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Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945. By Andrea Friedman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. xii, 290 pp. Cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-231-11066-9. Paper, $17.50, ISBN 0-231-11067-7.) More cogently and comprehensively than any other work, Prurient Interests explains how and why treatment of commercial sexual material in the United States shifted from the restrictive regime of the Victorian era to the relatively permissive one of today. The timeliness of this work is underscored by current debates over such recent innovations as pay-per-view and Internet pornography. But the book offers readers much more than contemporary relevance. True to her subtitle, Andrea Friedman uses her rich research on obscenity and efforts to control it in New York City to illuminate the complicated, circuitous, and highly gendered evolution of American notions of democracy. At the same...