Christoph Niemann
My wife wrote “sex night” on my Shared calendar (we’re trying for a baby). My coworker was offended. Do I need to apologize?
I forwarded your email to someone who I thought could help. His name is Ernest Greene, and when I got him on the phone he didn’t have much patience for this coworker of yours. “It was probably wrong to put ‘sex night’ on a public calendar where everyone can see,” he said. “At the same time, I think the person was being thin-skinned.” Greene was curious what sort of job you have if your workplace is really this uptight and censorious. “In our industry,” he told me, “the typical response to learning your coworker is going home to have sex would be: ‘Can I watch? Is it going to be anything interesting or just the regular in and out?’” See, Greene is executive editor of Hustler’s Taboo magazine and the director of more than 500 X-rated videos.
Greene wanted his wife to weigh in on the issue too. She was sitting across the room from him, working on her laptop, so he forwarded her the email.
“Nina! Nina!” he hollered at her. Then he grumbled to himself, “How do you hit Send on this thing?!” Then he yelled to his wife, “I sent it!” Then he grumbled to himself again: “I hope that sent the whole thing and not just what I wrote back to you.” Then he yelled to her: “Let me know if that sent the whole string or just what I wrote!”
This went on for a while.
Finally, Nina came on. She’s more commonly known as Nina Hartley, a 55-year-old legend of the porn industry who has starred in more than 650 films. Hartley was more diplomatic. She too was surprised that a married couple trying to conceive a child would scandalize anyone, but, she said, “you’ve got to pick your battles.” After all, once you do have a kid you’ll likely need to ask for a lot of understanding from your coworkers—permission to leave work early or stay home when the little one gets a cold. So, Hartley said, why not humor this offended colleague with an apology, or even offer to change “sex night” to “date night”—just to smooth out any ruffled feathers. Then, out of nowhere, Hartley told me a corny joke about physics: “Two atoms are walking down the street, and one turns to the other and says, ‘Oh my God, I’ve lost an electron.’ The first atom says, ‘Are you sure?’ And the second atom says, ‘I’m positive.’”
In other words, I phoned two famous pornographers and discovered an absolutely delightful run-of-the-mill aging married couple—folks who get frustrated with their smartphones, yelp at each other across the room, and cackle at their own geeky jokes. Maybe relay this story to your coworker. After all, all she has to do is accept that a run-of-the-mill married couple—i.e., you and your wife—occasionally have sex.
I’m thinking of having my friends over for a “dog fight,” where we bet on battling Roombas. Does this encourage cruelty to animals? Or am I overthinking it?
You are overthinking it. (You are also incredibly bizarre—just for the record.) You want to know about animal cruelty? Consider the Olympics. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in ancient Greece, the games climaxed with a ritualized sacrificial slaughter of 100 oxen. But since then, the whole enterprise has evolved. This year’s Olympic host city, Sochi, concocted a gleeful anthropomorphized polar bear and a chubby leopard to serve as mascots. I see you and your Roomba as taking a small step in the same direction: away from barbarity, toward something cuter. It’s innocent. It’s sort of embarrassing. It’s pretty dumb. Carry on.