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I think @Amadan has answered some of this, and I agree with everything he says, but just to add a couple of follow-ups...
Absolutely not, and interestingly in every 'locker room' context I've been in, joking about someone's kids in any negative way (not even just sexual) would code as deeply taboo. Here's a funny scene touching on that idea from In Bruges. I'm not exactly sure why it's taboo, when mothers are fair game, but jokes about someone's kids are ugly or dumb or gay would come across very poorly.
I think it's fair to read a lot of this form of male-bonding as a kind of test or trial for male-coded social skills - being able to come up with a good clapback, knowing what's going too far, knowing how to insult someone in a way that they will correctly interpret as affectionate.* I think men who struggle with locker-room talk fall into two main camps. The first are those who can handle the social dynamics but don't like the mock aggression, and to oversimplify, they become theatre/art/literature club kids. The second are those who ASD kids who don't get the complex social dynamics. They'll tend to filter out into the predictable science, math, and engineering clubs.
I've framed it in terms of high school, but I really think this kind of male behaviour really gets going around puberty in high-testosterone environments, specifically sports teams, and it filters out some people from male sports in general (not coincidentally, the boys on top of the sports hierarchy tend to be on top of the male high school hierarchy in general). Nonetheless, it persists into adulthood in similarly all-male and high testosterone contexts, and whenever you get a group of men of any age together with alcohol and an absence of women, it will tend to manifest. Again, there will be some guys for whom this is more natural, and others who find it uncomfortable, so they'll tend to just change the subject or shift the vibe.
And also to clarify re this:
@Amadan completely nailed my position. I'm not saying it's beyond political analysis - that's what I'm trying to do, through giving it a genealogy. I also think Fuentes is knowingly violating the norms here to get a reaction. But I also think a lot of the commentary I've seen from women involves a straightforward epistemic mistake in interpreting his intention and failing to contextualise it in the background of male-coded banter. As you note, there are practical reasons why women have a hair-trigger sensitivity to any kind of rape humour, but that's also what Fuentes is relying on.
Yeah, I think this is what I meant by making humor subject to "political analysis": not hand-wringing that rape jokes mean you're a rapist, but acknowledging that a group's perception of what's funny vs. unfunny could indicate something important about their underlying sentiments and desires, and that it's fair to investigate those sentiments by close-reading the jokes. Ironically, the threat of over-reading is probably what provokes some of the compensatory under-reading here, but there must be some level of valid interpretation between "jokes are a straightforward statement of intention" and "jokes mean literally nothing about anything."
(For instance, on why mama jokes are funny but daughter jokes aren't-- is it possible that most men have a little bit of underlying resentment/ contempt for older women, including their moms, that makes it a teeeeny bit viscerally enjoyable to imagine them being put in their place or subjected to male dominance, whereas having a beloved daughter demeaned is just straightforwardly painful?)
That's really interesting: when I asked the question I was thinking about a certain type of dumb and self-serious but also very athletic "jughead"-style guy that seems both common in sporty contexts and reasonably socially successful. Having known those folks in their administrative and bureaucratic afterlives, they seem too rigid, touchy and literal-minded to ever have been great at verbal sparring, but that's just from mixed-company observations. Are successful jocks really witty and transgressive with other men? I'm trying to imagine what that would even sound like.
I'm, tempted to quote EB White's line that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, few people are interested, and the frog dies of it". That said - I do understand this kind of analysis, and it's what a lot of my academic colleagues in the humanities spend their time doing. Over my time in academia, I've seen any number of articles, books, and editorials that lean into these strategies and I've come to have little patience for them. It can be a fun and an interesting exercise, but I'm less convinced that it helps us access truths in any meaningful way, at least most of the time. It's a kind of "social psychoanalysis" that just like regular psychoanalysis, is largely immune to falsification (Freudianism was one of the ur-examples that motivated Popper). You're into BDSM? Probably because you were spanked as a kid. Oh, you weren't spanked as a kid? Well, maybe that's why you're into BDSM. In the same way, you can imagine someone saying that the reason jokes about mothers are part of this humour is precisely because the mother-son relationship has such deep individual psychodynamic roots, and therefore it's funny to outrage people with it, in contrast to father-daughter relationships which come into being later in life and are parsed through a thoroughly adult lens. All of which is to say, sure, we can play with this analysis, but it will just tell us what we wanted to believe all along.
I can't guarantee that I'm zeroing in on the same archetype here, but if I am, then I'd say that these guys are very good at playing these male games, perhaps surprisingly so. They're also just very good at sequestering them in the right contexts. They're definitely the people whose female friends would be most surprised to hear them talking that way, though.
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