That’s the question being asked by this Slashdot thread about the Second Circuit Court striking down an FCC attempt to fine Fox for swear words uttered by celebrities in the apparent heat of the moment.
Not getting too much into this particular case, some on this discussion wonder why there are restrictions at all on individual words on TV. After all, they argue, shouldn’t parents be heavily regulating their kids’ TV viewing during their innocent, formative years anyway? And don’t said kids hear those words on the street and in school every day? And what harm does it do them to begin with? That’s not even getting into the whole violence and sex hypocrisy.
I must admit, I’d never really considered that viewpoint, what with that particular form of censorship being as old as the television medium itself, or even older. What do you all think?
Despite finding many swear words personally irritating, no we don’t need to shield people. Just like I do in real life, I can just avoid the places and people that swear a lot if it bothers me. And kids already hear enormous amounts of swearing; that’s when I picked up my distaste for it. We aren’t protecting them from a thing.
If we’re not going to insist that there are certain times and places in which it is entirely inappropriate to use profanity, then I see no reason to insist that there are times and places in which it is entirely inappropriate to use racial and ethnic slurs. If we’re not going to ban “shit” or “fuck” on television then I see no reason to ban “nigger,” “kike” or “spic” either.
I see no harm in requiring people to behave like civilized adults in public places.
So swearing due to, say, frustration is the same as insulting people to you? You see no difference?
I was amused but bewildered to hear a CNN anchor discussing this story today and saying, as best I could tell, that at some awards show Paris Hilton used “the f-word.” Are we all in grade school now? Say she used an obscenity. Who cares which one? The whole thing is childish.
From the link:
Am I the only one who thinks it’s weird that the chairman of the FCC would talk about “Hollywood” this way?
I agree. In fact, I think it’s the general censorship that makes the occasional slip so much more noticeable. We never notice a swear on cable, but they really stand out on network TV:
“Did he just say ‘dick’? on a Primetime show? Can you DO that?”
“I guess you can. What were those seven words again?”
“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.”
“Ooh…that’s way out of date, innit? I mean, ‘tits’? I think ‘tits’ is on, like, Sesame Street now. Elmo likes to go on about his Mommy’s big red tits and no one cares…”
“What should they be now?”
“Hmm…I bet you can’t say ‘smegma’.”
“But that’s scientific.”
“Is it? Does it matter? They’re blurring horse genitals these days --”
“Oh, wait! I remember! Goddammit. You can say ‘damn it’, but you can’t say ‘goddammit’.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep, apparently blasphemy is worse than simple vulgarity.”
“Isn’t that rather, uh…y’know, church and statey? Why should a government office have anything to say about blasphemy?”
Meanwhile, the kids are rolling their eyes, wishing Mom and Dad would shut the fuck up and take the show off of pause.
The point is, if you take away their offensive status, they would cease to be offensive- its not like there’s anything inherent about these words that makes them any different from the million others in the dictionary. I can think of many words you couldn’t say in the 60’s or 70’s that are pretty common today.
I also never got “tits” being offensive- I know prudes who use that word.
And if swearing is so bad, why isn’t there a commandment against it?
There is nothing inherent in the “n” word or the “k” word that makes them offensive, either. Take away their offensive status, and they cease to be offensive. I see no important difference between profanity and racial/ethnic slurs except that a liberal who professes not to see anything wrong with profanity is merely pretending that he’s somehow ever so much more worldly and sophisticated than a Baptist or a Mormon who’s offended by the “f” word. It has nothing to do with censorship or freedom of expression. It’s just another example of lefties looking for yet another excuse to pretend they’re somehow superior to the squares.
Nah, I don’t buy it. I happen to agree with you that it’s reasonable to keep certain obscenities and profanities out of civilized conversation. And, of course, it’s obligatory for a polite person to refrain from the use of any expletive that offends somebody else in conversation. (Yes, folks, that means that if your very straitlaced conservative Christian coworker thinks it’s blasphemous to say “Oh my God”, you have to apologize and stop saying “Oh my God” around her, even if you think she’s being an oversensitive prissy ass. Manners are tough sometimes.)
But even somebody as prissy as I am about conventionally “offensive” words can see a qualitative difference in offensiveness between a general blasphemy or obscenity used merely for emphasis or shock value (such as “fuck” or “goddamn”), and a slur on a particular group of people which is deliberately used to insult (such as “spic” or “nigger”). There are plenty of good reasons for banning the latter category of epithets even in situations where the former category is permitted.
