Word: prurients
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...intellectual content of Playboy is at least on a par with the pretentiously overstated content of a TIME Essay. The prurient appeal of an overripe foldout is no worse than the peekaboo enticement of gossip about "People." The humor of a Playboy cartoon is often more sophisticated than the cleverness of TIMEse...
...hour experimental peekture by Pop Painter Andy Warhol. Exclusively, explicitly and exhaustively, the film depicts homosexuality, Lesbianism, and drug-taking, and a majority of the critics (most of them over 40) found it dirty, dull and on-and-onanistic. But moviegoers (most of them under 30 and simply prurient) stood in long lines to buy the scene. All over the U.S., distributors suddenly sat up and begged for prints. In the next six months, The Chelsea Girls will be shown in at least 100 theaters-in addition to numerous college film societies. It figures to gross at least...
Under the current interpretation of obscenity law, three elements must coalesce in order to condemn a book as obscene: "it must be established that (a) the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex; (b) the material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards ...; and (c) the material is utterly without redeeming social values...
Standards for judging a book obscene became hopelessly confused when it was decided in Ginzburg v. U.S. that booksellers and distributors would be prosecuted for selling books that were "commercially exploited for the sake of prurient appeal, to the exclusion of all other values...
...stinging dissent, Chief Judge J. Edward Lumbard argued that more than 99% of viewers would consider 491 purely a pitch to prurient interest. Speaking for the majority, though, Judge Leonard Moore saw "redeeming social importance" in the fact that 491 professes "constructive ideas" even while it purveys seamy sex. Moreover, he noted a vital effect of last term's Supreme Court decision in Mishkin v. New York, which apparently discarded the "average person" test of prurient interest. Now the yardstick is "the probable recipient group"-which seems to mean that judges must determine whom the material is aimed...