Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...inciting anti-social conduct. Roth also carefully declared: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous." And in later cases, the court refused to censor sexual expression unless 1) "the material is utterly without redeeming social importance," 2) "the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest" in the "average" adult, and 3) "the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards," meaning national standards defined by the Supreme Court...
...Rules. In the second case, New York Pornographer Edward Mishkin argued that his books were not legally obscene because they excited only sick rather than normal people. Brennan agreed-and duly "adjusted" Roth's prurient-appeal standard from the "average adult" to the average members of any "probable recipient group," including sadists and masochists...
...publishing this anthology. Does the magazine want to show off the best pieces it has published? Does it want to demonstrate how four generations of Harvard undergraduates took to literary experimentation? Does it want to present curiosities, like Wallace Stevens' writing iambic tetrameter or Henry Miller's early prurient scatology...
Even in the Fanny Hill case, Associate Justice William J. Brennan said, "evidence that the book was commercially exploited for the sake of prurient appeal might justify the conclusion that the book was without redeeming social importance...
Needed Laughter. Justices Black and Douglas would solve the problem by declaring that the First Amendment is no more embarrassed by the publication of prurient pornography than by pink politics. Both activities are fully protected, the two dissenters argued in Roth. While they recognize state power to regulate public morals, they would draw the line when state prohibitions go beyond overt behavior, such as public nudity, and enter the realm of ideas. In their view, obscenity lies in that realm and is thus protected by the national Constitution...