Word: prurient
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...most sordid dregs dug up by the Watergate miners would inflame the passions of the domestic audience and provoke the guffaws, prurient curiosity or amazement of the outside world. The audience would hear those magical tapes in full. Not only the words directly relevant to charges at issue, but all the surrounding talk and epithets of tough, earthy men speaking as such men do in their supposedly private dialogue...
...freedoms in abstract terms. We should defend pornography specifically on its merits, on the fact that it represents distinct minority views which have every constitutional right to exist. We should challenge the logic of Chief Justice Burger, who wrote in the new Supreme Court decision, "At a minimum, prurient, patently offensive depiction or description of sexual conduct must have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value to merit first amendment protection." Any depiction of sexual behavior has, at a minimum, serious pshychological value. There is a definite point of view being expressed in pornography, a view about the potential nature...
...bloated, fetid atmosphere, the absorption with vomit and excrement, the colossal disrespect for human anatomy. Like pornography, it turns us (whether we're willing or not, and if we pay our pornmovie price of $5 we certainly ought to be willing) into voyeurs and accomplices. It appeals to our prurient curiosity at the same time that it disdains erotic indulgence. The movie tests our limits of shockability: how much can you take, Ferreri seems, combatively, to be asking...
...other three Nixon nominees and Byron White joined the Chief Justice in a new test for pornography. It is now constitutional, said Burger, for states to ban any "works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex,'which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value...
Officially, the court has tried to follow the guidelines of Justice William Brennan who declared that nothing could be banned as pornographic unless it predominantly "appeals to a prurient interest," affronts "contemporary community standards," and is "utterly without redeeming social importance." That definition proved so elastic that it has been stretched to permit almost anything, as can be attested at many a neighborhood-movie marquee or magazine rack...