One big viewpoint shift I've had over the past 5 years is that it should be very hard to fire people for their actions outside of work. By and large things that aren't criminal, don't involve employees of the company or their customers, and are not done under the guise of being an employee of the company should be that person's business alone. I get that there are a lot of grey areas, but it feels to me we've gone way too far the other way.
While I agree in principle, the fact remains that certain things you publicly do in your free time will change the way people view you and their respect for you as a professional. In the end, it affects your ability to do your job when you lose respect of your colleagues and clients.
In a perfect world, this wouldn’t be a problem, but we’re far from that.
The problem is that the line is very arbitrary and capricious.
I work for a government entity, and am subject to a variety of ethics laws that dictate certain aspects of my behavior outside of work. It’s onerous and heavy handed, but at least there are rules and case law to provide some level of due process and fairness. It still sucks - I actually have a social life, and I have to be very careful about who I’m around and that there is no problematic perceptions.
With private sector employers, especially entities that aren’t publicly traded, you don’t always know where you stand and the rules are subject to the whims of people whom you may not even know.
If you aren’t in a public facing role authoritatively representing the company or using the company to promote your outside activity, it should be a non issue. How many gays were drummed out and persecuted before the law protected them?
It is - but the key thing is there are rules and due process. When your boss decides your swimsuit pictures are too titillating for you to be an accountant for a car dealership, different story.
Well, in some nation states one is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
A properly managed corporation would instill that mindset, stop things from being hostile, remind others of that “right” and then go from there.
The problem is that all corporations ignore this right and hedge proposed changes in profit at the expense of the working class employee’s means to life or insurance or both.
In a perfect world I think that people wouldn’t be resorting to OF or porn.
Imo people today do that to make fast money and well… I don’t personally know why I should be forced to accept or approve that kind of way of money making. I don’t respect drug dealers, corrupt businessmen, nor YouTube scammers. I also don’t respect people who perpetuate mental harms by producing porn and contributing to these issues. I do respect startup founders that solve actual problems, teachers who help improve failing schools, or scientists who don’t accept corporate funding to paint an inaccurate picture.
I value persistence, virtue, and meritocracy and no amount of social force will make me accept certain behaviors.
Just being honest with my opinion.
And people are free to disagree with my pov as well, and do whatever they want.
If I told you that I had moral views about the legal and consensual stuff you get up to in your private life (whatever that may be), and I told you I thought it was reprehensible and that you should lose your job over it, would you perhaps think I was being overbearing and that I should mind my own business?
Eg, if you were a person of faith (I have no idea if you are), and I was a militant atheist (to be clear I'm agnostic), and I told you that I thought all religion was harmful and said something disrespectful like, if you believe in an imaginary friend who grants wishes you aren't qualified to be a doctor/engineer/etc (this is not a position I actually endorse or an appropriate way to talk about religion) - can you see how you might tell me to get lost?
Are you causing harm through your actions? That’s really the only metric I use, and it’s pretty simple. If my actions were increasing mental issues, leading to people getting sick via inaccuracies, or causing pension funds to be misallocated then sure. You should call me out on it.
Money isn’t the end all be all. Id say if someone can make porn and publish it they can surely do something else with that “creative” energy.
I agree! They could be making movies like Winnie the Pooh, Blood and Honey or maybe the Saw movies. Lots of creativity there and no law against it. Probably wouldn't have been fired. But people-a husband and wife pleasuring each other? Intolerable! And while we are at it, you know that statue of David? Put some pants on it!
> But people-a husband and wife pleasuring each other? Intolerable!
Exactly this. There are plenty of couples out there making videos of themselves having sex, and it's not my place (or anyone else's) to tell them they can't.
The “frustrating” part is that a corporation only feels “harm” via financial impact and not the kind of harm we really speak of when discussing the actions of humans.
This is why “my own time” should be my own time. If I cause harm to an individual, there are already laws to deal with that.
If I have yet to cause financial harm to a corporation and they cannot articulate how my actions during time in which they do not pay me they should not be allowed to even consider firing me.
Things, imho, will improve when the default to seeing a video/post is to think “that’s AI, not Jim.”
Well, I was using thought experiments to avoid calling you out, but if you want me to be forthright, I can do that. I don't want to get into an argument though, honestly I don't even want to get into a debate, so I'm gunnuh say my piece and you can take it or leave it. I just don't have the energy to get into a debate. (Not to say you aren't free to respond however you see fit, I just probably won't respond if you defend your position.)
