In my experience, there gets to be a point where you put on the Mom Look. As in, “Cut it out. Look at me; I’m not a 16 year old you can embarrass. This is work, not a locker room. Just cut it out.” Go ahead and put on the “really? I suppose you’re *proud *of that?” face, as if you you were dealing with adolescent boys who ought to know better.
You want to lean a bit more on the “I am disappointed in you” or “you are being boring, predictable and socially inept” or “you are embarrassing yourself” than “I am offended.” The disappointment ought to be over their poor choice of when to indulge in unprofessional humor. Avoid the plain fact that there really isn’t an appropriate time for this. Stick with the “if you want to indulge in puerile humor on your own time, that’s your business, but during business hours try to act as if you’re in a professional setting.”
Do not try to teach a pig to sing. You just frustrate yourself and annoy the pig. Swine will act like swine. The best you can do is to teach the creatures to stay off your lap. If you have to use a hog prod, so be it, but do not let on that they are getting to you. They talk like this to gain attention. You are better off if you act as if they have lost the capacity to shock you, that by now you just find them tiresome, professionally pitiful and, as “humorists,” entirely predictable and boring.
I would not be above:** “Don’t you people have friends or, you know, dates you go on for this kind of thing? Or does your habit of chasing young women with pictures of your naked bum make it a little hard for you to get a date? I can’t imagine there is anyone who finds any of this charming, let’s just say that. At any rate, I don’t, and we’re at work. Cut it out. Save it for somebody who finds it amusing.”**
If you complain to higher-ups, you should also complain about it as unprofessional, a big distraction to your ability to get work done, and not a good reflection on the company. If they are harassing you–and literally chasing you with pictures you don’t want to see is harassing–say that you have tried to get them to cut it out and you are at your wit’s end how to get through their thick heads that you don’t want a bit of it. You don’t want to whine or appear as if you cannot handle your own problems, but since you weren’t issued a cattle prod you’d like some assistance in communicating that this isn’t acceptable.
And yes, I’d say, “No, I’m* not *repressed. I’m merely a professional and, if I may be so blunt, a grown-up. This is ridiculous. We live in 2016. Normal people do not expect to do this at work. They expect to have some little shred of self-control more than a troupe of unsupervised middle-schoolers when the teacher has left the room. I want them to grow up and cut it out and that is not too much to ask or more than they can manage with their little bitty boy brains.”
If not, well, you need to find a job where there are some professionals at work. Women had to put up with this in 1960 in predominately male workplaces, but most places expect something more than that now.
