prurient
/ˈprʊərɪənt
/adjective
Having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters, especially the sexual activity of others: she’d been the subject of much prurient curiosity...
- Shaun's censorious attitude combines freely with a prurient interest in sexual matters.
- People have an in-built prurient curiosity and voyeurism so why should we blame the programme makers for that?
- In the West, Miike frequently gets pegged as a shock artist, a filmmaker who merits our prurient interest more than our legitimate respect.
Synonyms
salacious, licentious, voyeuristic, lascivious, lecherous, lustful, lewd, libidinous, lubricious;
depraved, debauched, degenerate, dissolute, dissipated
rare concupiscent
Derivatives
prurience
/ noun ...- To illustrate: a State might choose to prohibit only that obscenity which is the most patently offensive in its prurience - i.e., that which involves the most lascivious displays of sexual activity.
- It is taboo, embarrassment and sexuality's enforced covertness which foments ‘sauciness’, prurience, and notions of filth.
- If the British tabloid press shows the nation's unconscious mind at work - a bubbling pit of prurience and anxiety - then the Hollywood block-buster reveals the deepest fantasies and paranoia of the American psyche.
pruriency
- She also shames the reader with his or her pruriency - promising a story about a murderess involved in an extramarital sexual scandal.
- I've plunged beyond the sickest depths of pruriency. What is normal to me is far beneath what is seen as mere "obscenity".
pruriently
- These are people who frequented the beaches and pruriently connected naturism with sex.
- How this chap responds to your choosing not to have an agony recital will tell you whether he respects your wishes or is pruriently curious and just interested in a soap opera.
- Could one not, as a whole, find the nude statue of Michelangelo's David pruriently appealing?
Origin
Late 16th century (in the sense 'having a mental itching'): from Latin prurient- 'itching, longing' and 'being wanton', from the verb prurire.