This article discusses the ways in which the press, especially the Brazilian magazine Veja, foregrounded the issue of eroticism in the Brazilian culture of the mid-1980s. With the end of state censorship, the magazine reports showed ambiguities on eroticism in cultural productions. Eroticism spilled over the Brazilian political opening process, and, far from promoting explicit debate on eroticism, Veja developed arguments based on readers' letters and other sectors in defense of the benefits of censorship on some controversial cultural products. I argue that the views on eroticism in cultural production are directly related to the debate on democratization, censorship and freedom of speech in Brazil, where such productions constituted an opportunity to approach these issues, as they described tensions in the search for the new limits, once the ones established by censorship had ended.
eroticism; gender; censorship; press; history.