I do think you are taking a position which is harmful. For more reasons than I can get into in an HN comment, but the highlights are, you're exaggerating the potential for harm; you're projecting flat narratives in your head onto real people and using that to justify removing their bodily autonomy (eg, not everyone makes porn because they're desperate - some people are exhibitionists [no, I don't understand why either], some people enjoy that kind of work, some people do it for reasons neither of us have imagined); generally you're trying to impose your moral standards on to others.
But besides that, if you think about it. Firing people for doing porn as a side job is effectively forcing people into doing porn as a full time job. OnlyFans doesn't fire people for having a regular day job, so guess what remains as a revenue source.
I'm curious: "no amount of social force will make me accept certain behaviors." Why is "accept" the verb used in this statement? Why not "tolerate" or "allow" or "grudgingly ignore"?
To state my perspective by way of personal anecdote: I find it shitty that I have neighbors who like to run their errands with pistols strapped to their waists like they want to be Wyatt Earp when they grow up, but my acceptance or non-acceptance of the situation is irrelevant. I don't feel like I'm forced to accept the situation just because I have no right or power to change it by myself. As an aside: I bet if I tried to go get those neighbors of mine fired for their open-carry, I would end up shot.
I don't approve of many things that other people do, but I do accept the vast majority. I could go around decrying the mental harms caused to some by porn just as I could go around decrying the mental harms caused to some by religion. In the end, however, I find it easier to instead live and let live. I would hope you choose to the do the same instead of bothering others about their private lives.
Let's say you collect stamps. I think it's a stupid and morally irresponsible way of using your free time (you should be socializing or doing sports or learning something new). Just being honest with my opinion.
This is all ok. The problem is when we start firing people or shunning them for stuff we don't like.
"Not hanging out with someone" is the very definition of shunning, public or otherwise.
Why is firing a different matter? If I'm an employer in an at will state, I most certainly can fire someone who's not a member of a protected group, like atheists, say.
Let's take an example that's not a softball. What if your daughter's male elementary school teacher had a porn site and everyone in the class knew about it? How about your son's female middle school teacher? Apply to your therapist, or masseuse or whatever.
Do you not see a conflict of interest? How much of a distraction would that be? That's not so black and white to me.
This falls into the category of "effects their ability to perform their work" and (to some extent) "more harm than good" (because it impacts their ability to to do their work. And, in that case, it may be reasonable to no longer employ them for that role. I expect it's similar to sportsball players that have ethical clauses in their contracts; the point of their job is to bring in money for the team and, if people despise them for their actions, they may not be able to do that.
This would not be possible to implement in a lot of businesses where the "public image" of the employee (even during non working hours) matters to the company and its business.
But I agree with the argument "Judge the art, not the artist".
As Camus attempted to portray in "The stranger", the protagonist was on "a trial that judged his character and the ways in which he integrated in the society, not on a trial for killing an Arab".
Businesses themselves rarely fire people out of principle, but rather because of pressure.
(at least in the case outlined by GP, where the cause is "not criminal, not involving employees/customers, not done under the guise of being an employee")
The pressure often comes from the outside, and it's indeed very difficult for a business to fight it.
I don't think GP is arguing for it, I also don't know if I am arguing for it... but... IMO for those cases the only simple "solution" I can see is to legally protect those people from being fired for unrelated reasons, so that business has legal plausible deniability, and hopefully doesn't suffer the consequences itself.
> The pressure often comes from the outside, and it's indeed very difficult for a business to fight it.
In the rest of the world where you can't fire without a valid reason, it is very easy for them to say "We can't legally fire them for things they do unrelated to their job".
This is the crux of the matter. If you're the face of an institution, different rules apply. And your compensation and benefits should reflect this.
Most importantly, it should be in BLACK AND WHITE in your contract when you start. If you're someone who needs to abide by a code of conduct different from the norm outside of work hours, that absolutely should be something you're made crystal clear about, and are agreeing to.
For both your sake, and the sake of the institution having to clean up the mess otherwise.
At will employment exists for good reason. You can quit your job at any time for any reason and your employer can fire you at any time for (almost) any reason. There are a very narrow set of circumstances for which your employer cannot fire you, and this is by design. The government should have as little control as possible over who you hire and fire and why.
