I visited my sister one summer when my nieces were in junior high school. They each had a friend over, and as they watched TV after supper, I couldn't help but overhear them.

"You one skanky ho!" one niece shouted to her best girlfriend. "Man, who you callin' skanky? You da ho," responded the friend. They threw pillows at each other and went in search of snacks. The jive-talking knife-twisting got worse as they tussled over a bag of chips.

It's hard to shock a baby boomer. We've pretty much seen it all. But the raw violent sexuality of that language, from the mouths of babes, was more than I could stomach.

I sat down with them and tried to reason. "How come you girls call each other such ugly names?"

They just stared at me, like I had descended from Planet Weirdo.

I pressed on, "Don't you realize how degrading it is to call each other ho's, and skanky, and all that? You're all smart, beautiful girls, and you must like each other. So, what's up with the language?"

One niece found her voice. "It's like, I don't know, all the kids talk this way," and she rolled her eyes at me, old fuddy-duddy aunt.

My sister said, unconcerned, "Kids do talk like that, and they don't mean anything by it."

I shook my head in disbelief and dismay. After almost 40 years of the new feminism, the best women can do is call each other ho's, and accept it when they hear others doing it?

Now comes Imus with his "humorous" on-the-air description of the Rutgers women's basketball team, made, by the way, in response to his NBC-executive companion on the air, who said it first. Imus gets a two-week suspension, a mere pop of the locker-room towel. A couple of big sponsors pull out. The NBC exec who started it has been forgotten. So, after 50 years of civil rights, the best people can do is call blacks "nappy-headed?"

Coach Vivian Stringer correctly points out that all women are degraded by such language, not just black women. So true. But then, women are sexualized, trivialized, slapped around, screamed at, murdered every day - women don't fare so well in the mass media.

There's more. What Imus said is an undeniable racial slur. "Ho" is a recent addition to the common lexicon, thanks to gangsta rap. "Nappy-headed" is an old phrase. I heard it from adults in the 1950s, talking about civil rights leaders. It was a way of adding colorful descriptors to the N-word. Argue against an ideal by disparaging the advocates' appearance - it's an old rhetorical trick, leading to conclusions that are necessarily false but may be powerfully persuasive nonetheless.

But look - Imus is just taking the fall here, and firing him would send a message to no one. Who hires him, scripts him, arranges for his guests, rehearses him? Who sponsors him? Who listens to his programs? Who buys what he sells?

We are all complicit in Imus' crime. We accept whatever we're handed on television and radio. We turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the consolidation of media ownership in the hands of a very few. We cheer Simon as he rips into another hapless contestant on "American Idol," and we can't get enough of pseudo-reality shows like "Bad Girls Club" and "Survivor." The nastier they are, the better we like it. We wait with baited breath to see who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, and we almost believe this is news. Has anyone else noticed the plunging necklines of female news anchors lately? Has anyone noticed that the black characters in Disney movies are the clowns or bad guys?

Let's stand up and be counted; let's not take it any more, sitting comfortably in the Laz-e-boy, clicker in hand.

Immanuel Kant, in one formulation of his famous categorical imperative, urged us to act as if we lived in a world governed by moral rules. Let's see how it would work.

If we acted as if all people deserved to be treated with dignity and respect, we would never use degrading language, and we would call others out when we heard such language being used.

If we acted as if we were intelligent, informed citizens, we would not put up with the mind-numbing pap that television and radio feed us. We would pick up a book, search out intelligent conversation, attend lectures, learn things.

If we acted as if all this mattered, our children, partners, colleagues, neighbors, and friends would not have to suffer the assault of demeaning, degrading language, images, and stories every day of their lives.

Donna J. Wood holds the David W. Wilson Chair in Business Ethics at UNI.