DEAR MISS MANNERS:

I am one of three on-site female employees in an almost exclusively male company of about 28 employees. While I like many of my colleagues, I am increasingly reluctant to come to work because of the nonstop sexual innuendo, joking and outright comments that surround me all day long.

I am an attractive young woman and it seems that he men I work with, including my two bosses, cannot resist turning any statement I say into some sort of sexual play on words. One of my bosses even reads to me the subject lines of the spam porn e-mails he receives. The other one openly assesses my figure every time he speaks to me. I am uncomfortable at work and have begun keeping my office door shut to ward off a co-worker who likes to “pretend” to pick the lint off my sweater.

I understand that what happens is up to me in that I have the choice to either find another job or make a formal complaint, neither of which I am prepared to do right now. And I feel partly responsible for not drawing the line when I was first employed here four months ago, but I was worried about fitting in and keeping my job.

Now I fear I have allowed my co-workers to assume I am receptive or at least amenable to all this “wind-wink, nudge-nudge” talk that goes on, when in fact it makes me very uncomfortable and is often personally offensive.

I am hopeful you can provide me with some polite but firm responses—things to say to help me establish boundaries and ward off these conversations before they start, and to hold me until I can make a decision about remaining here. It is very dispiriting to work with people who seem to have a juvenile fixation on sex and it is insulting to me that they don’t consider me enough of a lady to spare the talk in my presence.