Word: prurient
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...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...
...Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest." > Whether it also "goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor" to the point of "patent offensiveness...
Moreover, Redfield argued that the books cannot be tested according to the Roth decision as appealing to the "average person's" prurient interest. "They appeal to the elderly, the impotent and the perverse. Must one be judged by what offends others?" Indeed, can books that actually bore the average person be adjudged obscene because they rouse the prurient interest of what Justice Abe Fortas delicately called "special groups...
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...