Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Esquire, a lit'ry, prurient playboy in the '30s and a leering satyr in the '40s, is a mature and well-behaved 25-year-old this month. Circulation is a record 829,817, an increase of 43,661 over last year; ad revenues are up 12.4% this year. The $1 anniversary issue carries $1,040,000 worth of ads, and articles that are hardly for hairy-chested males or boudoir bounders: musings on his craft by Poet Robert Graves, blasts against conformity by Educator Robert Hutchins, and the early thoughts of Playwright Arthur Miller on his forthcoming...
...last week's decision the Supreme Court, after running a private screening of the picture, relied on Justice Brennan's opinion for a standard of obscenity: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. [Obscenity] deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest." The court thus seemed to reach its conclusion on the evidence of the film's content alone, not on the fundamental question of prior restraint, i.e., the constitutionality of community and state censorship laws. It has yet to make its views known on that score...
...wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, has "indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages." But sex and obscenity, he pointed out, are not synonymous-and there has been plenty of disagreement about when the subject of absorbing interest becomes one of prurient*interest. It was in a first major attempt to settle that issue that the Supreme Court, in a split decision, last week upheld U.S. and California criminal obscenity statutes...
...material to be judged merely by the effect of an isolated excerpt upon particularly susceptible persons." That standard was rejected, and the Supreme Court instead approved this test: "Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests." Justice Brennan quoted with approval a lower court's charge to the jury: "You and you alone are the exclusive judges of what the common conscience of the community...
...moral, work of art. And yet, as the script continues, long after it has made its moral point, to fondle a variety of sexual symbols and to finger the anatomical aspects of its subject, the moviegoer can hardly help wondering if the sociological study has not degenerated into the prurient peep...