Word: sexes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...viewing, also feature two-minute peepshows of naked couples. Nudist magazines, which until recently airbrushed their models in strategic areas, now show them in toto. So do a proliferation of homosexual magazines. So do a new wave of lecherous tabloids, with titles like The New York Review of Sex, whose erogenetic aim is mostly emetic in effect. Despite the blatant offensiveness of books, magazines and wall posters in smut-shop windows, local authorities are reluctant to take action for fear of prolonged and probably fruitless appeals through the courts...
Even D. H. Lawrence favored rigorous censorship of smut. "You can recognize it," he wrote, "by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit . . . The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship!" On that point, both the author of Lady Chatterley and Evangelist Billy Graham would be in wholehearted agreement...
...seeing intercourse and nude bodies in a motion picture. Psychologists and sociologists in the U.S. have no concrete evidence that erotic material directly stimulates sexual activity. They maintain that the young in particular ?and movie audiences today consist mostly of people under 25?are more sophisticated about sex than the previous generation, and in consequence may tend to be less excited or shocked by nudity or scenes that show copulation. The strongest evidence suggests that total permissiveness in the arts is a result, not a cause, of relaxed standards of conduct. The majority of psychologists and behaviorists in effect...
That is not the only issue, however. A number of experts are agreed on one point: erotic art often unduly celebrates sexual prowess to the exclusion of such qualities as tenderness, patience, courage, humor or honesty. If sex is universally regarded as the ultimate status symbol, as Playboy and the pornocrats suggest, many responsible adults will wind up feeling cheated, and alienated; at the same time, and ironically, the aim of sex will become mental rather than sensory...
Hardly anyone can quarrel with the ideal of a healthy sexuality, free of false shame and guilt. Yet to judge from the nation's mood, a great number of Americans feel that the surfeit of sex must somehow be contained. Unless some restraints are imposed?or self-imposed?history suggests that the reaction to permissiveness may be strong. The ribald, rollicking Elizabethan age was succeeded by the severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal...