to ourselves.  It’s like gravity–that’s just the way the world works.  Except, you know, it’s seriously fucked up.

To my mind, this isn’t just another seemingly sex-negative chick shaming story. This also raises the question for me of what, exactly, do we owe our employers?  Or, more importantly, what don’t we?  Assuming one’s shows up, performs satisfactorily, and doesn’t run afoul of the law–exactly how much control should our employers have over us when we’re NOT on the clock?

I get that it’s not “safe” and perhaps not “smart” to have your real world and online personalities be linked, but I also think that kind of misses the point.  It’s ridiculous to me that the legal things one does in one’s off hours is somehow in the purview of one’s employers. Googling one’s employees juuuust to see to what they’re up to is, methinks, a bridge too fucking far.  At what point is enough enough?

I don’t know how we’ve arrived at a place where our employers own not only our 40 plus hours a week, but also our “free time” as well.  TBK wasn’t writing about how much her job sucked, or how much of a cuntrag her boss was–although lord knows it seems it would have have been a fair assessment–she was writing personal shit about her personal life.  It’s stupid to argue that she should have been obligated to keep it all private.

I get that our personalities blur more and more as we all become increasingly connected. We are going to have to redefine and articulate our spaces and boundaries.  The fact of the matter is that what I do in my off hours is not my bosses’ business, even if I choose to do some of those things in public.