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Online shopping at work might not be all that bad.
In fact, your fellow co-worker — one cubicle over — might be watching porn.
While a shocking number of people have admitted to watching porn in the office — 60% according to a Sugarcookie survey — the reason why they got frisky while on the clock isn’t what you think.
“I think we have this view that if someone’s accessing porn at work, they are somehow secretly masturbating at the desk or they’re disappearing off to the toilets to masturbate,” Craig Jackson, a professor of occupational health psychology at Birmingham City University in the UK, told the BBC recently. “It’s more of a distraction.”
In fact, Jackson noted that watching porn could be “stress relief or a coping mechanism” while working.
“Many workers in organizations feel faceless. In the absence of good leadership, they feel overlooked, underutilized, under-challenged, under-promoted,” he continued. “[Porn] becomes a way of coping with how mundane and unpleasant the reality of their work is.”
But for some, it’s not a way to solve their boredom. In fact, it’s a “reward,” said Paula Hall, an addiction therapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy.
“They’ve just got a sale, had a win, they’ve just finished a piece of work online and it’s a treat,” she told BBC. “We might have a cup of coffee and a cake . . . somebody else might watch pornography.”
Working from home meant more freedom while on the clock, and with it, came wandering minds. More than half of people working from home admitted to watching adult videos on devices used for work, according to a survey by Kaspersky.
Research from PornHub affirmed those findings, revealing in a 2021 study that, while 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. was the most popular time frame for porn-watching, 4 p.m. came in a close second.
Leisurely viewing during work hours could have been spurred by pandemic-related working from home trends, but the NSFW site’s data speculated that afternoon gazing was present well before COVID-19 struck. So, returning to the office might not deter employee’s workplace porn consumption.
And, for many, there haven’t been any negative consequences for secretly letting their freak flag fly.
If it feels “good” and there aren’t “immediate negative consequences,” Jackson told the BBC, people will “do it again and again and again and again.”
Plus, those hell-bent on watching adult clips from the comfort of their cubicle have discovered their company’s IT security doesn’t succeed at blocking the NSFW sites as it should, Jackson added.
“Many workers have found that their organization’s IT system for monitoring and blocking adult material content is not very sophisticated at all,” he said.
While it never ends “well” for those caught porn-handed, adult videos affect more than just the viewer. The impact is far-reaching, and could even result in sexual harassment, said Wendy L. Patrick, a career trial attorney in San Diego, California, who writes about the effects of porn-watching in the workplace.
“Pornography often includes dehumanizing sexual scripts,” she told the BBC. “Internalizing this orientation through repeated exposure can decrease the enjoyment and productivity of workplace relationships, sometimes leading to insensitive, inappropriate interactions.”
Just look at ex-New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin, who was caught masturbating on a Zoom call with the magazine’s bigwigs in 2020. While he has since been fired from the publication, at the time, he admitted to Vice that he made a “stupid mistake.” The 62-year-old Harvard Law School graduate thought he wasn’t “visible” and that he had muted the call.
But even without a full frontal, NSFW can still get you the boot. A University of Miami professor was fired after eagle-eyed students spotted a porn bookmark in his browser during a Zoom lecture in which the instructor shared his screen. The eight-second TikTok clip, which has since been removed, was all the evidence needed to declare the misconduct.
Even without getting caught, watching porn in the workplace has been linked to employees “shirking and lying” about the work they’ve completed throughout the day. But on the other hand, Jackson found some employees overcompensated for porn-watching.
“They kind of do more work to justify the pornography use. It’s quite interesting. There is a moral trade-off,” he noted.
But don’t be so quick to write off the employees who overindulge in their inappropriate online content, Hall said. Instead of “demonizing” them, the focus should be on “educating people about the risks, so that people can make an educated choice.”
That way, employees can recognize if their behaviors are dangerous — to themselves or others — or dependent.
“If workplaces were engaging and staff were used more broadly, we might find that people might not need to use pornography as a problematic way to cope with the world of work,” Jackson argued, although Hall believed what people do on their breaks or in their home is “surely up to them” — as long as it doesn’t impact performance.
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