Word: sexualizing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...knifes through Los Angeles' West Hollywood residential district, Santa Monica becomes a garish, grubby, milelong gauntlet of sex-book stalls, theaters and 8-mm. peep shows for voyeurs, and massage parlors and sexual encounter centers for those who want direct action. The Boulevard is a flexible ribbon of smut that expands or contracts according to the apathy or indignation of the surrounding stucco-house neighborhoods. It is, in a way, a bit of the Old West, a semilawless, laissez-faire street of chance, a zone of temptation and humiliation, harshly lit by neon signs that crackle their messages: ADULT, ENTER...
What pornography is can endlessly be debated. One rough definition: explicit books, films and other materials (including, by extension, performances) designed chiefly for sexual arousal. By any definition, porn has mushroomed in the past decade, from a marginal underground cottage industry into an open, aggressive $2 billion-a-year, crime-ridden growth enterprise. Its once powerful foes?the churches and their antivice allies?are now in retreat if not totally routed. Despite flurries of police busts, sporadic prosecutions and a growing sense of unease among many Americans about the gross new world in which they find themselves, most...
...distinction between sexual and obscene material. What was sexual, the court ruled, was not necessarily obscene. The standard it laid down: "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests...
...that worry soon faded for a number of reasons. Most important was the general revolution in sexual attitudes that had altered many of the traditional American views of sex. So at the very time the court was remanding to communities the right to judge pornography, "community standards" on such delicate matters were in more disarray than ever before. Few localities were in the mood or of the single mind required to take on the porn lords. Another factor was the growing tendency of police and prosecutors to argue that campaigns against "victimless crime" represented a misuse of limited resources that...
...Former Ventriloquist Ted Marche, 53, a decade ago opened a small dildo factory in North Hollywood, convinced that another kind of profit might be extracted from the sexual enthusiasms of the young. Since then, he and his son Steven, 27, have sold 4,975,000 dildos. Today Marche Manufacturing turns out 350 different sexual products, and sales have risen an average 28% each year since 1970. Claims Dildodynast Steven Marche: "These toys have saved more marriages than all the preachers in the world...