Word: erotica
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...legged hero appears as a villain in Chaucer, Shakespeare and John Donne. Accordingly, the book lives up and down to its title. It even includes a bit of anonymous erotica-"The Autobiography of a Flea," whose expository style even Nabokov might envy. "I was engaged," begins the flea, "upon professional business connected with the plump white leg of a young lady of some 14 years...
...CALCUTTA! The contents of this "nudie revue" may be disappointing when one considers the list of contributors-and the authors have not come through with the promised "elegant erotica"-but the bodies are indeed handsome...
Words also tend to be devalued by the new erotica. Three centuries or so ago, William Shakespeare or John Donne could convey passion, poetry, disgust and concupiscence in words with artful undermeanings that shocked none. Nowadays, a few greatly gifted writers can effectively employ the familiar quad-riliterals for dramatic or comic effect, but they tend to lose their value through overuse. As George Orwell observed 22 years ago, "If only our half-dozen 'bad' words could be got off the lavatory wall and onto the printed page, they would soon lose their magical quality." That process is well under...
Such evidence is scarcely conclusive. Erotica has flourished in every society and under every kind of regime from the Pharaohs to the Maos. "Legalizing pornography," reasons Author Wilfrid Sheed, "will not destroy its appeal any more than ending Prohibition stopped people from drinking. Liberal cliche to the contrary, lust was not invented by the censors." But lust can indeed be helped along by the censor. The outwardly prudish Victorian era produced pornographic literature of unsurpassed richness and ingenuity. In the first five decades of this century, U.S. art and entertainment either were censored or practiced self-censorship. Yet those were...
Fundamental disagreement occurs on the issue of what erotica does to the consumer. Critics of the new permissiveness assume as obvious that it is damaging to people, particularly the young, and that it leads to sexual license. But in the age of the in-depth survey and the microscopic sexual study, there is a remarkable dearth of information about the psychological impact of erotica on the normal?or more significant, ab normal?individual. A possible clue was offered by a commission of the Danish government appointed to study the incidence of sexual crimes; the commission found that such crimes...