Word: sexualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Franciscan Nick O'Demus, 53, who declines to give his real name, drifted into the sexual leather-goods market nine years ago. A sandal maker, O'Demus was asked by a few customers if he could turn out sexual harnesses. "Pretty soon," he says, "word got around about what I could do, and I found myself with a new product line." Now O'Demus and his partner, Frank Morris, 25, employ 18 people at their Trading Post Enterprises, which grosses $500,000 a year from making bondage materials, whips, chains and other devices, mostly for the homosexual trade, and selling...
...Just as Hugh Hefner merchandised himself as the dapper self-assured playboy, Goldstein sold himself as the anti-hero of raw sex?a fat, articulate, self-deprecating perennial juvenile ("I am the furthest thing from a mature person") who overstuffed his plain newsprint magazine with tales of his sexual obsessions, failures with women and humiliating need to buy sex from prostitutes because of his overwhelming unattractiveness. Screw (circulation: 125,000) features raunchy humor, gross sex, porn-movie reviews and endless columns of ads for prostitutes and willing amateurs. The formula, imitated by several other sheets, tapped an astonishing market...
...taboo currently under the heaviest assault is sadomasochism?sexual pleasure derived from dominating and inflicting pain on a partner or from being hurt. Porn-film makers long avoided "S-M," as it is known in the trade, because they were convinced that it would drive away customers. Now even that is changing. In X-rated movies and throughout the world of voyeur sex, sadomasochism is in. Two current hits, the soft-core Story of O and hard-core Story of Joanna...
...movie in which a woman is eviscerated and sawed to pieces by a sadistic gang leader apparently modeled on Charles Manson. (Though the advertising implies the woman was actually murdered, it is a hoax.) "If anything should be censored," says Psychologist Wardell Pomeroy, co-author with Alfred Kinsey of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, "Snuff would head the list." The movie was banned in Baltimore, Wilmington, Del., and Orange County, Calif. In New York City, protesters picketed the theater showing Snuff. Such fledgling porn fighters as Critic Susan Sontag, Historian Martin Duberman and Author Grace Paley demanded censorship...
...porn is innocent escapism, a healthy device for fantasizing, a safety valve for dangerous impulses, a useful antidote to Puritan attitudes. Alan Dundes, professor of folklore at Berkeley, argues that it is an informal part of the nation's sex-education program, "the way American culture prepares people for sexuality." To Social Psychologist Douglas Wallace of the University of California Medical Center, porn is needed to bring sexual pleasure to the losers in the sexual game?the shy, the unattractive, the crippled. "Are you," he asks, "to deny these victims of our socialization process the satisfaction they might enjoy from...