Word: sexualism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have always been linked, but the connection can be carried too far ?as was demonstrated for all time by the Marquis de Sade, who was more of a revolutionary than a sensualist, and pushed both roles to madness. Today, many of the young (or would-be young) use sexual display or obscene language quite deliberately as shock weapons of protest against "the Establishment." At the same time, those who are affronted by the new license may produce a backlash that could lead to a general mood of repression, social as well as political...
Within this erotic panorama, there are obviously immense differences. Surface appearances are deceptive. A play in the politest language can be more obscene in essence than a four-letter-word tirade. A sexual embrace depicted with art can be more innocent than a Botticelli Venus. A fully clad model in a TV commercial can exude more sexuality than a nude onstage...
Moreover, some critics contend, the artist's license to show and do all creates an audience of voyeurs passively feeding on their fantasies. In the visual arts, as in literature, "the cult of utterness," in one critic's phrase, tends to devalue and depersonalize human sexuality. In an essay in the book Language and Silence, an eloquent condemnation of pornography, Literary Critic George Steiner objected: "Sexual relations are, or should be, one of the citadels of privacy, the nightplace where we must be allowed to gather the splintered, harried elements of our consciousness to some kind of inviolate order...
Fundamental disagreement occurs on the issue of what erotica does to the consumer. Critics of the new permissiveness assume as obvious that it is damaging to people, particularly the young, and that it leads to sexual license. But in the age of the in-depth survey and the microscopic sexual study, there is a remarkable dearth of information about the psychological impact of erotica on the normal?or more significant, ab normal?individual. A possible clue was offered by a commission of the Danish government appointed to study the incidence of sexual crimes; the commission found that such crimes...
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...