Word: smut
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...right, let's admit sex is great [July 11]! But when it hits you in the eye with belted monotony on the screen, in books, on the stage under the pretentious guise of the "new morality" (i.e., dressed-up smut) I find it quite tiresome. There's nothing funnier than a good dirty joke, and nothing flatter than a poor one. Seems to me, the plethora of poor ones going the rounds these days is all one hears. Who's laughing...
...Your cover story was interesting but inconclusive. You failed to point out the chief casualties of the current smut cycle: style, class and grace, which continue to be indispensable qualities of enduring art. Today's vendors of sexual kitsch have kept the dirty bath water (in some cases literally) and thrown out the baby, and with it their chances of eventual survival. Boredom will rescue us from their brand of entertainment...
Between the extreme partisans?those who hail the phenomenon as liberation and those who condemn it as decadence?there is room for some serious con cern about what it means in American life. In a sense, the creative arts and even their sleazy offshoots?blue movies, smut books, peepshows, prurient tabloids ?hold a public mirror to a society's private fantasies. A nation gets the kind of art and entertainment it wants and will pay for. Thus to many serious critics, and they are by no means all bluenoses or comstockians, the explosion of salacity in cinema, theater...
...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...