THE PRESS AND SEX : Why Most Editors Lean to Dots, Dashes, Euphemisms : Language: They worry about offending readers with sexually explicit words and obscene terms. But are readers sometimes misled by the desire not to discomfort?

Last year, newspapers across the country published stories on Page 1 about two obscenity cases involving the rap group 2 Live Crew.

But no major daily paper printed any of the allegedly obscene lyrics that caused the entire controversy. Very few papers even described the lyrics in anything but the most general terms.

The Washington Post may have been among the most graphic, citing lyrics that referred to “breaking the walls of a woman’s vagina . . . a man forcing anal sex on a woman and later making her lick feces.” Most other newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times, used such non-specific descriptions as “crude and graphic sexual language.”

Why are newspaper editors--who are generally insistent that their reporters be specific and detailed in their stories, especially on controversial issues--so squeamish about telling readers exactly what stories are really about when the subject is related to sex?

Because newspaper editors know that many readers are offended by graphic language--and, especially, obscene language--that involves sexual and scatological terms. Language that might seem acceptable in a movie, where it’s evanescent--uttered and gone in a millisecond--or even in a book, which will have limited access, may offend mightily in a “family newspaper,” where it’s printed in black and white, there forever for children and all to see. So editors resort to euphemisms--”a four-letter vulgarism”--or dashes (“f---”)--or they ignore the terms altogether.

A newspaper is generally seen as “another person in people’s homes, sitting at the breakfast table with them at 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning,” says Leonard Downie, managing editor of the Washington Post. “There are things they will accept from TV and the movies (that) . . . they won’t accept from a newspaper.”

Why are some people so offended by obscene language?

Many people see it as “a penetration, a violation of their private sphere, their psychological and spiritual being,” says Leonard Michaels, a novelist who is also co-editor of the study “The State of the Language.”

Christopher Ricks, Michaels’ co-editor, says the real problem is the lack of “neutral” words for most sexual and scatological functions.

“All the words for sex and scatology are either chill and clinical, like ‘sexual intercourse’ or ‘defecation,’ or they’re crude and vulgar,” Ricks says.

Moreover, Ricks says, “it’s often not the language itself but the act it reminds one of that gives offense.”

Although many in today’s generation tend to use four-letter words more openly, the use of such language in newspapers is not necessarily generational. Shelby Coffey, the editor of The Times, is 44, for example, but he is generally much more reluctant to permit the publication of obscenities in The Times than was William F. Thomas, his predecessor, who retired in 1989, six months before his 65th birthday.

Two years ago, Jack Miles, book editor of The Times, says Coffey ordered that two obscene words be excised from a review of a book of letters by novelist James Jones. One was a four-letter vulgarism for defecation; the other was “laid” as in “getting laid.”

Coffey says both words “easily could have been written around.” But Willie Morris, the author of the review, said that cutting the words would violate both his principles and the spirit of Jones’ work. He refused. The review was not published.

Last month, in examining material excerpted from the Christopher Commission report showing members of the Los Angeles Police Department making racist and sexist remarks, Coffey excised several obscene words, including one that he had the paper characterize as “a four-letter vulgarism for vagina.”

The woman who wrote the story and several women editors said the actual word should be used because it is so offensive to women that by not using it, The Times would fail to accurately portray the severity of the officers’ demeaning attitudes toward women. Coffey eliminated the word anyway, arguing that it appeared only once in the transcripts and was thus not demonstrably part of “pattern and practice” in the Police Department and also that the word is “sexist and derogatory.”

Coffey did agree, however, that the story could quote the word “tits” from the LAPD transmissions. The story also contained several other derogatory, although not obscene references to women, and Coffey said he thought the cumulative effect of the language The Times used made the necessary point about the officers’ behavior.

Are there circumstances under which Coffey would permit the publication of obscenities?

If obscene language is “in one way or another deemed essential to the nature of a particular story,” The Times would publish it, he says.

But Coffey did not deem obscene language essential to the nature of a story on obscene language--the very story you are now reading--not even in illustrative examples ranging from a famous outburst at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, to the resignation of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, to a recent exchange of profanity between Boston city councilmen published in the Boston Globe.

It is a measure of how uncomfortable most editors are with publishing obscenity that Coffey, who suggested writing about obscenity as part of this series on the press and sex and then said several times that he was prepared to publish the obscene words used in these and other noteworthy cases, ultimately decided to eliminate them from this story.

