It isn't that you have to pretend to be asexual.
Just don't sexually harass people who work under you as subordinates; that's abusing your position.
I don't think you even remotely understand the problem. The problem isn't the place human sexuality plays in conversation, but the fact that women in Silicon Valley work in male-dominated environments that have been getting increasingly hostile towards women over the last two decades, and people working in such environments quickly sublimate the power structure. It's not that talking about sex makes the atmosphere hostile, but the other way around: women (and men) don't feel comfortable where they don't feel safe. If all employees felt safe, secure, and respected, they -- including women -- will be happy to talk about many subjects, including sex.
No, I get it. My issue is that they get conflated in the media and in discussion. Combating sexism and harassment is good, no two ways about it -it is a problem? Yes, I know of women who have to turn down repeated requests for dates, from the same people over and over and over. Myself I remember some guy asking me out repeatedly --knowing very well I'm not into guys. But, it's a shame that there is no nuance and any semblance of sexuality is automatically seen as treading the very thin ice of harassment.
People aren't sure any more if a compliment is going to be interpreted as harassment. Harassment meanwhile goes unabated, and as you conclude, may be getting worse.
But the harassment, in this case, is only a symptom of the sexism that is making its way into the very core of SV workplaces. Everything gets amplified when the perpetrator enjoys more power and the support of the boy club. This case is just one more demonstration that the problem is not the limits of propriety, but a very unfair distribution of power.
If someone hurts you, whether or not you will experience the offense as a dangerous threat depends very much on whether the offender makes the offense knowing they enjoy the protection of power, which allows them to harm people who don't.
It can't be a symptom of sexism, else I could not ever be accused of harassing a man. Yet, could be capable of harassing a man, or a man harass me. Or one woman another. And power amplifies it, or squelches it (one rarely sees a superior get sexually harassed, but it's not because a potential harasser does not exist). Harassment is to me, more a disorder, at least that's how I have experienced it.
Don't read that as saying harassment is okay. Harassment is not okay. However, talking about sexual topics bringing them up, etc., is not sexual harassment, prima facie. But this is where we are, unlike Europe. I dare say in Europe there is less sexual harassment in the workplace, but simultaneously there is more open talk about sex at the workplace; people don't have a puritanical knee-jerk reaction to sex. Talking about sex and complimenting people in the workplace is not some weird taboo. They understand people are sexual creatures and don't try to pretend they are not.
Again, it's reprehensible and bad to sexually harass people. I think any normal person would agree --but I would have to disagree with saying that to combat sexual harassment it's necessary to extirpate sex from people's conversations at work. It's unnatural. What's next, sing a contract explicitly allowing consensual sexual talk at work to ensure correctness?
To put this another way, women also like to talk about sex in the workplace. What they don't like is talking about sex turning into an invitation to sex. It's not. Sometimes people just want to talk. And it's not as if women are sexless beings without impulse. As men, women too have sexual thoughts about people at work but they don't typically act on them in a repulsive way, where as men don't control their impulses as well (plus tend to have the power imbalance in their favor).