A great many of these people would say that their workplace culture is fine and that white collar workplace culture is too PC and stifling.
But it isn't a masculinity problem, it is just plain dominance behavior. That can have different manifestations. Some use drastic expressions, some try to shield women from the barbaric hordes.
Professional distance has its place in business of course.
I always look at it as the customer has my money in his or her pocket. As I'm not, myself, ever going to risk getting that money by calling that guy's daughter ugly. I'm not even going to consider putting anyone in front of that guy if there's even the slightest chance that he or she might call that guy's daughter ugly.
A lot of business success and failure is just common sense stuff like this. That's probably at least a part of what gave rise to that blue/white division in the first place. The guys at the top simply don't want to lose money over something stupid.
No it's not free, because it bleeds. It bleeds into interactions where it's completely inappropriate. You want to be uncouth, do it at home in places where there is no possible connection to me or my business. You're at this business, then you're on your P's and Q's or you're out. Simple as that. Times are already hard enough without throwing nuggetheadedness on top of everything else that's losing businesses money and putting employee livelihoods at risk.
But the million dollar question is how much it bleeds and whether that is worse than the trade-offs you get from telling people not to joke around. (obviously it's a scale not a binary choice)
Listen, i won't argue about "too PC", but in my experience, if a workplace have a not PC culture and the target of discrimination start shooting back harder than the bully, it always end poorly for everyone.
I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.
I'm not trying to apologize for ultra-masculine culture, but this epistemic argument about the presence or absence of emotions boils down to "their culture is not my culture" and just increases the divisions between those cultures and accelerates the culture war.
In the end - if what you actually cared about was people being uncomfortable you'd think through the economic, social and technical structures that make them feel uncomfortable. IMO, it has overwhelmingly to do with naive adoption of technology, with PC culture being a way for those who benefit from this adoption to cope with the negative results of that adoption.
Don’t tell me I’m wrong for being offended because it’s your “workplace culture”.