Word: porn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Five subjects were traditional no-nos at English dinner parties: sex, politics, religion, illness and the servant problem. Now, according to the first book of etiquette published in Britain in more than 50 years, the forbidden list is down to two: malicious gossip and porn movies. Anything else can be discussed, even in "heated conversation," as long as guests have the wit to avoid the four dreadful icebreakers (Do you live in London? What do you do? Have you any children? Have you been abroad this year?). And if the soup is scorching hot, a guest should spit...
...runway for years, but now cable television is definitely airborne. A quarter of the nation's 77.8 million TV homes are hooked up to one of the 4,600 local cable companies that pipe into living rooms everything from first-run movies, hard-sell religion and soft-core porn shows to kiddie programs and the proceedings of Congress live. Cable-systems owners, present or prospective, are as hot on Wall Street as genetic engineering firms, and advertisers are beginning to eye cable TV as a promising vehicle for commercials. Though at present a mere $45 million in cable-television...
...support it have made the exploitation of women perhaps the most widespread and most ineradicable example. And a whole industry of pornographers takes the principle of tantalizing advertising to its logical conclusion: where an ad will use the bodies of women as bait to sell an unrelated product, a porn magazine trades directly in the female form itself. Once that form becomes an object to merchandise, it follows naturally that the promoters will seek ever more extreme ways to present the object: from titillation to abuse, from abuse to rape...
...Polyester, Francine Fishpaw (Divine) presides over a bunch rowdier by far than any Dark Age cavalry. Her husband runs a movie house specializing in kiddie porn; her daughter trucks around with vicious punks; her son is a criminally insane foot fetishist. Only Todd Tomorrow (Tab Hunter), Francine's dream lover, offers any hope for spiritual regeneration, for he is everything her husband is not: handsome, slim, roughly debonair, and the owner of an art drive-in that shows Marguerite Duras triple bills. Best of all, he is in love with her . . . or so it seems. Francine should have known...
Romance fiction has also attracted some unsolicited (and scholarly) criticism as well. Columbia University English Professor Ann Douglas brands the genre "soft porn," that corrupts feminist ideals by glorifying male dominance. But Author Be atrice Faust in Women, Sex and Pornography takes a stand worthy of a romance heroine. In the right kind of contemporaries, she argues, "men have acquired tenderness and girls have matured into strong, independent women." These exemplars may help readers across the minefield of a new sexual culture. But the central question posed by Sullivan remains unanswered: "Why do women need so much fantasy in their...