Office romance is dead in the age of #MeToo

Iwonder if we are beginning to see the end of assortative mating. For a long while now we have tended to select our life partners from the place in which we work — rather than, as before, from our home towns or places of education. This process began with the long march of women into the workplace in the early 1970s, a development which, while overall being undoubtedly both benign and just, nonetheless slightly widened the gap between rich and poor. Men and women who worked together had a tendency to, if I can put it like this, cop off. This meant we had many more families where both parents worked, and many more families where nobody worked. Assortative mating of this kind was exacerbated by the fact that we were ever more transient and mobile, and marrying later and later.

But new and wonderfully woke employment laws may be starting to reverse this trend, and both men and women may soon be thinking: if we can’t sleep with anyone at work, who actually can we sleep with? The story of Steve Easterbrook, the now former boss of McDonald’s, is a case in point. Easterbrook, who is British, was fired from his £12 million per year job because he had enjoyed a consensual sexual relationship with a woman with whom he worked. This came to the notice of his bosses and that was it: out. What I found remarkable about this story was the almost complete acceptance it was afforded in the media, as if this was a perfectly just decision taken for decent reasons by a caring and mindful multinational company. Not just the media, either — Steve Easterbrook himself said he agreed with the company’s decision and that it was time for him to ‘move on’. I daresay his payoff will have lessened his grief, but still. Easterbrook is long divorced. There is nothing whatsoever to suggest that his relationship with the unnamed woman was anything other than entirely consensual, and indeed McDonald’s didn’t seem to care one way or another about that — simply that it happened and that Easterbrook was on a higher payscale than his girlfriend.

A McDonald’s worker in New Orleans, Tanya Harrell, who has claimed she was groped at work, said dozens of complaints of sexual harassment at the company have been ignored. ‘With the firing of Steve Easterbrook, we now know why,’ she added. But what does Easterbrook’s relationship have to do with sexual harassment cases? He was fired because he had sex with someone who was junior to him in the hierarchy. If the woman had been in the position of authority then she would have been fired. I don’t know what the McDonald’s regs say about men and women who are on exactly the same pay and grade who decide to indulge in a bit of extracurricular poking — maybe they both get fired.

I remember about 25 years ago hearing John Humphrys interview the somewhat odd feminist author, the late Andrea Dworkin, on Today. As you might imagine, it was not a meeting of minds. At one point Ms Dworkin said to Humphrys: ‘Any act of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is necessarily coercive.’ John harrumphed a little and replied: ‘Not in my experience it isn’t.’ Dworkin’s extreme views were considered hilarious back then — and yet it seems to me today that this is the precisely the view implicit in the regulations laid down by McDonald’s. Because Easterbrook was in a position of authority, the coercion was tacit: he had the power, she didn’t. She might have found his advances — if he made advances — unpleasant but difficult, because of her subordinate position, to resist. That there is not the slightest evidence to support this thesis does not matter one jot. In a Marxist sense, the woman was objectively exploited. It is odd to think of McDonald’s as a Marxist company, but there we are.