Word: porn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...they please in private, have begun to fear that the porn plague is in fact invading the privacy of those who want no part...
...right, porn may eventually exhaust itself, having run out of new taboos to conquer. Yet in his 1966 study of Victorian pornography, Columbia Professor Steven Marcus described the porn impulse as "insatiable." Slade and Marcus may be making the same point: it was precisely the repressive nature of prudery that created a taboo-rich culture in which Victorian porn fantasies could take exotic shape. But if the porn industry finds no limits, it could perhaps reawaken the American taste for censorship. The very thought is anathema to most Americans. The danger is that it may be found more supportable than...
What pornography is can endlessly be debated. One rough definition: explicit books, films and other materials (including, by extension, performances) designed chiefly for sexual arousal. By any definition, porn has mushroomed in the past decade, from a marginal underground cottage industry into an open, aggressive $2 billion-a-year, crime-ridden growth enterprise. Its once powerful foes?the churches and their antivice allies?are now in retreat if not totally routed. Despite flurries of police busts, sporadic prosecutions and a growing sense of unease among many Americans about the gross new world in which they find themselves, most...
...startling aspect of porn is its new social acceptability. Prodigious Linda (Deep Throat) Lovelace is an ordinary topic of surburban conversation and a cover subject for Esquire. Superstud Harry Reems, at 28 a veteran of 400 porn movies, has had to dodge his fans on the street. Porn Star Johnny Holmes has 37 fan clubs, and Writer Gay Talese says an esoteric cult has grown up around Leather Princess Bettie Page, whose photos "are collected and traded across the country like you and I did with baseball cards." Prestigious Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., honored Penthouse Publisher Bob Guccione...
American anxiety over porn is little more than a century old. Early America had few obscenity laws. The new nation's first recorded court decision did not come until 1815, when six hapless Philadelphians were convicted of showing for profit an indecent painting. The first federal restriction came in 1842 with the passage of a law that forbade importing obscene pictures. In 1865, in response to fears that smut had been corrupting the Union's soldiers, such things were barred from the mails...