Word: prurient
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Whatever other publications may say about the Mirror's prurient preoccupations, its editors are well aware that the readers are coming back for more. "Newspapers," says Publisher King in the current issue of the highbrow quarterly, 20th Century, "have helped to create a social atmosphere in which change has become possible. This has been achieved almost exclusively by the popular press, presenting news vividly so that millions who would read nothing else read newspapers...
Rome-and the rest of the world-burned with prurient curiosity. Last week, while unconcernedly directing her lawyer to terminate the services of hangdog Fourth Husband Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth Taylor, 30, tirelessly sought to turn a more prideful head. Liz's latest quarry, the Mark Antony to her Cleopatra. Richard Burton, seemed cheerfully prepared to indulge her exhibitionistic binges of togetherness on the Via Veneto and to relish his odd-hour neighborly access to her villa. But he was careful to keep the home fires burning with a weekend rendezvous in Paris with Wife Sybil. As the tasteless, tedious...
...this picture, after a run of unsuccessful shows, McCarey has once more called upon religion to perform a commercial miracle; but this time he appears to have used the Lord's name in vain. For all its superficial smirk of piety, McCarey's Satan is just a prurient, soft-soap-and-holy-water version of the spicy story about the lonely missionary and the beautiful native girl...
...under political duress, destroyed the heritage of law that they were sworn to defend. But in short order the script stoops to conquer the attention with a long, clinically detailed and (for all legal and dramatic purposes) pointless discussion of sexual sterilization in the Third Reich. Next comes the prurient account of an episode in which an elderly Jew, accused of committing Rassenschande (race shame) with a 16-year-old "Aryan'' girl, is legally murdered by a German judge. Finally, to complete his crescendo of sensationalism, Kramer cuts to some film clips of Buchenwald and starts bulldozing piles...
Shock or disgust, however, is not the issue. Any legal test for obscenity hinges on whether the matter appeals to prurient interest--whether the total effect of the book would be to arouse sexual desire in the average reader (In the Roth decision, Justice Brennan explicitly stated that "the portrayal of sex ... is not itself sufficient reason" to declare a book obscene...