Desexualization, Gender and Sexuality at Work - Essay Example

Critical Discussion Paper Critical Discussion Paper Introduction Many articles are usually written from the perspective of certain issues or events. However, such articles can also be analyzed and reviewed then either criticized or acknowledged from either the reader’s or another writer’s perspective. For instance, in the paper With(out) pleasure: Desexualization, gender and sexuality at work, Katie Sullivan is of the opinion that organizational pressures to desexualize the workplace in massage therapy works against the intended objective. According to Sullivan (2014, p. 347), although there is no uniformly available legitimate professional identity in massage therapy, efforts to desexualize the profession only serve to promote heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment. In this context, desexualization is in reference to efforts aimed at removing gender and sexual qualities and characteristics of men and women at work. However, it must also be noted that at the workplace, sexuality takes on multiple forms with multiple meanings and consequences. For example, markers such as gender, education and training levels, sexuality, class and race will have different implications of sexuality and affect workers and work differently. Sullivan (2014, p. 360) has given her position on desexualization and its consequences in massage therapy. This paper will critically discuss her arguments and give the writer’s own view on the issue of sexuality at the workplace. This will be done with the consideration that although many organizations have attempted to monitor and control their workers’ sexual behavior, workers have also been known to show resistance to the control and tried negotiating the constraints. It cannot be denied that so long as men and women work together, sexual feelings and relations at the workplace will always exist (Erickson 2007, p. 79). However, this is not to mean that when they enjoy sexualized interactions, the possibility of damaging outcomes is eliminated. More specifically, massage therapists need to have legitimate professional identities since female and male therapists manage their marginalized identities differently. However, the efforts to desexualize the workplace and afford massage therapists a legitimate identity maintain heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment (Sullivan 2014, p. 348). Sullivan (2014, p. 348) also correctly points out that organizational sexuality predominantly stem from organizational bureaucracy and feminist communications that support its eradication openly. This opinion is true because the moment an organization attempts to desexualize its workplace it makes workers more aware of their sexuality. The problem with desexualization attempts is that gendered tensions are exposed when organizations impose the responsibility of controlling and monitoring upon workers (Adib & Guerrier 2008, p. 414). While men are expected to maintain their masculine status, women are expected to control their bodies. This approach can be criticized because men and women are not given the same standards to construct professional identities, which counters the very purpose of desexualization. Desexualization initiatives expect women to avoid appearing overly sexual and at the same time, ironically, expect them to maintain their feminized sex appeal. Therefore, it is true that desexualization will maintain heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment. Desexualization among workers at the workplace in massage therapy aims to create and promote perceptions that massage is professional rather than sexual labor, as it is usually considered by persons outside the profession. However, it also becomes evident that the struggle by therapists is a reminder that not every worker in every profession can attain professional status readily. In response, there have been both individual and occupational efforts to position massage as a profession and in doing so, advocated for massage to be desexualized. To desexualize, women therapists need to monitor their bodies, interactions and how they dress, which essentially constitutes defensive strategies to manage professional identities. On the other hand, male therapists often take on proactive approaches to manage their identity by developing desexualized clinical identities whereby they link massage to the medical profession. However, when this approaches taken by both men and women are critically analyzed, it can be seen that their labor practices and their bodies become sites for professionalization struggles. This is mainly because both individual and occupational strategies employed to get rid of marginalized identities are capable of either constraining or enabling workers and work (Baxter & Babbie 2010, p. 104). Further analysis shows that the manner in which workers seek professional legitimacy will have impacts that will reflect on their understanding of their positions in their professions, the work they do and the bodies that do the work. For example, according to Sullivan (2014, p. 356), professional advantages may be equally conditional for both men and women and there are consequences when they do not perform according to their traditional masculinity or femininity. However, critics may argue that modern culture must recover from this perception, but it must also be viewed from the point of reality. Massage therapists may attempt to desexualize the workplace, but they must also acknowledge that the two sexes find each other’s physical, sexual and behavioral differences attractive. Viewed in another way, men, women and their clients do not quite support the initiatives to fit them all in one unisex space, hence the resistance and attempts to negotiate the moves to monitor and control their sexual conduct (Evetts 2008, p. 398). Organizational desexualization processes have been going on for long periods starting from pre-industrial organizations but have mainly managed to bring out resistance especially among organizational subordinates (Dow & Wood 2008, p. 69). The same kind of resistance is witnessed in contemporary organizations and can be said to arise from the fact that attempts to desexualize