I’m not a huge fan of Howard Stern, mostly because I find crass, adolescent humor generally not to my taste. (Actually, that’s not true. I find Chris Rock insanely funny, as well a many other comedians whose humor is quite ribald. Also, I saw Private Parts and found Stern to be a character I could empathize with in different ways. I’m not a moral absolutist.) However, I’m deeply concerned by the trend toward monitoring and fining him for his use of language. I listen mostly to NPR, and the following excerpt from a New York Times essay caught my attention:

Here are just a few of the things we’ve broadcast on our show that now could conceivably result in fines of up to a half million dollars for the 484 public stations that run the program: assorted curse words, people saying ”damn” and ”goddamn” (a recent F.C.C. decision declared that ”profane” and ”blasphemous” speech would now come under scrutiny); various prison stories; and a very funny story by the writer David Sedaris that takes place in a bathroom and that violates all three F.C.C. criteria for ”indecency.” It’s explicitly graphic in talking about ”excretory organs or activities”; Sedaris repeats and dwells on the descriptions at length, and he absolutely means to pander and shock. That’s what makes it funny.

In the past, the F.C.C. would have considered context, the possible literary value or news value of apparently offensive material. And the agency still gives lip service to context in its current decisions. But when the commissioners declared in March that an expletive modifying the word ”brilliant” (uttered by Bono at the Golden Globe Awards) was worthy of punishment, it made a more radical change in the rules than most people realize. Now context doesn’t always matter. If a word on our show could increase a child’s vocabulary, if some members of the public find something ”grossly offensive,” the F.C.C. can issue fines.

–Ira Glass, This American Life, a public radio show.

A friend recently wrote, “Heads up for an article I thought you might like to read that gets the feministy juices flowing. Its on Salon.com today, entitled Making Women’s Issues go Away by Rebecca Traister.” Here’s an excerpt of the article:

If you’d logged onto the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from “Earning Differences Between Men and Women” to “Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women” to “Women’s Earnings as Percent of Men’s 1979-1997.”

Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women’s Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like “Hot Jobs for the 21st Century” and “20 Leading Occupations for Women.” It’s just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women’s issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to “Missing: Information About Women’s Lives,” a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.

My friend continued by saying, “I personally do not like hearing all the statistics as of late of how single woman are one of the largest groups of non-voting peoples and then the commentary that follows on why ‘we’ don’t vote. Of course this ‘we’ is a very heterogenous bunch — but it still irks me, and I’d like to see more done about it.” She mentioned a site focused on trying to bring together large numbers of people to encourage them to vote. It is Dinner for America, which “represents 30 million young people who are trying to make sense of the baffling, absurd, and hilarious world of American politics.”