Focus: Shock in the USA! Anarchy in the UK!

A breast flops out in America and all hell breaks loose, from the courts to the White House. It could never happen in Britain, the land of Page 3 and Jordan in the jungle - where the ultimate swear-word pops out live on TV and most viewers carry on regardless. Here Andrew Gumbel explains why Janet Jackson bared the US soul and DJ Taylor speaks up for our last verbal taboo

America is upset. A scandal has provoked outrage across the nation and condemnation from the White House. The cause is not poverty or war or terrorism but the slightly exposed right breast of a faded pop star. Janet Jackson's mammary gland appeared on network television for 1.7 seconds last Sunday, but the storm it caused has sucked in the White House and the law courts, and changed the way major events are broadcast. It shows no sign of abating.

Even as Ms Jackson was apologising for baring (not quite) all at the Super Bowl, another televised confession was about to take place on the other side of the world. The father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme admitted selling atomic secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea - slightly more worrying than breast-flashing in the global scheme of things, you might think, but whereas Abdul Qadeer Khan received a presidential pardon after his mea culpa, Jackson now faces the wrath of the Bush administration.

Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), denounced her display as "a classless, crass, and deplorable stunt" worthy of the highest censure. An official investigation is already under way, Mr Powell promising to hunt valiantly for The Truth.

The US media, which forgot all about Mr Khan in the blink of a single news cycle, has gone into all-Janet-all-the-time mode, asking many of the same questions as those in officialdom. Who knew about the breast stunt, and when did they know it? Was it really a "wardrobe malfunction", as Jackson's singing partner and the man responsible for ripping away her outer garment, Justin Timberlake, described it? Or was a plot hatched long before the performance got under way?

These are questions that cry out for answers. The burgeoning scandal has already acquired a clutch of nicknames, from Breastgate to The Teat Offensive. And it has triggered one knock-on effect after another. Despite her videotaped apology - in which she insisted the episode was her fault, and her fault alone - Janet Jackson has been officially disinvited to tonight's Grammy awards ceremony. All red-carpet events for the foreseeable future, including the Oscars later this month, will be broadcast with a five-second delay, giving producers time to switch camera angles or bleep out bad language emanating from the mouths of insubordinate celebrities.

There have been anxious newspaper editorials, many of them agonising about the deleterious effect the glimpse of the Jackson mammary gland might have had on the nation's impressionable children (as though babies had never seen a breast before). The nation's guardians of puritanical virtue have muttered disapprovingly about the moral corruption of Hollywood entertainers. There has even - perhaps inevitably - been a lawsuit. A Tennessee bank employee called Terri Carlin has filed a class action suit "on behalf of all Americans", alleging that Jackson's suggestive duet with Mr Timberlake and her climactic déshabillé caused viewers to suffer "outrage, anger, embarrassment and serious injury". The nature of the "serious injury" is not specified, though one wonders: did the entire nation spontaneously gouge its eyes out?

Granted, there was nothing clever or sophisticated or remotely tasteful about Jackson's performance, one of a handful of numbers making up the halftime show at last Sunday's Super Bowl football league final. One might have guessed from her antics that she had a new album to promote. The song she performed with Timberlake was an utterly forgettable bump-and-grind number called "Rock Your Body". At the moment that Timberlake lunged for her clothing he was singing the line "I'm gonna have you naked by the end of this song" - now elevated to Exhibit A status in the prosecution's case for prior intent. When the breast popped out, the nipple appeared to be obscured by a shiny object - which, on repeated subsequent viewings, turned out to be a silver sunburst nipple shield. Opinions have varied whether this made the whole thing worse or better. True, the shield did spare the precise delineation of the areola to those poor innocent children watching at home. Then again, how kooky is it to get your nipple pierced?

Such has been the tenor of discussion on the 24-hour news channels and on the internet, where the clashing American proclivities for excess and puritanical self-loathing have been on spectacularly lurid display in the past few days. Essentially, the attitude has been (and I paraphrase, slightly): "That's disgusting! Now, let's watch it again!" President Bush professes to have fallen asleep before the half-time show started, although a White House spokesman did feel able to say families should be able to expect higher standards from broadcasters. But if anyone missed the breast-baring it was played over and over, with multiple forms of smudging, pixel distortion and black oblong blocks, depending on the channel. To borrow a very old line from Laurence Sterne, the prude was running the peepshow.

The hypocrisies and inconsistencies have not gone entirely unnoticed. As several commentators have pointed out, the FCC might have been upset by Janet Jackson's flash of naked flesh, but it was apparently absolutely fine with the game itself - macho, sweaty, and infused with elemental violence - and also with the orgy of highly expensive, closely watched television adverts punctuating it. These included a dog biting a man in the crotch, a flatulent horse, a monkey making suggestive advances to his owner's paramour, an elderly couple beating each other up as they fight over a crisp packet, a woman cooling her genital area with a beer bottle and any number of adverts for "erectile dysfunction" remedies. Explain those to the children.

Consistency, as it turns out, is not the FCC's strong point. Almost exactly a year ago, at the Golden Globe film awards, Bono let out a spontaneous "fucking brilliant" when he heard that he had won for best song in a movie, and his words went out, uncensored, on the NBC airwaves. On that occasion, curiously, the FCC ruled that nothing was amiss because the U2 front man was not referring to a sexual act and he was not insulting anyone. Rather, he was using the word "as an adjective or expletive to emphasise an exclamation".

