Word: puritanical
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...severity of scenery was complemented by the utter absence of color in costume, representative of puritan conservativeness of course. The shirts seemed to be color coded with the judges in white, the Putnams in green (for envy perhaps), Abigail Williams in red (think red lights) and the jail officials in blue. The strength of the acting, however, requires no decoration and no color to draw the audience...
...Puritan consciences wouldn’t let us take the time off,” he said...
...some point to behold them, but for a period in between we feel the need to see to it that no child ever sees a breast. This prudishness seems quintessentially American; Europeans, who have long been more comfortable with the human form than we, are generally amused by the Puritan standards of American entertainment when it comes to nudity. The French, for example, have no trouble with the appearance of topless women, shown routinely in newspapers and advertisements...
...revolutionary, if that?s what Hefner was, has to take attacks from all sides. He got it from the puritan right and the feminist left, though both made the same point: that Playboy objectifies women. The Playmate, one clergyman fumed in the early years, is ?the symbol par excellence of Playboy sex, for she may be folded when not in use ... the Playboy girl is detachable and disposable.? Benjamin DeMott denounced Hefner in the Jewish-intellectual magazine Commentary: ?In place of the citizen with a vote to cast or a job to do or a book to study...
This is not to say (even setting aside the executions for sodomy) that Puritans were faultless—even the sympathetic Edmund S. Morgan admits that 17th century Puritan New England “was not a society in which most of us would care to live, for the methods of prevention [of sexual transgression] often caused serious interference with personal liberty.” But it does suggest that our criticism of them is unfair. As heartening as it is to define ourselves in relation to the Puritans—so we don’t get out much...