Notoriously, The Arts Council of Great Britain (as it was then called) remove ‘Towards New Expression’ from an exhibition of artist’s books touring Britain in 1976-1977, after it had been selected and included in the published catalogue. In an article written about the affair, Rosika Parker contrasts this censorship with the inclusion of Allen Jones ‘s artist’s book ‘Projects’
(Parker 1977).

It was about Jones’s work that Laura Mulvey had expounded her theory of fetishism (Mulvey 1973), and Parker cites this in order to analyse why the ACGB felt able to include the Jones book while excluding Santoro’s. She quotes Robin Campbell of ACGB justifying the exclusion ‘on the grounds that obscenity might be alleged’. Obscenity per se was clearly not the issue, however, as the ACGB was ‘willing to defend obscenity on the grounds of artistic excellence’.
The ACGB’s problem was that Santoro’s book did not merely image the ‘obscene’ but was in and of itself ‘obscene’ because ‘ the avowed intention of the book was primarily a plea for sexual self expression’ (in Parker 1977: 44-45).

Bypassing the skewed logic of this (as Parker points out, presumably Santoro’s work was artistically excellent enough to merit its initial selection), and the vexed question of the definitions of ‘obscenity’ in a patriarchal legal system, (note: see Lynda Nead, ‘The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality’ (London: Routledge, 1992) particularly pp. 25-33, on this definition.)
I think we can expand Parker’s understanding of the censorship as resulting from phallocentric man’s need to remove women’s genitals from his sight.
It is notable that Jones’s work, which takes its imagery from fetish and bondage magazines, does not image the female genitals. Drawing from Irigaray’s insights about hysteroscopy on the one hand, and the need to develop women’s sexuate subjective identity (as the subjects, women) and the necessary concomitant, a Symbolic syntax appropriate to women on the other, we can see Santoro’s work as being part of that broader, cultural and ontological threat to threat to phallocentric man which Irigaray identifies. It is this not because it images women’s genitals, but because it is a strategic response, developed from within the political, collective site of the women’s movement (Parker 1977: 44), to what Irigaray identifies as the ‘need […] to work out an art of the sexual, a sexed culture’ (Irigaray 1987f: 15; 1993c: 3); ‘an art of the sexual that respects the colors, the sounds, and the forms proper to each sex’ (Irigaray 1987b: 179; 1993f: 165).


Citation from: Reading Art, Reading Irigaray (the politics of art by women) from chapter 5, Divine Beauty, pp163-164, 165 Hilary Robinson. 2006. I. B. Tauris London, New York
Also see: Spare Rib “Censored”, Rosika Parker Jan. 1977 London