See, I didn't hear Adam say he doesn't like to pay for dates at all, just that a dinner date is a larger investment (financially and emotionally) than whatever they were talking about at the time (presumably work flirtations of some sort). Which in writing sounds like splitting hairs, but I didn't think of it as "he doesn't like to pay for dates" at all until I read posts here--I heard it as, "If I take someone on a dinner date, it's because I really like them,"--possibly as opposed to someone he might just flirt with at work.

It also seems to me like one of those uneven situations, where it's one thing to refer to oneself as something, and another thing for someone to grant themselves permission to do so. I mean, I occasionally used to refer to myself as a "nice Christian girl," in a joking context, but if I were discussing something in a professional context and someone cut me off with a similar comment, I would find that innappropriate. I wouldn't necessarily assume that said person is anti-Christian--nor do I think Clay is anti-Semetic. But in this situation, in front of a large audience, it was just stupid. It falls into the kind of thing that you can joke about with your friends, but not all those things are workplace appropriate. A friend tells me that for a nice Christian girl I have a sick twisted mind? I laugh. A colleague insists on assuming that, for instance, I wouldn't compile information on gay adoptions because he knew I was Christian and therefore must be homophobic? (That really happened, BTW) is being an asshole, and got called for it--despite his protestations that the fact people knew I was Christian meant his concerns were totally legitimate. I realize that this whole presentation was much less formal than most workplace encounters, but it was still a professional setting--and even if there hadn't been the "Jewish" aspect, it still seemed like a way to demean a fellow presenter in front of your audience.

Incidentally, I love George for saying that executives should be sensitive--not as a wishy-washy PC thing, but simply because it makes sense. There's no point in needlessly offending someone, and defending your right to do so, or your opinion that they "shouldn't" have been offended is just bad business among other things. And Clay lost a lot of points from me with his, "If I need to apologize, than I do so," type comment, because to me, that's not an apology at all.

I also frankly don't care if he's [Adam, that is, not George! Not that I want to think about George's sex life either] a virgin or not. Then again, I was a virgin until I got married, and I helped run anti-date rape workshops and the mandatory safe-sex workshops at my school, so "virgin" doesn't equal "scared of discussing TEH SEX!" to me. On the other hand, I wouldn't be comfortable teaching a class like that--which seemed to me to have very little structure or planning--with people who seemingly had no specific credentials--I mean, what, they've had sex at work? Whoo for them. It just seems to me like a stupid concept unless it was actually grounded in something like understanding sexual harrassment--which admittedly would not be a terribly exciting class. And, for example, the issue of Clay's comments about homosexuality suggests to me they planned very little. Which isn't to say, at all, that homosexuality shouldn't be discussed in "Sex in the Cubicle" or whatever the class was, but it does suggest to me that they didn't discuss beforehand what they might say. I wasn't offended by his comments about co-workers "slapping his ass" or whatever it was, but it's conceivable to me that some people might be made uncomfortable by that, and in this setting, it seems to me like something he should have been aware with. (Then again, sometimes it seems like I spend way too much time trying to convince straight guys that, no, dear, that one gay guy you know actually ISN'T constantly checking you out and attempting to seduce you--and from the comments that we saw, I would be concerned about whether that was feeding that kind of stereotype--and if I were on the team, yeah, I might feel that wasn't the smartest way to handle said topic, particularly when being graded a subjective scale. It's one thing to have a "provocative" topic to get people into the class, but I would think they would have considered the risk of "provoking" people into giving them bad reviews.