‘The way we were razed’: pubic hair and permissiveness in 1970s Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers how pornographers negotiated the ‘permissive moment’ in Britain in the 1970s. It examines, as a case study, the publication Sexpertise: Shaved Pubes Special to discuss how editors grappled with changing definitions of obscenity and sexual liberation through the content of their magazines. Sexpertise’s focus on the fetishisation of female pubic hair removal was a way for the magazine’s editors to locate themselves at the forefront of sexual radicalism and innovation at a time when pubic hair was seen as becoming increasingly respectable. I argue that the magazine’s embrace of pubic hairlessness was not only a way for it to appear cutting edge but also reveals anxieties about the changing sexual landscape in Britain and the effects of this on the pornography market. Attempts to sustain a sense of relevance manifested in Sexpertise’s engagement with the historical ‘roots’ of hairlessness and the erotic. This article concludes by examining more broadly the function of nostalgia within pornographic texts and considers how historians might utilise pornographic discourses as texts and archives which recycle ideas about the sexual past in order to make sense of the present.