Do you mean we’ve become to lenient or too strict? I feel like image outside of work has always been something that employers have concerned themselves with and anything legal but untoward has been perilous for anyone in a highly paid career that’s image conscious. I guess what I’m asking, was it ever not like this? The internet has just made it easier for the overly image conscious to purge the ranks of unseemly people.
Of course it was never always like this. The CEOs todays CEOs look up to were having olive and martini lunches and finding company on paid business trips
Yes, and we should force people to shop at places who hold views they don't agree with. And I mean force. You can't stop buying from them. You have to give a fundamental reason why it's a worse place to shop. Otherwise it'd be illegal to not shop there.
Trust does not depend only on things that are illegal. For example you would not trust an obsessive liar, even if it is jus outside of work. For now. Because you will be convince it is a huge risk it will happen at work, sooner or later.
Same, you will not want to hire a famous womanizer. It will create chaos in your company or with clients. And you can find a huge number of examples to confirm that if what people do outside of work something that is considered negative, even if it is legal, it is a problem to hire them; maybe to keep them.
Free speech is fine in most cases. People can have opinions that other people dislike, even most people dislike. The problem is what they do (act), not what they say.
Morality clauses are common in positions of greater responsibility. They exist to keep the degenerates from destroying the reputation of the business or institution that employs them.
You mean normal? What percentage of the world’s population do you think agreed with me that making porn is degenerate, and also that Trump is a degenerate? 80% maybe?
I think the bar for what constitutes unacceptable outside of work behavior changes significantly as you move up the responsibility ladder. Once you are in any significant leadership position where credibility and moral authority matter, doing things that land you on the front page in situations that make you look highly partisan, or immoral, or just plain stupid, in the eyes of much of your constituency - employees, customers, or community - is a real tax on your ability to lead. It justifies firing. And, to be clear, if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway. Chancellor is not a back-office job.
Sex is not immoral. Fuck everyone who thinks it is and imposes that belief on others. People who impose those beliefs on others as a tool to ruin lives and careers should be in prison.
Depends on your definition of moral. In my book what is moral is what is an action or an attitude which is good for the whole society or at least living well in society.
The problem with sex is that its nature is EXCLUSIONNARY: sexual desire is made in part to discriminate who is the more fit or not to reproduce, especially among males. Historically only 60% men reproduced and 80% women... A HUGE LOT of people and especially men are not accesing sex on a regular basis.
In that sense you can't say porn / OF etcc are 'moral' in any way shape of form I think. There are actually many places in the world / religions that promote the idea that REGULATING sex (especially women's sex life) is the MORAL thing (since it allow a 'better' repartition of sex and reproduction in the society, especially for men).
I don't agree with any of it (and 100% share your point of view), but it's important to discuss the underlying reasons of what you observe in societies.. at least to better fight it.
Sounds like you want to impose your beliefs on others through threats of ruining lives and careers via the prison system... seems hypocritical to your otherwise live and let live (fuck and let fuck?) position.
I accept your clarification but your original comment was pretty specific to certain set of beliefs of a certain set of people, with a very specific punishment.
I don’t feel like you are making a genuine argument in good faith, as the alternative is literally anarchy. I would still be happier with that situation than the current oppressive regime, but come on… is that really what you are suggesting?
Yes, without naming it, because people (as you demonstrate) immediately presume anarchy === bad/chaos/disorder. All Anarchy means is No Kings, not No Order. In fact, anarchy allows for a type of emergent, bottom up order that cannot ever happen by top-down fiat mandate. It permits all (consensual, private property respecting) beliefs.
It does Not prevent someone else from disapproving of your actions (making porn), but it Does ensure that their response is limited only to their property/sphere of influence.
Anarchy has many different schools of thought. For those curious or intrigued, I'd recommend The Anarchist Handbook by Machael Malice. It contains a collection of writings from many different anarchist thinkers, from the violent dynamite throwers to the peaceful libertarians.
He's also got a podcast and has been on plenty of other podcasts, news shows, etc if you want video content.
As he says: "the black flag comes in many colors."
Porn is about the commodification of sex though, not about sex itself. You are also giving the worst interpretation possible, arguing it's "a tool to ruin lives and careers", which is very much not the point.
The article makes it clear that isn’t the case. Anyway, the issue is much broader than just porn. Every additional constraint you add on a job means the people leftover are somewhat less competent at their actual job.
Google for example is stuck with worse programmers due to their hazing stile interviews meaning many of the best either don’t apply or get falsely rejected. For companies this this isn’t such a big deal, but it helps explain why political parties rarely pick candidates that people really want to vote for.
