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’

  More example sentences

  • ‘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.’
  • ‘The film, however, while presenting itself as a compassionate treatment, exploits for dramatic purposes the prurient interests of the audience.’
  • ‘In some ways, this biography should be applauded for its total absence of the prurient interest so common to most of its peers.’
  • ‘The best a guy with prurient interests gets to see is one glimpse of Reneé Humphrey, and a few fairly hot scenes of women kissing.’
  • ‘Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.’
  • ‘The trouble is, we are a prurient lot, always interested in the sex lives of other people, especially the famous.’
  • ‘There is a great deal of prurient curiosity surrounding our partnership.’
  • ‘But just for a moment, prurient eyes were diverted from Sven-Goran Eriksson and Ulrika Jonsson to an altogether more gloomy European affair.’
  • ‘If prurient peering into other people's private lives is now an offence, the Home Office should be the first in the dock, with this Act offered as evidence for the prosecution.’
  • ‘Media shift the responsibility for sensationalized coverage to a prurient citizenry's market demands for more blood, gore and opulence.’
  • ‘‘Nobody is going to speak freely if they're going to be quoted by ambitious and prurient journalists’.’
  • ‘But beneath the prurient detail lies a stinging indictment of greater Canadian society, police and the mainstream media.’
  • ‘Pious people, along with neglectful officials and prurient newspapers, need not worry about the thin dividing line between the demon and the normal citizen.’
  • ‘There is something about regulating pornography that causes even the most prurient libertarian to become apoplectic.’
  • ‘Operating on a far more prurient level is Paul Schrader's latest, Auto Focus, the lurid tale of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane.’
  • ‘And it has enough about actual sex to satisfy your prurient side as well.’
  • ‘These type of programmes are cheap (from a production standpoint) puerile, prurient and sadly popular.’
  • ‘Indeed, the only possible response to prurient questions is ‘mind your own business’.’

  Synonyms

  salacious, licentious, voyeuristic, lascivious, lecherous, lustful, lewd, libidinous, lubricious

  View synonyms