Word: sordid
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Desire has cash value; the market has no rules, possesses no scruples. From Eastern Europe to the Himalayas, from Tokyo to Tegucigalpa, transaction by sordid transaction has created a multibillion-dolla r sex trade. It is encouraged by massive socioeconomic movements: the collapse of the Soviet empire, the increase in global mobility, the wrenching disparity of worldwide incomes. But its effect is most devastating on an individual level. Poor women and children are commodities traded on the street, products bartered, haggled over, smuggled and sold as hedges against hunger or as cruel but quick routes to profit. Souls...
...lived by these men's words as children, and we will miss them as adults--especially since our world has become increasingly sordid in the past four years...
...memoir cleverly intersperses the narrative of Offutt's wife's pregnancy with the sordid anecdotes of his youth. He sets his fifteen years of wandering against the nine months of expectancy, illustrating the transformation from carefree adventurer to father with well-ordered contrast. The father-to-be balks at the notion of parental responsibility, just as his youthful self fled from the restraints of any long-term career or romance...
...child, isolated inside his best instincts, survive for long, when family, school, class, the whole sordid world conspire to crush him? Leo can't. But Leolo can; his autobiography is saved by the one stranger who might have helped him. Certainly Lauzon, who testifies that this grotesque family portrait is based on fact, survived and thrived -- to make a beautiful film. His story, in this boldly voluptuous telling, reminds us of two truths: no remembered childhood is so bizarre that it cannot have occurred; and the surest way to purge demons is to impale them on the page or screen...
MacKinnon has a long and sordid record of attacking free speech. In 1983, she authored a Minneapolis ordinance, soon declared unconstitutional, that outlawed most sexually suggestive art and literature depicting women under the guise of fighting pornography. Under this ordinance, she and her longtime collaborator, Andrea Dworkin, who believes that all heterosexual sex is rape, advocated banning from the City of Minneapolis French and Indian art films, avant garde art, and even Rolling Stones album advertisements. MacKinnon has spent years lobbying for the enactment of similarly repressive ordinances in numerous other cities and states, including Massachusetts...