> if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway.
YES, this - but 's/probably also too/obviously far too/'.
Plus - recent legal settlements in university sex scandal cases are getting into the 1/2 billion dollar league. Nobody responsible for university finances, however libertine they might privately be, would want a flaming-red-flag idiot like this to be allowed anywhere near their students, staff, or campus.
"if Gow really thinks his porn appearances don't impair him in his job as university Chancellor in small Wisconsin city, he's probably also too social judgement impaired for the job anyway."
He clearly stated, he was aware of it:
"We think our sex is beautiful and have no qualms at all about other people watching us make love,” they wrote. “But our establishment colleagues likely would be shocked … and we’re fairly certain we’d be shunned in our community. Our careers likely would be ruined.”"
He simply thinks it should be allright and accepted behavior even for a university chancellor and I agree with that.
What is unclear is if the author meant to make a broad statement about activities outside work that don't really interfere with work.
>wouldn’t it be simpler to agree that, at least if no laws are broken, one is judged at work only for what one does at work?
Would the author still agree with this sentiment if the activity outside of work was not pornography, but something they themselves find disagreeable? Let's say for example, participating in a KKK gathering. (not public activism, which certainly can interfere with someone in an official position) Please note that the KKK is a stand-in example rather than an actual example. You can imagine but I'd refrain from mentioning more real examples, which people are actually fired or "canceled" for, activities which certainly is far from something like pornography.
> Would the author still agree with this sentiment if the activity outside of work was not pornography, but something they themselves find disagreeable? Let's say for example, participating in a KKK gathering. (not public activism, which certainly can interfere with someone in an official position) Please note that the KKK is a stand-in example rather than an actual example.
From reading other stories by that author at that same publication, I think he'd agree.
He's against cancel-culture in general, and has been writing against it for the past few stories, at least.
A lot of this is simply that people are far more replaceable in their jobs than they believe, so a lot of firing is not that they did something terribly wrong, but rather that replacing them is simpler than dealing with minor damage.
So I suspect that if an affair made national news, the chancellor would be fired as well.
Any change to the current ways of doing things would need to be societal, as otherwise whatever institution is employing the person would pay a high price.
A honest question, only tangentially on-topic. Our parents all needed to have sex so we got conceived. So i would expect it to be a socially normalized thing, aka "people do it all the time".
But yet we live in a society where any form of open sexuality is shunned. If you want to play along you sort of have to pretend these things don't exist. Why is that?
I don't think this is the object of the discussion. I don't mind people that have sex (that means almost everyone I know), but I dislike people that do sex in public, with minors, with animals, with cadavers etc. For me, porn is similar with sex in public and this can be annoying, distracting or disliked by other people.
Your parents didn't need to record that sex and broadcast it publicly, possibly for profit.
People do it all the time privately (at least historically) because it was considered an intimate activity, not a banned activity (again, historically and generally speaking).
The problem is there are too many uncool, untraveled, insecure, stupid people who happen to be Americans who aren't getting any and cling to their prejudices as part of their self-righteous identity.
> Karen Walsh, the president of the UW Board of Regents, said she was “alarmed” and “disgusted” by Gow’s actions, which were, she stated, “wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor.” But Gow’s actions were neither consistent nor inconsistent with being chancellor. Strictly, his actions were outside the scope of that role. Or they could be considered so, if most Americans simply chose to see the situation that way.
People's actions outside of work are still an indication of who they are as a person, and being an effective leader generally requires that your subordinates have some level of respect for you. As the article itself admits, the majority (58%) of Americans consider porn to be immoral. Most people aren't going to have much respect for someone who engages in behavior they view as immoral, particularly if the individual has a long history of such behavior (as is the case here).
The leader of an organization is also viewed by people as a representative of the organization's values. If people view the leader of an organization as immoral, it will deter them from engaging with that organization.
People don’t really care about the morality of the organization head if the org is able to stand on its own. There’s been no shortage of known scumbags helming popular companies even in recent times to seemingly little effect.
How far does that stretch? Can one question the effectiveness and safety of COVID vaccines outside of work? How about protesting for (or against) Palestine or Israel? BLM? Can your employees have an "its OK to be White" yard sign?
is this a case of closing the barn door after its been filmed in the Senate Hearing chamber?
Chancellor isn't a real job. It's basically just a hat that you wear while being unassuming. The whole point is to be unassuming. You can't do that with an onlyfans.
