1. Tell the truth. Don’t lie.
2. Sometimes the truth you owe people is “That’s none of your business.”

I have not particularly tried this approach with bosses, policemen, judges, or IRS agents.

I had the same employees (all female) for my entire 30-year practice (I am a heterosexual male). After the first 8 years, I changed from general urology to a practice called the Sexual Medicine Center. The kind, polite, refined Cajun ladies who worked with me went from never saying or hearing anything of a sexual nature in our office, to doing almost nothing but that for the next 22 years. Because many of the patients (all male) were unfamiliar with medical terms, these women both heard and spoke terms, to and from both the patients and me, such as “hard on”, “come too fast”, “lump in my dick”, and all the others you can imagine. The concept of sexual harassment apparently never occurred to them. The ladies cried when my injury caused the practice to shut down, but we still see one another periodically, because we all enjoyed our work environment. Is it possible that you’re finding only what you’re seeking in the workplace?

Evelyn, with the advent of often draconian hostile work environment law, a woman can stop a guy from making any reference to sex (or anything even close to it). But there is no way to prevent guys from thinking whatever they like. And your words, “attractive or not” make me think it would be ok if an attractive person thought about sex, but it’s highly objectionable if an unattractive person thought about it.

That reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit which purports to be a preventing workplace sexual harassment video. The lessons: Be Handsome. Be Attractive. Don’t Be Unattractive.

That especially applies to #3 where, if you’re not going to have intercourse, why bring it up and suffer the probable demerits? And if intercourse is a reasonable possibility, then honesty (“you are attractive, I wish to have sex with you”) is not going to achieve your objective, unless its a prostitute, so you better deploy some game.

“The hypothesis is that habitual honesty can be reasonably mistaken for dangerous madness?”

Diogenes of Sinope found it so. Why would it have changed since?

I cannot immediately rule that out as a fair description of a common belief, nor even whether it is a fair heuristic for most. I do fear for our species.

Honesty per se isn’t unpleasant. But it can be if, along with telling the truth, one is being boring, or puzzlingly irrelevant, or if in saying one’s piece one also appears to be doing something else – making a pass, picking a fight or whatever. And in general, failing to observe the norms that govern truth-telling will make one appear unusual; perhaps mad; perhaps dangerously so. It should go without saying that most people prefer not to deal with the dangerously mad.

Of course I have access to even more normal people, but it’s hard to get them to admit that honesty is peculiar, let alone unpleasant.