The whole tempest was so monumentally stupid that I was tempted to ignore it, particularly since it’s starting to blow over. But it’s worth trying to figure out what the uproar was really about, since it could be a sign of the kind of media coverage this brash new group of representatives, particularly female representatives, might be in for.

It certainly wasn’t about the profanity itself. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney delighted conservatives by effectively telling Senator Patrick Leahy, on the Senate floor, to go copulate with himself. (“It’s sort of the best thing I ever did,” Cheney later boasted to right-wing comedian Dennis Miller.) In October, Kanye West used the same term as Tlaib in the Oval Office, and few pretended to be scandalized.

Some commentators accused Tlaib of adopting a Trumpian mode of discourse, but this misunderstands why Trump’s words are offensive. When Trump called athletes who knelt to protest police brutality “sons of bitches,” the problem was bigotry, not salty language. When he was caught boasting about sexually assaulting women, the issue wasn’t that he used a slang term for female anatomy. It’s Trump’s foul actions and ideas, not his swearing, that make him a walking obscenity.

A few opiners insisted that the real affront lay in Tlaib’s threat of impeachment. But it’s not a secret that a lot of Democrats want to see Trump removed from office; on Thursday, Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, reintroduced an impeachment resolution in the new Congress.

So why the fainting fit over a bad word? I suspect it has something to do with the very phenomenon Tlaib was celebrating. The new Congress looks very different from any that’s come before. Forty-two of the new members are women, while 24 are people of color. Two of them, Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, are Congress’s first Muslim women. This new face of American political power makes a lot of people uncomfortable.