If someone you know constantly makes reproductive anatomy or other borderline jokes and you think they should stop just play dumb. After the joke just say (with a straight face) that you don’t get it. When they have to explain it it the joke satisfaction is gone and then more technical words need to be used to explain it making red flags pop up for them and anyone listening. They might get in trouble and you won’t need to confront the behavior directly.
Works especially well in the military (even better if it’s a superior).
This might be effective in institutions wherein expression is already strictly restrained and your opponent doesn’t have the option of ignoring your request for information, but when people pull this shit on me I just say “comedy’s subjective.” It happens to be true. The list of topics that are “inappropriate” is also extremely subjective. I make jokes to cope with stress and add value. If you don’t like my joke, you can say so, but when you try to use social structures to manipulate others’ capacity for expression, you out yourself as a Machiavellian control freak which, in fairness, puts you on good terms with all the other manipulative, power hungry, institution worshiping demagogues that create stressful situations in the first place.
People have been getting mad at me for making jokes for literally as long as I can remember. One of my oldest memories is about getting in trouble for joking about a teacher’s contradiction. She didn’t like how it made her feel, so she made me sit in the corner in front of the class. She used her leverage in the social structure to try to prevent herself from feeling that way again. I remember it for two reasons: first, because I think it was the first time I felt humiliation, and second, because my friends turned on her. The girl beside me, who I now realize I was trying to impress, didn’t like my joke. She hit me. Then, after the teacher overreacted, she switched teams. After class, we went and peed on the teacher’s flowers together. We were 6, by the way. Yeah, sorry Rachel, I’m going public with the scandal. DM me if you read this, I’m way funnier now.
Free speech is not hip or trendy at the moment, and that’s fine. That’s actually how it’s been for most of history as far as I can tell. The reason we should defend it is the subjectivity I mentioned earlier. The basic idea is that different things make different people upset. To make rules about what you’re allowed to say is to defend a subset of emotional responses ─ to put some people above others ─ to deny the universal fraternity and equality of people. You may have the best of intentions, but you won’t get any feedback when those people decide to pee on your stuff.
I am all for free speech in public. It’s traditional to keep things professional at work and not every workplace is the same so everyone can find a place where they can express themselves however they want. When you on deployment and your boss repeatedly makes sexual harassment jokes and you can’t just leave the military then it’s more of a problem.