The Man Gene: Foreign and Domestic

I have written previously about The Man Gene because of its impact on a significant workplace subject. Sexual harassment charges are filed every day. Employees are frequently fired for inappropriate sexual conduct. The Man Gene elucidates the sexual divide between men and women and exposes the challenge of complying with the law in today’s society.

It’s no secret that the French are much less conflicted than Americans when it comes to the subject of sex. According to the New York Times, the French are pushing the sex envelope again – from a movie called Cliente to a president who’s on his new, third, hot wife to a justice minister who’s unmarried and pregnant. Cliente posits the notion that a middle-aged woman who finds herself alone should be able to find sexual fulfillment, even pay for it, just as men do. President Sarkozy was more or less publicly dating his third wife, a model-turned-pop-singer, while he was still married to his second one. No one seems to care that the pregnant justice minister, a Muslim, isn’t married.

While America may not be France when it comes to sex, America has long been the recipient of imported French sexual mores. The Graduate’s Mrs. Robinson had no trouble seducing a much younger man, and Class was about a mother who had an affair with her son’s college roommate. President Clinton was impeached for his tryst with a young intern in the Oval Office, but he wasn’t convicted. Soliciting prostitution is a crime in the U.S., but Eliot Spitzer isn’t going to be prosecuted for it. Representative Linda Sanchez of California recently announced that she will be the first congresswoman in history who isn’t married to have a baby while in office.

Not to mention the latest issue of Vanity Fair showing Kate Winslet baring all on the cover and inside the magazine. Outside the workplace, we live in a world where sexual images abound, where sex is used to sell everything, and where movies and TV show sex, sex, sex.

The French recognize The Man Gene as a fact: 79% of French women and 59% of French men believe that a man’s sexual needs are biologically higher than those of women. If true, The Man Gene is a factor to be reckoned with by men and women and the companies that employ them.  

But when you go to work every day, you’re not to think about sex, speak about it, or do anything about it. That’s asking a lot, given the sex-haunted world in which we live. I’m not advocating that our employment laws be changed. I’m not saying that The Man Gene isn’t a destructive force at times. I am saying that rather than ignoring this phenomenon or telling The Man Gene to take a cold shower, men and women and their employers should have frank discussions about a subject that’s increasingly schizophrenic in this country and that’s the continuing cause of many lawsuits arising in the workplace.