It would be nice if The Atlantic was sophisticated enough to comprehend that different jobs might carry very different expectations of "Free Time" moral appearances. (Hint - they ain't.)
If this guy was a long-haul truck driver, who would ever care?
Vs. a public university leader, in a country where porn addiction is seen as a major mental health problem for young people?
People’s activities in their free time bear on someone’s values. The kind of person who makes pornography is a particular kind of person. For most jobs, those personality traits are probably irrelevant. But they are relevant to an educator—someone who is in charge of socializing the next generation. The kind of person who makes pornography has no business being in charge of a state educational institution.
I believe in objective morality.
Porn is immoral.
A persons immoral behavior outside of work is a red flag. It means they are also MORE likely to ack immoral at work. Based on that, it could be grounds for dismissal.
IMO, your opinion more of a red flag than porn itself.
Porn doesn't affect employee performance.
Not directly, and not more than any other outside activity.
Being of the opinion that someone should be fired or not hired because of something that doesn't affect work performance is a handicap on your leadership and collaboration skills. IMO.
The objective reality is we're all just energy moving slow enough to self-perceive as matter wiggling along waiting for the heat death of the universe. Anything you want to set on top of that is subjective.
I am from Wisconsin, have good friends that went to the UW-LAX, and it's obviously an embarrassment and something that damages the reputation of the university. It's very simple: imagine you're interviewing for a job, they look at your resume, they see the university you went to, and think, "Oh, I was just hearing something in the news about this school, what was that about again?"
Obviously, an interviewer shouldn't reasonably hold this against a candidate, but it's in the back of their head. As a candidate, the bar to impress is made slightly higher in order to overcome that subconscious bias. One of my best friends is in this exact situation of looking to switch jobs (outside of tech, in sales) and holding a degree from UW-LAX, and he's legitimately punting his job search for a few months until this is out of the news cycle.
That's just completely unacceptable. You could be the most competent chancellor in the world, but it doesn't matter if your lifestyle choices can have that kind of negative impact on alumni. It's unbelievably selfish. If you have some inner need to publicize your sexual encounters, that's fine and well, but you owe it to the thousands of people you represent to resign from your job. The only way that I can explain this sort of blatant disregard for the impact this would have on others is that he found the risk he was taking (risk both to himself and the community he represented) to be sexually thrilling.
I'd forgotten the university and I've been hearing about the story for weeks. And nobody would know about it at all if they hadn't been fired. So I think the reputational concerns are way overblown.
Yeah, people perceive and retain things much differently if its happening in the local area or if its somewhere else, regardless of how much they look into the story.
Bigotry is still alive and well. It just changes shape over time. Puritanical condemnation of sexuality is a long standing tradition in the US. If they had their way, God would forbid anyone from sex if out of wedlock or without the purpose to procreate. Bunch of prudes, if you ask me.
It doesn't matter what you, I, or my friend thinks about this, you can't deny the reality that some people think this is weird, and you can't ignore the possibility that someone like that might be interviewing you. Especially if you're someone working a sales job for small companies in the Midwest.
It's a reflection of your privilege that this either isn't obvious to you or that you think my friend should simply refuse to work for such people.
Huh? Isn't the privilege to be a bigot in a position to interview people?
60 years ago you can't deny the reality that some bigot had power and interviewed people and he didn't like "fruity" men (or whatever he'd have said back then).
Or the reality that he wouldn't have hired a woman. Or a black person.
And somehow it's privilege to point this out? Excuse me?
Obviously the person in a position to bring their personal beliefs into a hiring decision is in a position of privilege. My point is that there are a lot of people out there that aren’t in a position to be able to afford walking out of that interview.
I'm just acknowledging the reality on the ground. A majority of students at UW-LAX are Wisconsinites and (I'd imagine) the majority stay in Wisconsin after graduating. Wisconsin is still a very socially conservative place outside of Milwaukee and Madison. Regardless of how you wish the world was, the world is, and it does not change the responsibility that this guy had to his students.
I follow you, but as you can also follow your argument could be used not long ago in America to justify firing a chancellor (or other in prominent position) for being in a romantic relationship with a black person. I can assure you that people used to find that disgusting, and a white guy in a relationship with black woman was seen as making a flamboyant choice and shoving it in people’s faces.
Admittedly, when it comes to sex, my view of the US is that of a prudish and cruel cultural backwater.
