I don't know, if the author's only experience of male coworkers is that they either don't want to work with her, or they want to get busy, then it basically sounds to me like she is surrounded by a bunch of arrested-development coworkers with poor boundaries.
Restricting this to heterosexual dynamics, a bonding platonic interaction with the opposite gender very well might feel different than a bonding interaction with the same gender. But that doesn't by definition mean that it has to be distracting, with the participants wondering whether they're about to shag.
That's what having boundaries is all about. It's what professionalism is about. It's erring towards the professional interpretation rather than the suggestive interpretation.
If some other coworker sees you laughing together and gets all gossipy about if something is going on, then that is simply an immature reaction, and it is not professional. I just can't quite fathom simply "tolerating" a gray zone when it really sounds like people need to do a better job of shutting it down and being professional.
I see snippets of this conversation and it's hard to wrap my hands around it because it just seems like the entire conversation is stuck in a paradigm from a few decades ago. It sounds like people in this industry just need some more experiences with having positive, bonding professional experiences with compatibly-gendered coworkers, without it getting all weird and dramatic, before they'll start to accept that it is actually normal and expected, and that there's no reason to get all distracted by whether or not there's any subtext there. Maybe that's all it is, just something where the community needs more experience and socialization...
Restricting this to heterosexual dynamics, a bonding platonic interaction with the opposite gender very well might feel different than a bonding interaction with the same gender. But that doesn't by definition mean that it has to be distracting, with the participants wondering whether they're about to shag.
That's what having boundaries is all about. It's what professionalism is about. It's erring towards the professional interpretation rather than the suggestive interpretation.
If some other coworker sees you laughing together and gets all gossipy about if something is going on, then that is simply an immature reaction, and it is not professional. I just can't quite fathom simply "tolerating" a gray zone when it really sounds like people need to do a better job of shutting it down and being professional.
I see snippets of this conversation and it's hard to wrap my hands around it because it just seems like the entire conversation is stuck in a paradigm from a few decades ago. It sounds like people in this industry just need some more experiences with having positive, bonding professional experiences with compatibly-gendered coworkers, without it getting all weird and dramatic, before they'll start to accept that it is actually normal and expected, and that there's no reason to get all distracted by whether or not there's any subtext there. Maybe that's all it is, just something where the community needs more experience and socialization...