Ask A Manager: Coworker Masturbates In Bathroom

[minoanmiss]

Title tells it.
There is a guy in my office who will go into one of the stalls in the men’s bathroom for 20-30 minutes at a time. I have had the bad luck of entering a stall next to him and hearing audible masturbation noises. I think he does this every day we work in-office because I swear it’s happened 5-6 times. A coworker I’m close with has confirmed hearing it as well, so I know I am not going crazy. I have also seen this guy come out of the bathroom with headphones on, looking at something on his phone, so after repeated incidents, I’m pretty sure he just doesn’t know how loud he is.

Not sure how to handle this one. He is more or less doing it “in private” and I feel like HR would escalate things too much. We also were recently acquired by an international company and no longer have in-house HR. I don’t really want to tell someone halfway across the continent about a coworker’s bathroom habits. On the other hand, I would feel uncomfortable going up to him and saying, “Hey, I hear you jerking it every time we’re in the office, can you knock it off?”

Asking HR to intervene would not be escalating it too much. Far from it! This guy is not in private; he’s using a shared bathroom where coworkers are hearing him (and he’s apparently not even bothering to be discreet or to stop when someone is in a stall a couple of feet away from him). You don’t owe him privacy here; he owes you the ability to use the bathroom at work without being exposed to the sound of someone jerking off. “Not hearing someone masturbating” is pretty much a bare minimum expectation you should be able to have at work.

Talk to HR. Say you’ve heard others report the same thing, it’s gross, and you don’t want to be exposed to it.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

I may have to rejoin AAM. This discussion is a doozy. Notable commenters include "Jordan Black" reiterating that we want to Ruin His Life and "Double standards =/= real standards*" who posits that this is just rampant sexism because we'd all love to listen to a female coworker masturbate. I need more popcorn

[lilysea]

Yep.

I am a big proponent of humans of any gender(s) (and agender humans!) masturbating in ***appropriate*** situations. This is not an appropriate situation.

Appropriate situations for someone else to be able to hear someone else masturbating:

a) a partner or casual hookup who has consented

b) a sex party where everyone around consents

c) a sex worker/client interaction with consent

d) a phone sex operator/phone sex client with consent

e) a porn film shoot with consent

f) a sex therapist/sexual surrogate with consent

g) if you work at a fertility clinic, and send a patient into a room with a cup and a magazine to get a sperm sample, it is not unreasonable that you might possibly hear some sounds coming out of that room (altho a clinic should probably look into a white noise machine or sound insulation)

a random workplace, where the product/service being produced/provided is not sex or sex related, no!

[cereta]

I'm mostly counting how many ways they can misspell "masturbating."

[minoanmiss]

ahahahahah I apologize, Professora.

[dissectionist]

It’s always irritating to me as an autistic person how many people claim that autistic people lack the understanding that other people’s interior worlds are different, while simultaneously they’ve got shit-tons of non-autistic people out there defending oppression by assuming the way _they_ feel is the way _everyone_ feels or should universally feel if they’re “normal”. Mote, beam, eye, etc. (See: white people defending touching Black folks’ hair because “it wouldn’t bother me if someone touched my hair”, men in the above example assuming everyone wants to hear women masturbating, men defending catcalling because “I’d love it if women hit on me like that”, etc.)

Even as someone sexually interested in women, no, I don’t want to go to the can and suddenly hear Bev from Accounting spanking it. Nor do I want to smell sexual activity I’m not involved in. (No matter what someone’s junk is, sexual friction and/or release has smells for those of us with sensitive noses.) Even if I had a crush on someone in my office, I still wouldn’t want to accidentally hear them going at it, because then I’d feel like a creep when it wasn’t even my fault.

[julian]

I, a bisexual woman, do not want to hear/see/feel/smell/touch/intuit *any* of my co-workers, female, male, genderqueer, or agender, masturbating. It is impolite to do this in the office.

That is all.

[liv]

I kind of agree with LW that this is not really an HR situation. Like, yes, it's embarrassing to ask the person directly to be more discreet. But why should an HR person have to be the one to deal with the embarrassing conversation? Also I think what the guy is doing is somewhat poor manners, but it's not that awful, I don't feel like he deserves a formal reprimand or other serious career consequences. If he's open to a friendly request that should be the end of it; the scenario described doesn't sound like deliberate sexual harassment to me.

If this had been a Miss Manners letter instead of an AAM letter, you'd probably get a suggestion of just casually happening to mention that it's annoying how the stall partitions are really thin and you can hear much more than you want to. That's probably enough, assuming the coworker isn't deliberately being loud for kicks.

[mrissa]

And if the coworker is deliberately being loud for kicks, what a great time to involve HR.

As for why HR should have to be the one to deal with the embarrassing conversation, two reasons: one, they're in charge of things like "don't take 20 minute breaks every day if it's not medically necessary"; and two, it is literally their job to handle mediation in the workplace. It's not their only job, and it doesn't mean you can't mediate things yourself if you're up for it. But if you're not, it's what they signed on for.

[minoanmiss]

I don't think I can agree that sexual activity is at all appropriate for work, even in the bathroom. And I really think this should go to HR because this is the kind of issue which a trained and supposedly dispassionate professional should arbitrate.

[jack]

This definitely feels like an HR thing to me (whether there's an HR department, or handled by a manager). There's nothing with masturbation, but the way it seems to always be happening, he must *know* that he's likely to overheard or otherwise noticed, and *know* that that's likely to make other people uncomfortable, and *know* that many people would feel threatened by forcing awareness of his sexual activities on them, and keep on doing it anyway. Often enough that it's not just once, it's a regular problem.

That said, if LW doesn't want the embarrassment of bringing it up with HR, I imagine knocking on the stall door and asking him to stop is likely to be extremely effective. That guy's the one who broke the secret veil of not acknowledging sex stuff or private cubical stuff, not the LW.

[conuly]

Geez, just go to HR, LW. That, or get used to knocking on the stall door - dude needs to be interrupted mid-coitus, like, a fucking lot.

[cereta]

If LW absolutely, positively doesn't want to go to HR (and I think they should), it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of situation for which the anonymous note was should have been invented.