How come the FCC let that one go, but came down hard on Jackson? We shall probably never know. One can't help observing, however, that the Nefarious Nipple was an extremely convenient distraction for the Bush White House as it suffered one of the worst weeks since coming to power three years ago. News of the Jackson investigation helped, at least a little, to obscure the administration's embarrassment over the glaring absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and made it a bit easier for President Bush to launch a politically sensitive investigation into the use of intelligence in the run-up to the war.

If the Jackson crackdown did have any broader political motivation, however, it may yet prove to be counter-productive. Political columnists have already noted the speed with which the FCC moved and wondered why the president, by comparison, has dragged his feet so on WMD. Sooner or later the question is bound to be asked: why worry about a single naked breast, when it is becoming increasingly apparent that the emperor has no clothes at all?

In a career not overburdened by the use of foul and abusive language, I have only ever once called someone by the c-word (as I propose to refer to it hereafter). The circumstances, oddly enough, were highly innocuous: the moment 15 or more years ago when my father asked me what I thought of a trainee barrister with whom I shared a flat, whose name, for the purposes of this anecdote, we shall call Barraclough. As it happened, Barraclough and I had come to blows on the hall carpet a week before. I thought hard. Moron didn't really do justice to Barraclough's ghastliness. Even the more powerful alternatives were anodyne. Only one expletive fitted. "Barraclough," I informed the listening parent, "is a [well, you know]."

No sooner had the word left my mouth than I felt hugely ashamed of myself. Not because I am particularly squeamish, but because it seemed so startlingly inappropriate to the business at hand. Jumped-up, overbearing little public school pipsqueak Barraclough might have been, but he probably was not worthy of the worst insult in the language. The f-word? Well, everyone uses that, do they not? My 82-year-old father uses it when he loses his spectacles. I use it when the post brings notice of an Inland Revenue inquiry into my tax affairs. Even my wife has been known to use it. But the c-word? No thanks very much, we're all civilised people around here.

On the face of it there is something wonderfully ironic in the thought of dozens, if not hundreds, of irate viewers clogging the ITV switchboards to complain about John Lydon, live on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, using a word synonymous with female genitalia. Considering the conspicuous excesses of which TV is daily guilty, the Lydon outburst seems pretty small beer. In its wake, though, have arisen the most agonising debates about the breaking of the final verbal taboo, as voluminous in their way as the furore of 30 years ago when Peregrine Worsthorne, having used the f-word on TV for the first time, was told by The Daily Telegraph that he would never fulfil his dream of the editorial chair.

Historically, one might wonder what all the fuss is about. From the angle of the etymologist, the c-word is something over a millennium old. It turns up in Chaucer (references to the Wife of Bath's queynte and so on). In somewhat elevated form ("cunny", which makes it sound rather like a small beast of the field) it runs furry riot through Victorian pornography, while rhyming slang - "Berkshire Hunt", "Cunning Stunt" and other variants - has been exploring its possibilities for centuries. And yet getting it into literature proper required a struggle of gargantuan proportions. Even in the post-Chatterley 1960s when every modish novel worth its salt sprouted the f-word on alternate pages, it was invariably set down as "c--t".

Every now and then pundits declare that the trouble about bad language is that it needs "demythologising". George Orwell, for example, himself much censored, once remarked that if you could get the half-dozen best-known English obscenities off the lavatory wall and into the drawing room, the problem would more or less be solved.

Such is the power of symbols, though, that this process of demystification is notoriously hard to carry through; the number of people prepared to be welcomed at the drawing room door with the fuller version of "Hello you f-wording c-word!" is probably rather small. Even used humorously, the words have a kind of visceral offensiveness. An offensiveness, too, that has little to do with time-honoured English prudery. Complainants to the Independent Television Commission, it turns out, are always much more exercised by bad language than sex.

It is important, too, to distinguish between the different degrees of offence caused by spoken and written obscenity. In the hands of modern Scottish patois merchants such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, four-letter words are used so regularly that they become a kind of sedative syntactical rhythm beat, almost to the point where the reader barely notices their presence. Hearing two thousand Chelsea fans use them in unison to name the referee is a rather different thing.

There are plenty of good arguments against bad language in general and the use of the c-word in particular. The most obvious is that it betrays a sort of bedrock mental slovenliness, an inability to think in terms other than the low-level insult. As a teenager I occasionally had to share a school changing room with a boy called Lennie Gordon who didn't swear in the way that other people swear; he simply talked obscenities: "So I went to the f-wording refectory and ate my f-wording lunch and that c-word Wills gave me a f-wording detention, the f-wording c-word." A worm's eye view of the world, but one intimately bound up in the language in which it was - or wasn't expressed. Running it a close second is that implication of generalised sexual - and sexist - contempt. To put it another way, I've known plenty of hard-swearing women in my time, but I never knew any of them call anyone a c-word or want to be so called.

That society needs taboos - those figurative lines drawn in the sand over which one shall not walk - seems clear from the fact that every society placed under the anthropologist's lens seems to possess them. The power harnessed by breaking them - so useful when one wants to make a very strong point, express anger beyond usual words, or even provoke shocked laughter - resides in rarity.

Without taboos, for instance, British comedy would scarcely exist. After all, for a smut-merchant like Roy "Chubby" Brown to waddle on stage to announce "They say you are what you eat - well, I'm a c-word" is funny - if it is funny - only in a world where the word still makes people feel slightly uneasy. To go back to Orwell, lavatory walls are not simply there to be pissed against.