the workplace makes workers more aware of their sexuality. Massage therapists are expected to understand how they work with both their clients’ social and physical bodies in order to maintain professional relationships. At the same time, they must also be aware that the clients’ perception of the body is not necessarily similar to theirs (Ashcraft 2008, p. 75). Essentially, desexualization aims at enhancing a professional relationship in a field where the boundaries of touch remain largely indistinct although with a certain amount of regulation. However, from this perspective, one can actually find a different perspective to Sullivan’s argument that desexualization is detrimental. When sexuality is removed from the workplace, massage therapists will stop working with the social body and embark on working with the physical body. Given the nature of their work, they will lose compassion and neglect their clients’ need for care since in any case, massage is a therapy. This is where the efforts to desexualize fail to realize that although equality is deserved by every human before the law, some professions will only and appropriately deliver when men and women posses their sexuality. Desexualization has the ultimate goal of ensuring men and women behave gender-atypically but that will not make them less aware of their sexuality. The fact that they are constantly striving to act gender-atypically can only mean that they are constantly aware of what they are trying to avoid (Cheney & Ashcraft 2010, p. 148). On the other hand, if gender roles are allowed to take their natural course, there may never be, for example, more male nurses than females or more policewomen than policemen. This can be explained from the sense that behavioral dimorphism is engrained in men and women as more of natural selection than political correctness. For example, professions, it is known that professions have been historically patriarchal and predominantly gendered to provide more privileges for men and masculinity. This apparently persistent connection of specific visualizations of rationality and masculinity to professions has only served to imply that the body is a site of problems, peculiarities and possibilities (Stryker 2009, p. 151). Then from this, it can be seen that the separation that desexualization is intended to create between the gendered assumptions of a profession and its laborers is little to nonexistent. It can therefore be agreed that people come to know of, and try to understand, a profession partly through their hasty and reactive associations on the subject of the bodies that do the work. They also partly learn of professions by shrewdly and even deviously implying what they are not. This could be in ways that consider massage therapy as an unclean work and hence not ethical enough to be afforded a professional identity. More importantly, these associations may be both historically and culturally dependent and open to change and diversity, but a consequence of gendered professional segregation is that modern definitions of what comprises a professional are persistently contracted. Further, they are also persistently associated with the bodies that perform the labor. Sullivan (2014, p. 259) does not deny that organizational sexuality potentially bears dilemmas and risks. However, she also points out that the selective manner in which therapists use desexualization discourses to co-construct sexual subjectivities that are gendered limit or broaden men and women. Hence, one can agree with her that desexualization as an organizational strategy to remove sexuality from the workers’ occupations, labor and social relations does not contribute positively towards solving the issues arising from sexuality at the workplace. Working relations cannot exist without sexuality and efforts to desexualize will construct gendered and more sexualized norms (Barley & Kunda 2007, p. 78). My personal view on sexuality at the workplace is that it should be controlled. However, this must not translate into total desexualization. While Sullivan’s article says that women are given double standards to monitor and control their sexuality, it is also true that men must take part in positively controlling sexuality besides imply maintaining their masculinity. Basically, it is unethical to use sexuality for career advancement. Therefore, rather than attempt to desexualize the workplace, it is more beneficial to encourage employees to refine and develop their own codes of ethics (Dreyer 2010, p. 319). It is upon the organization to consider whether their desexualization procedures and policies respect or are in violation of their workers’ sexuality. In order to encourage positive sexuality at the workplace, it will require informing, advising, training and working with the employees towards implementing positive desexualization (Robinson 2012, p. 331). Looking at Sullivan’s argument, she is not convinced that desexualization produces the desired results, although she does not explicitly assert that desexualization as a strategy is not justified. It is easy to agree with her because the society has a traditional commitment to the notion that the workplace needs to be asexual. However, workplace sexuality is not necessarily disruptive or discriminatory since sexual conduct assumes its meaning and form from the wider organizational context (Chreim, Williams & Hinings 2009, p. 1515). Studies have shown that women working in democratic and integrated settings will be part of, and take pleasure from, sexual interactions (Arndt & Bigelow 2009, p. 248). Therefore, a personal opinion is that rather than employers being encouraged to desexualize the workplace, they need to be encouraged to desegregate. This can better be understood once organizations acknowledge the fact the intoxicating combination of business and sexuality has more to do with the notion that in their personal lives, people marry their opposites for the purpose of a healthy balance. On the contrary, in business workers are attracted to people who are more like them, driven by the desire to connect with the same energy and not necessarily sexuality (Ozturk 2011, p. 1102). However, when desexualization raises more awareness of sexuality at the