I will respond rather tangentially to this. I find that “discreet” swearing (the flocking sh1t @ssh0le kind) is even worse than actual swearing. When you hear someone swear openly, you can at least give them the benefit of doubt and choose to believe that didn’t know what they were doing. When someone says “oh shoot, you moperflopper”, you know for a fact that this person thinks there is something wrong about swearing and chooses to do it in a way that is still obvious enough that everyone hearing will know what he actually meant to say. If you need to swear, own up to it and go all the way. Trying to cover your curses doesn’t shield anyone from anything.
You’re in Denmark? My Danish student tells me that Danish media are actually quite prudish about obscenities such as “lort” (which literally means “shit”). Is that somehow less silly to you than American media avoiding the use of “shit”?
A lot of English-speaking people from non-Anglophone nations, I find, seem to consider “shit” a fairly mild expletive like “heck” or “rats”. I’ve heard well-mannered, deferential teenage students in India exclaiming “Oh shit shit shit!” in front of old-fashioned elderly professors, and nobody seems to think it sounds really naughty. (These same students would never use comparable Hindi obscenities like sala or chod in the same circumstances.)
Traditionally in American English, though, “shit” is quite a naughty word. This is loosening up some, but we’re still nowhere near as casual about the use of “shit” as are non-Anglophone cultures who’ve imported it as a loan word from entertainment media.
I didn’t mean that you should be able to ‘fuck’ at church, given its status in today’s society, but would society be any different or worse off if you could? Obviously I don’t want to purposefully offend anyone, like the Uber-Christian girl at work, by cussing or doing anything out of the ordinary to offend them, but do I also think that if I slip up and “fuck” in front of her that *she * , not me, is the one with superiority complex, becasue she expects me to believe that her merely hearing a dirty swear is going to causer her to faint, her soul to go to hell, or in any other way ruin her day? And not even aimed at her as an insult?
I think this is almost circular reasoning, though. Yes, if obscenities like “fuck” were considered non-disruptive and acceptable even in the most “refined” social settings like church services, then the use of “fuck” in such settings wouldn’t bother anybody, pretty much by definition.
Well, better example- My 80-year old nan is hip, and wouldn’t bat an eye if I let fly with a stream of obsceneties, and may even join in with her own. A good friend of mine couldn’t say groin in front of his grandmother without her turning blue. Just by hearing this and knowing nothing else about us, could you make any reasonable determination about us as people? Could you pick out the one who was (hypothetically, of course), a rapist?
And I should add to this, As a child I was exposed to every possible curse word as long as I can remember, and there are several words my friend didn’t know until he went to junior high.
MHO: Absolutely not. Modesty in language is essentially just as arbitrary as modesty in clothing. If one culture thinks it’s immodest to expose, say, even knees and elbows, while another culture thinks any clothing is acceptably modest as long as it covers the nipples and genitals, that determines exactly zilch about the relative levels of kindness, happiness, intelligence, or other good qualities in each of the cultures.
Same goes for variation in acceptability of swear words. Your grandmother and your friend’s grandmother apparently inhabit different cultural groups, and I would not venture to deduce anything about the characters of either of them just from the fact that they have different views about obscenities.
Within a given culture, however, different choices about the use of swear words can be revealing. If your friend habitually embarrassed his gran by using obscene words in her straitlaced social circles, I’d think he might be kind of a jerk. Or if his gran habitually embarrassed him by pretending to be shocked and disapproving about his use of mild expletives that nobody in her social circle actually objects to, I’d think she might be kind of a jerk. It’s all about custom and context.
I concede that I do not happen to be on television at the moment.
To me, the big question is the following: Is it useful for a society to have “forbidden words”—words which have great shock value (not entirely due to their literal meaning) and are taboo in polite company?
As being crude and offensive is the whole point of using swear words in the first place, it is entirely appropriate to have a taboo against using them in polite company, just as the “n” word might be appropriate in a Chris Rock comedy routine but not in a church sermon. The arguments used for removing the taboo from the “f” word could be easily used for removing the taboo from the “n” word as well. Which, to my mind, shows how superficial and hypocritical the arguments are in the first place. Basically, the people who want to remove the taboo on profanity only want to remove the taboo from some offensive words (the ones that offend the squares) but keep it on others (the words that offend them).
