Ozzie Guillen, the manager of the Chicago White Sox, has been the subject of more-than-usual conversations this past week after he called Jay Mariotti, a Chicago Sun Times sportswriter, a “fag.” The coverage has been extensive (no need to revisit it here), but little of it has touched upon the key underlying issue.

Ozzie’s statement is part of a continual process of defining and reiterating what it means to be a “man” by positioning oneself against a feminine Other — whether that be women or gay men. The responses to the statement, though, also revealed America’s screwed-up attitude toward “foul” language. We are simultaneously frightened and fascinated by it, but we rarely take time — or practice the moral and intellectual patience — to truly understand it.

If we listen to and interrogate language more seriously (and less Puritanically or defensively), we might just discover the means to confront the damaging social constructions — like Ozzie’s statement — in a deeper, more meaningful way.

Part of the problem with the cultural conversation that ensued after the statement was that is has been chiefly confined to the (American) sports world — a world whose very foundation was built upon overcoming male insecurity and, in the minds of such influential figures as Teddy Roosevelt and Billy Sunday, driving back the powerful feminizing forces in American culture (see Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood and Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America for insightful, well-documented sociological overviews). The evolution of the modern American (male) athlete in this past century has simply acted to strengthen these misogynistic and homophobic roots.

And we don’t need to look simply to the loud-mouth columnists or in-your-face players and managers that are now de rigeur in that sports world. Spend any length of time in a male locker room — even among casual weekend warriors — and the jokes will begin to arise as naturally as the steam from the showers. They are such an accepted part of the conversation that it takes even someone sensitized to the historical and social context a few moments to suppress his laughter and realize what he is participating in.

So almost all of the commentary I heard on sports talk shows and in print was about how Ozzie shouldn’t have said what he said because “in our politically correct culture” that is a word that just isn’t allowed. Or, a few of the more sensitive and worldly commentators would suggest that Ozzie should not have said it because he is “offending the gay community.”

Interestingly, the week Ozzie made the statement he also got suspended for an unrelated incident in which one of his pitchers hit an opposing batter in retaliation for White Sox players being hit earlier in the game (this is all after Ozzie had demoted another one of his pitchers to the minor leagues for being unwilling to exact that same revenge a couple of weeks before). The same sports commentators had nothing but praise for Ozzie, as they have had in the past, for bringing a “toughness” to the team.

The week was also, ironically, Pride Week — which in Chicago alone draws hundreds of thousands of people, gay and straight, into the streets of what is, despite its “blue collar” reputation, a very gay friendly town. Of course, not a single commentator noted this noteworthy fact.

The only commentator I found that showed an awareness of the larger context wasn’t part of that sports world. In his initial blog entry on the subject, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn compared the word “f-word” to the “n-word” and interviewed a gay activist about why the significance of the word (”the fact that Ozzie used the word to abuse or demean Marriotti, meaning to suggest that he was something bad, less than a man, or whatever, is what carries the sting”).

Later, Zorn published a letter from a reader (and added his own insightful notes) that exposed the hypocrisy of sportwriters like Mariotti, who frequently traffics in misogyny and homophobia himself — calling a former White Sox star, Frank “Big Hurt” Thomas “The Big Skirt,” referring to Mike Ditka as “Limp Ditka” and even identifying Chicago, in a parody of Carl Sandburg, as “The City of Weak Shoulders.”

Zorn’s perspective was the very rare exception, however. In fact, the mainstream media was so far from truly confronting this issue that it couldn’t even agree, as Teddy Greenstein of the Tribune points out, on whether it was OK to print or say the word “fag” in a journalistic context.

Which brings me to my current obsession with HBO’s Deadwood, a series about a small Western town in the years following the Civil War. Presently, it has begun its third and regrettably its last season.

David Milch, the show’s creator, clearly intends the town to represent a microcosm of America — but many, including Ian McShane, who won a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of saloonkeeper and all-around town boss Al Swearengen, sees the allegory as even more immediately relevant: “In ‘Deadwood,’ we dramatized the back room deals, the rigged elections, and the treachery that shows how American capitalism started …. It does smack of a certain similarity that has been occurring in certain quarters in the last few years. It reminds me that from the days of the gold rush until now, government has existed for three reasons: One, to separate rich people from poor people; second, for the government to take as much of the remaining money from the poor people; third, to protect the rich people from themselves.”

Despite these grand ambitions, however, the show — and McShane’s character, for that matter — is best known for the curses that populate almost every sentence in the script. Swearengen’s favorite epithet, for example, is to refer to anyone who dares challenge him as a “cocksucker.” He also gets more mileage out of the multiple connotations of “fuck” than anyone since the should-be-famous moment during the first season of The Wire (episode 4) when for an entire five-minute scene “fuck” — or some version of it — is literally the only word that is uttered.

What few people are discussing is the connections between the American allegory, the “crude” language, and the uncompromising portraits of down-and-dirty manhood on the show. Much like Ozzie and Mariotti, the men of Deadwood use language in a variety of ways to prop up their power, especially when it is threatened. The show both revels in the language and reveals its limitation. The multi-dimensional quality of almost all of the curses lends a poetic, Shakespearean quality to the characters’ voices — and often leads to some of more comedic moments of the show.

One of the best qualities about the show (and one of many aspects it shares with The Wire) is how it never fails to show the complexities of what would normally be dismissed as “simple” or “worthless” folk. The appreciation of everyday language is one of the greatest examples of this awareness.

But as the curses pile up on the show, the swearing begins to reek of desperation — of desperate men in a desperate time and place. The frontier — which was supposed to be the site where men could refresh their manhood and America could reassert its rugged individuality — is failing them. The frontier, in fact, never existed, except in the idealized American male mythology.

That mythology, nevertheless, persists — and sports, with its endless at-the-ready narratives of toughness and confrontation, is the perfect modern venue for its promotion.

The only way we can intervene in those narrative is to call them out, and that requires putting their language in the proper context — not because it’s politically correct, not because it’s offensive, but because it’s part of a story in which we are the often unwitting characters. It would be nice, as women but especially as men, if we could find the language to start writing a better story of our own.