When shock jock Don Imus uttered the words "nappy-headed hos" on the air, he was merely mimicking what pop culture, hipsters, gangsta rappers, Hollywood, post-feminist wanna-be-like-the-boyz bad girls and prime-time television have been repeating for years.

Mimi Yahn, who lives in Ingomar, has written extensively on gender and race; her latest study of hate speech and biased language on prime-time television will be released in June swiftianreport@surfbest.net).

Played over and over on the news, talk shows and YouTube, his remarks demeaned two marginalized groups in our society: African Americans and women. But as often as blacks are degraded in the media, there is no group targeted with as much intensity, ugliness or volume on a daily, nightly and even hourly basis as females.

On March 19, I began a six-week survey to track hate speech and bias language on prime time television. This project, which focuses on the six major network stations (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, MY-TV and the CW), is funded by the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania and will be completed at the end of May.

But this is the second time I've conducted this study. The first time around, in the spring of 2000, I found that females were the overwhelming target of degrading language on television.

I recorded all incidents of hate speech and bias language, no matter the target, and there were 22 categories in all, including race, gender, religion, sexual preference, nationality, class, age, physical appearance and mental illness. "Language incidents" were classified in order of severity. Categories 1 and 2 (bias language) consisted of comments that were dismissive, exclusionary, disrespectful or negatively stereotypical. Categories 3 and 4 (hate speech) consisted of language that was demeaning, objectifying, derogatory or pejorative (most of which cannot be printed in the Post-Gazette).

Of the 44 incidents in Category 1, females were the target of 41, with one each aimed at blacks, foreigners and males. Of the 316 incidents in Category 2, females were targeted in 73 percent, males in 12 percent and African Americans in 3.9 percent. The remaining incidents were spread out over 13 other groups, including Asians, whites, lesbians, Jews, Native Americans and Arabs.

Females were the target of 67.6 percent of the 145 incidents in Category 3, followed by males (11.7 percent), gay males (9 percent) and those seen as having problems with weight or appearance (4.8 percent).

Eight-four incidents fell into the most pejorative Category 4, with females targeted in 53.5 percent of the cases, followed by males (34.5 percent) and Asians (6 percent).

So overall, just in the relatively short period of the survey and only during the prime-time hours of 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., females were the butt of disrespectful, demeaning or derogatory language 416 times out of 590 recorded incidents.

As for Don Imus, the double-barreled nature of his slur is nothing unusual on prime-time television. Females regularly are "dual-targeted," with references to both their gender and their religion, sexual preference or, of course, their race.

Prime-time television writers have learned to create code words for race that avoid coming close to using the "n" word. But they are not so guarded when it comes to women. For instance, comedians and others add the word "crack" to "whore" to signal that they are referring to a black or Hispanic female. If you watch often enough, you'll see that when they just say "whore," they usually mean a white woman.

There's no reason to believe that the ugly language targeting females on prime-time television has decreased since 2000. In fact, my preliminary update of the earlier study indicates quite the opposite. The Law & Order franchise alone probably accounts for more Category 4 gender epithets against women in one season than all of prime-time television in the 1990s. The question is no longer which of the shows might slip in the "b" word now and then, but whether all of them use the term in virtually every episode, along with a collection of others, including the one for which Don Imus is now famous.

Why this matters goes to the heart of our disingenuous presumption that all of this misogynist trash talk is just talk. If words are so innocent and incapable of causing harm, why did our founding fathers find speech so important to protect? Why do dictatorships and overbearing presidents seek to silence critical words and reporters risk their lives to write and speak out?

In America and elsewhere, democracies value free speech as a necessary tool to defend against tyranny, but here we also emphasize our personal right to say whatever we want. Other democracies are more willing to limit nonpolitical speech to protect group rights.

This obsession of ours has created a society that protects bigotry in the name of personal liberty while rejecting social programs in the name of "government intrusion." It has rendered many of us incapable of telling the difference between critical discourse and hate speech.

There is a difference. Hate speech and bias language create a climate of intolerance and undercut the human rights of their targets. The individual who spends a lifetime hearing herself referred to by the "n" word or the "b" word is given to understand that she is worth far less than the people slinging those words. She also soon finds out that the people who use such language are not about to give her the jobs, housing, education, legal rights, pay, health care or respect they would give to others like themselves. Hate speech and bias language help establish the terms and limits of our place in society.

Last September marked a turning point in the way prime-time crime shows depict violence against women. No longer satisfied with nightly rapes and murders, women also were tortured, dismembered, beaten to death, burned, hung from ceilings and subjected to a range of horrific and sadistic hate crimes never before seen outside of snuff pornography.

As the frequency, pervasiveness and coarseness of hate speech increases, so too, does the social acceptability of taking it one step further. Dehumanization is at the heart of it all. Hate speech leads to hate crimes. Ask any Holocaust survivor. Or ask the hundreds of thousands of women raped and beaten in America every year.