Word: nude
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...Supreme Court last week upheld an Erie, Pa., ordinance that required nude dancers to wear a minimal amount of clothing--namely pasties and a G-string. The context would be comical, were it not for the serious threat the ruling poses to basic principles of free speech...
...rationale behind the ruling was not that nude dancing itself is an unworthy form of expression--the court has consistently found this kind of activity under the protective umbrella of the First Amendment--but that the state has a legitimate stake in limiting so-called "negative secondary effects." Nude dancing at adult establishments, the city reasoned, leads to increased rates of crime and prostitution and decreases in surrounding property values. Accepting this line of reasoning, the court upheld the ordinance...
...believe otherwise, as Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his dissent, "is nothing short of a titanic surrender to the implausible." Even the plurality opinion expressed similar skepticism. Nevertheless, the court upheld the ordinance on the grounds that the city did not necessarily need to prove a correlation between nude dancing and crime. It needed only to show that the ordinance would somehow further the city's interest in controlling such negative effects, rather than solving the problem completely...
Such a loose standard is both dangerous and misleading. It is dangerous because it opens the door for states to restrict almost any kind of speech on flimsy theories of cause and effect. Nude dancing at a strip bar and nude dancing at the ballet are two entirely different kinds of speech. Yet the city's ordinance allows the government to ban both in the name of fighting crime. The court's decision, wrote Justice David H. Souter '61, ignores that evidence of negative effects "must be a demonstrated fact, not speculative supposition...
...tried to imitate Maxim without imitating Maxim. Golin, along with a crew imported from his former magazine, went counter to his sleaze-master typecasting, adding un-Maxim-like service articles on money and career. To stave off the lad mags, he also sexed up covers with screaming tag lines--NUDE YEAR'S EVE--and skin. "Yes, we had women on our cover," he says. "But for the most part, they weren't leaning forward; we weren't picking them for their breast size." (Such is the definition of classiness in guy culture today.) And the publisher, known for such upscale...