Word: prurients
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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...
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...
...automatically entitled to First Amendment protection unless the state can prove that it is obscene. Relying on U.S. Supreme Court doctrine, the California justices declared that the state had the burden of proving that the dominant theme of Kelley's dance "taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest," is "utterly without redeeming social value" and affronts "contemporary community standards." In fact, said the justices, the state had failed to introduce expert testimony to prove that Kelley's act went beyond the community's standards of decency...
Dali on Dali in (some) words and (many) pictures. Inevitably among those present: pre-pop Surrealist Dali, Prurient Dali, Renaissance Dali, and Dali, boy genius grown old. Also, on practically every page, Dali the pyrotechnician in paint, the most engaging, self-indulgent and talented decorator of his age. Appropriately wrapped, like candy, in gold tinfoil...