Why?

Because, Coffey decided, the words were not “a news necessity” and because “the aim is not to go out of your way to offend large parts of your readership.”

“If the President . . . utters a four-letter word about his political opponent or you get a White House tape,” Coffey says “then that is a news event of a different order of magnitude. . . .”

Other editors agree. That is why many newspapers--including The Times--quoted on their front pages an obscenity used by President Richard M. Nixon when taped transcripts of conversations in the Oval Office were released in 1974.

But that was news in 1974; it’s history in 1991. So Coffey excised that obscenity from this story, too.

Newspapers are in the communications business, however, and their reluctance to publish so-called “obscene” words and phrases sometimes prevents them from communicating the essence of an important story. Moreover, in their zeal to avoid offending readers, newspapers sometimes confuse or mislead readers.

That’s what the New York Times did in 1976 when President Jimmy Carter used the word “screws.” Although most major newspapers used the remark intact, the New York Times substituted “a vulgarism for sexual relations.”

The next day, apparently realizing that readers might mistakenly think Carter had said something far more offensive than “screws,” the Times changed its description to “a common but mild vulgarism for sexual intercourse”--taking eight words to clear up the confusion originally caused by having used five words to replace one word.

Although editors are now sometimes more willing than in earlier generations to use graphic and even, on rare occasion, obscene language, they remain squeamish.

When a Cincinnati museum director was tried--and acquitted--on obscenity charges last year for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, no major daily newspaper published any of the most controversial photographs in full, but the Washington Post did describe the photographs as depicting “the forearm and hand of one person inserted into the anus of another . . . a finger inserted into a penis . . . a cylindrical object being inserted into an anus . . . a man urinating into the mouth of another.” Several other newspapers--including the New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Washington Times--used one or more of these descriptive phrases or phrases similar to them.

But when the Los Angeles Times reporter covering the Mapplethorpe trial tried to do something similar, editors changed his wording to refer only to photos showing “homoerotic images” and “a child with genitals exposed.”

“Homoerotic images” could just be photos of two men kissing. George Cotliar, managing editor of The Times, who is strongly opposed to the publication of obscene and graphic language involving sex and defecation, said he did not think more specific language was necessary, though.

Geneva Overholser, editor of the Des Moines Register, says many editors’ stated reluctance to offend readers may also be a manifestation of their own “prudishness and fear about reporting as thoroughly as we really ought to be reporting.”

Indeed, many of the very people whom editors say they are trying to protect from rough language--children and adolescents--hear such language at school, on the street, in music and movies.

Because editors are increasingly worried these days that young readers find newspapers stuffy, remote and out of touch with the reality of their daily lives, would not a more realistic use of the language that many young people hear every day help bridge that gap?

“I don’t think we have to be vulgar to attract young readers,” says Peter S. Prichard, editor of USA Today. That paper, which has been more successful at attracting young readers than virtually any other major newspaper in the country, uses dashes or euphemisms for obscenities to “disguise them in some way that readers can figure out . . . but won’t offend a large number of people,” he says.

But obscenity is often in the eye of the beholder.

In 1972, the Los Angeles Times published a story on Frasier, a physically debilitated lion at Lion Country Safari, who had sired more than 30 cubs with six different mates in 18 months, despite being 75 years old in human terms. The Times published a photograph of Frasier with the story. The photo was no Mapplethorpe; it simply showed Frasier lying on his back, napping under the “watchful eye of one of his wives.”

But, between editions, the watchful eye of a Times editor noticed that Frasier’s genitals were clearly visible in the photo. He ordered them eliminated for the next edition, seemingly on the theory that the mere sight of Frasier’s cub-making equipment might have caused lasting psychological damage to any child who happened to see the picture.

That evening, when I showed the Frasier story to the 10-year-old boy who then lived next door, he read it with great amusement, then looked at the photo and, confused, and concerned, said to me:

“But, Mr. Shaw, what happened to his balls?”

Three days later, there was a 69-car pileup on the Pomona Freeway near Claremont. The story was the main banner headline on Page 1 of that day’s Late Final edition of the Los Angeles Times and it remained on Page 1 in the next day’s home edition. But in both editions, in headlines and stories alike, The Times called the accident a “70-car” pileup.

The editor who made that change said he had done so to avoid “titillating or offending readers” by reminding them of the sex act of the same number.