Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Furthermore, he claimed that the writing was filled with "foul language, obscenity, and indecent sexual acts." One of the several criteria for obscenity set forth by the U. S. Supreme Court insists that "the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." Yet the Hansons could not have judged the material "as a whole" since they admitted that they had looked at only parts of the books. And some of the score of "concerned citizens" who joined the Hansons in signing a petition of complaint had not read a single paragraph of the allegedly offensive...
Between the extreme partisans?those who hail the phenomenon as liberation and those who condemn it as decadence?there is room for some serious con cern about what it means in American life. In a sense, the creative arts and even their sleazy offshoots?blue movies, smut books, peepshows, prurient tabloids ?hold a public mirror to a society's private fantasies. A nation gets the kind of art and entertainment it wants and will pay for. Thus to many serious critics, and they are by no means all bluenoses or comstockians, the explosion of salacity in cinema, theater...
...Supreme Court, has offered what may be a classic definition: "Pornography is in the groin of the beholder." Though, as Rembar notes, there is virtually no such thing as obscenity in the literary legal lexicon today, the courts have insisted that minors should be protected from exposure to prurient material. And by federal law an individual may take action to prevent receipt of unsolicited pornography through the mail...
Nabokov's literary province is a bizarre, aristocratic, occasionally maddening amusement park in part devoted to literary instruction. It has many sideshows but only one magician. The general public, which chose to read Lolita as a prurient tale of pedophilia, enters through the main gate, hoping to meet the creator of that doomed and delectable child. A more sophisticated clientele moves beyond the midway to seek out and applaud Dr. Nabokov, the butterfly chaser, dealer in anagrammatical gimcracks, triple-tongued punster, animator of Doppelgänger, shuffler of similes. Prolonged exposure to Nabokov reveals much more. What he calls his "ever...
...problem is that Beate's business is sex- pure and adorned. From a head quarters in Flensburg and eleven stores in cities across the country, she markets some 1,500 prurient products designed for those who believe that sex improves with aid. Her wares include a wide assortment of contraceptives, special-formula bonbons that are supposed to make reluctant fräuleins more cooperative, "quick-lift" panties, battery-operated stimulators priced at $9 each, and even creams to control male timing in sex. "Together to the Peak of Happiness," exhorts Beate's blue-tinted catalogue. To make...