'The Social Picture of Our Own Times': Reading Obscene Magazines in 1940s Britain

COCKS, HARRY

Abstract

The market in what was regarded as obscene literature, 1940s and 1950s Britain was dominated by magazines containing female nudes and risqué fiction. What can we know about the readers and consumers of this type of pornography before the 1960s? We can never have anything more than a very fragmentary picture of this market and its consumers owing to the nature of the archive. However, a police investigation from 1950 into the records of one dealer, along with other surviving fragments, do give us a hint about how some readers of this material responded to it. When confronted, they sought to justify their consumption and reading practices by dividing the obscene into categories that separated the harmless from the perverse. They rejected the latter category, even though they were interested in it. In that sense, the obscene shared elements with the wider culture of legal but erotic print that was characterized by a ‘naughty but nice’ ethos of what Peter Bailey has called the ‘parasexual’. By arguing that what they consumed was little different from that which appeared legally in the wider culture, producers and readers of obscene material justified and normalized their own reading of pornography.

Citation

COCKS, H. (2016). 'The Social Picture of Our Own Times': Reading Obscene Magazines in 1940s Britain. Twentieth Century British History, 27(2), 171–194. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hww008

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Mar 18, 2016
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Aug 16, 2017
• Print ISSN: 0955-2359
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 27
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 171–194
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hww008
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1110237
• Publisher URL: https://academic.oup.com/tcbh/article/27/2/171/2465880