workplace, workers will inadvertently act the way they feel they need to towards the sexes and, most probably, provoke responses (Calvert 2008, p. 93). The responses are not necessarily sexual activities, could take the more detrimental form of heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment. Attempts to desexualize the workplace have often driven massage therapists to craft professional connections of their labor with medical identities. For example, studies have shown that massage therapists tend to wear medical scrubs at work or even place life-size skeletons and human anatomy charts in their offices (Cheney & Ashcraft 2010, p. 169). However, the fact that this identity is mostly crafted by mean underpins the suggestion that the medical construction is gendered and only used to borrow the legitimacy of medicine as well as desexualized perceptions. Therefore, it is sexualized models of economy that drive contemporary markets where sexuality is now highly commodified, controlled and commercialized amidst claims of desexualization (Williams & Dellinger 2009, p. 74). Building on this trend, the range of goods and services being provided for consumption via the invocation of sexual metaphors has expanded over the years within struggle over resistance and regulation, relations at the workplace and processes of labor. Together, even though organizations are attempting to desexualize the workplace, these factors add up to personified, intimate and sexualized labor (Lovaas & Jenkins 2010, p. 143). Going just by that, it is clear to see that heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment will still be practiced even within circumstances and strategies that aim to desexualize. Considering that oppressive and exploitative perceptions of what natural and normal are as regards sexuality and their impacts on the way the organizational setting experiences sexuality, it seen that anxiety about expression of sexual desires will always be present (Brewis, Tyler & Mills 2014, p. 306). Such anxiety is almost always a function of the hierarchical ordering of who expresses the sexual desires. This can explain why desexualization is organization sexuality rather than removing it from the workplace, which is in agreement with Sullivan’s article. For instance, the changing attitudes of the society alongside protective legislation, stronger political powers and technological advances have resulted in elaborate social networks directly linked to sexual diversity within modern organizations that represent open spaces, accounting for the organized sexuality (Brewis, Tyler & Mills 2014, p. 306). One may also agree with Sullivan’s (2014, p. 358) view that the constructions of vulnerable clients by therapists can be viewed by how the clients complement the therapists’ negation of their vulnerabilities while creating professional identities. For a considerable number of times the therapists do not have much control over the manner in which their work is coded. For example, this may be explained using other forms of feminized labor that is mostly sexualized, such as women who engage in customer service functions that require enhancement through feminine (or flirty) performances. This may also include performances in which caring for or nurturing bodies is involved. In direct support that desexualization maintains heteronormativity, discrimination and sexual harassment, this shows the dilemma women are up against when they seek professional positioning (Young 2008, p. 211). The dilemma is that while the male body and its sexuality are gendered in a way that they are normalized, the female body and its sexuality are gendered in a way that makes them publicly suspect. This is in disregard of the training that massage therapists receive that generates the desire to professionalize how they control not only their bodies but also characteristics of the labor itself. Going back to my personal view of sexuality at the workplace, ethics will still take the larger part of explanation. When there are no ethical standards at the workplace, the employer risks losing not only the most valuable employees but also clients. Therefore, sexuality should not only be looked at and emphasized from the perspective of desexualization. There is a reason why there are the two genders and opportunities for them to work on the same profession. It is therefore the responsibility of the organization’s management to ensure there are ethical codes of conduct in place so that workers can also play their roles in ethics. Further, the organization has legal avenues that can be used to implement codes of ethics rather than resorting to desexualization. Once the organization takes initiatives to educate the workers that harassment based on sex is illegal and may also violate federal law, efforts made by the workers to remain within legal and ethical boundaries may reduce the need for desexualization. This can best be aided by the understanding of the management that sexuality can exist healthily at the workplace when ethics are in place as opposed to trying to eradicate it completely. Conclusion Sullivan’s article largely denounced the efforts of desexualization at the workplace in massage therapy, and after critically analyzing her arguments, it is generally agreeable that desexualization does not achieve its desired results. Apart from the management at the workplace, even the therapists themselves draw and use discourses selectively in attempts to desexualize and co-construct gender. Desexualization is also an overambitious initiative that makes worker and clients more aware of their sexuality rather than strip them of it. As studies have shown, while pressures are being applied to desexualize, it must also be acknowledged that sexuality is not always disruptive or discriminatory so long as the organization and workers have and practice ethics. Further, in the democratic and integrated workplace, workers have been known to take pleasure from sexual interactions. According to the writer’s personal opinion, sexuality at the work place can be appreciated when initiatives are taken by both the company and workers, and these initiatives have legal support in most states. 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