This is a continuation of my previous post about sex/prurience.
It's another whole discussion, but:
There are men who get erections when they look at a pair of high heeled shoes. Are high heeled shoes 'purient'? Or just sexy?
Very long hair is a big sexual turn-on for some men. Are women who grow their hair very long, and then, for heaven's sake, bleach it!, behaving pruriently?
There are individuals who seek sexual arousal by looking at pictures of amputees in medical textbooks. Are those textbooks prurient?
Was it prurient of me just then to use the words 'erections,' 'big sexual turn-on,' and 'sexual arousal'? There are people for whom those words on the page are more arousing than nihil's post, simply because they are used so properly and without humor. I'm one of them. There is no context proper enough to de-sex the word 'arousal,' to me, personally. But do I think it's a prurient word, or that I am prurient because it is a certain sort of word for me? If that response made me prurient, could 'prurience' be reasonably defined by anyone as a 'bad' thing?
The point I'm making is that sexuality of content is easy enough for us to agree on, you and Bob and shalom and me-- though our agreement won't be 100%. This is not at all true of prurience. And even if we manage to agree on a subset of texts or images that are, to all of us, prurient, it is unlikely that we will agree about whether those prurient texts are 'good' or 'bad.'
Sexuality and prurience and obscenity and vulgarity do not all mean the same thing.
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