Self Stimulation on Zoom Calls

While the debate goes on whether Jeffrey Toobin’s act of self-stimulation on an official Zoom call was an “embarrassingly stupid mistake” or constitutes sexual misconduct, it was this piece on BuzzFeed that particularly caught my attention. 

Purportedly, it seeks to ask how is it that in so many months of quarantine (and Zoom calls), we haven’t read of more cases like this? The author goes into remarkable detail (embellished with a certain kind of literary flourish) to make her point.  Here’s an extract:

Some of you, I’m sure, have turned your video off for a brief moment during a video conference to take a big, hearty pull off a joint, and turned it back on when the smoke finally dissipated and your eyes look, miraculously, droopy. I, of course, have never done this, as I am a good employee and have never done any drugs at all (my review is next week, please be cool), but it would be naive to think that most people aren’t engaged in some fuckery during a work Zoom. That’s the benefit of all this time working from home — the aberration in our routine allows for deviations in our day, which can include pleasure. You’re going to tell me you’ve never taken a quick three minutes midday to crank your hog? To mash your meat? To butter your own muffin? There’s so little joy left in our lives; are we not at least owed the time to toot our own horns?

I mean, maybe not during an active Zoom call where your video is still on. Time and place, I suppose.

But as our home lives and our work lives have fused more and more, it was inevitable that the cracks in our professional demeanors would start to show. The slow ebb of our professionalism is becoming visible in a hundred little ways: bringing our pets to work calls, showing up in loungewear and no makeup, chewing on stale bread mindlessly during quarterly reports. Do we work from home or do we live at the office? Whatever the case, it was inevitable that someone might slip, and let their colleagues witness them at their most primal: hunched over their weiner, choking it frenetically, hoping their colleagues can’t see them at their most crude.