> Men, can you imagine how hard it would be if all the women were constantly, and openly, talking about tampons, cramps, yeast infections, cheating, being cheated on, Trichomoniasis, faking-it, etc? I don't know about you, but It would make me feel out of place.

You're right--you don't know about me. I fully wish this were the case!

The place I want to work is the place where people are people, not separately "men" and "women": and people like fart jokes, dick jokes, cramping jokes, faking-it jokes, what have you. They also like pictures of cats!

...or, at least, when you ask them by themselves, they do. But something strange happens when you ask them in a sufficiently large group: suddenly they'll say there are certain things that are horribly offensive, even though they're not "personally" offended!

Now, someone with some evolutionary-biology experience can probably give you the full low-down as to why, but here's my (limited) understanding: when we're in a group of people large enough, and who don't know one-another particularly well, we start to think we might have the opportunity to mate with someone else in the group without that becoming a "sore point" for the group later on (especially if the group isn't closed to new people entering/leaving.) So, we start to enforce these "global social norms" on one another, even if we don't agree with them ourselves. We do it so we can show we can "do the dance" of mating, that we're clever enough to avoid slipping up in the complex social machinery we've instantiated, and thus we sort ourselves into rankings of social ability. Both the people in higher and lower rankings subliminally know their position, and so the people in lower rankings are subconsciously proscribed to submit to those of higher rankings when a rivalry springs up for the affection of a potential mate. Thus, the people best at the dance have the most choice, and we call that something like "charisma."

We drop the whole dance when we end up in groups of "just friends." If nobody around us is a potential mate, why bother? Around friends, we tell all the fart jokes we like, and nobody gets offended. But take those same friends and sit them at a fancy banquet--where strangers can hear them--and suddenly they'll be shushing one another to prevent those jokes from slipping out!

Now, in my opinion, the whole etiquette game is a game--and you shouldn't be playing games at work. It's easy enough to avoid when everyone at your workplace are friends--and this seems to be the real goal that employers are trying to foster through "team-building": the ability for everyone to see one-another as someone to goof off with and tell silly jokes, not a potential mate (and especially not a potential rival for mates!) But it rarely succeeds, precisely because humans are intelligent and observant social animals, who notice when, despite the trappings of "friendship", nobody really cares about what anyone else did on the weekend, nobody will actually keep in touch with anyone else after they move on to another job, etc.

I don't know how to solve the problem, other than to form companies solely from people who are already friends (like YC tends to do!) and then not grow them at all beyond that :)