"The smell of ink, the thrill of testosterone"

[pynchonoid]

The smell of ink, the thrill of testosterone

It's a Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, the
Postwar Pulps. Edited by Adam Parfrey, Feral House:
288 pp., $29.95
By Gary Indiana

July 27 2003

The men's magazines surveyed in Adam Parfrey's "It's a
Man's World" had their effulgence during the first
long leg of the Cold War. Their evolution, reflected
in the feverishly vivid illustrations Parfrey has
assembled, is readily linked to notions of masculinity
that seemed firmly in place throughout World War II
and embattled ever after. The decay of certainty, the
sense of ideological threat that accompanied the
postwar economic boom, the mutation of the GI into the
man in the gray flannel suit summoned a nostalgia for
an unambiguous manliness expressed in violent action
and a longing for coherent adversaries in a world in
which enemies were increasingly faceless and
prosperity had a curious resemblance to zombie-ism.

The staples of publications like Argosy, Peril, Sir,
Fury, Male, Men Today, All Man, Real Men, Men in
Conflict, Man's Adventure and dozens of similar titles
— sadistic Nazis, menacing wildlife, headhunting
natives of voodoo islands, marauding Apaches, killer
Communists — express in lurid, living color the deep
wish for a morally and sexually black-and-white world.
Masculinity is defined by the testing ordeal. The
protagonist is typically pitted in grossly unequal,
unfair combat against implacable, monstrous enemies.
The comic book cousins of these magazines show evil
reliably vanquished by superhuman heroes. The men's
magazines suggest the possibility of unhappy or
incomplete outcomes: Threats are so myriad and
multifarious that the price of security is eternal
vigilance, eternal grimacing, scowling and cowering.

The extreme depictions of danger the pulps trafficked
in carry a freight of dread more evocative of moral
twilight than triumphalism. The pictorial style on
view here is virtually the same melodramatic rendering
of "the dark side" associated with film noir and the
early paperback novel. The iconography is one of pure
immanence. The moment most often captured on these
magazine covers is one in which the menaced subject
has already slogged through a snake-infested swamp,
been tortured in a Nazi prison camp, washed up on the
shores of a cannibal island and now, in torn or
shredded clothing, sopping wet or desiccated after
crawling through a desert, faces decapitation,
consumption by vicious marine life, amputation by
hacksaw, attack by alligators, weasels, ferrets,
Indian arrows or samurai cutlasses, sexual exhaustion
by Nazi libertines, cigar torture at the hands of
Fidel Castro and sometimes — not often — incineration
by H-bomb.

The yearning for an ennobling mythos embodied in this
canon of popular art had a furtive aspect. These were
not the magazines that went on the coffee table, and
the fact that they were "gendered," just as Redbook
and other women's magazines were, assimilated them
into the loose orbit of soft-core pornography. In
their time, testosterone was perceived as such a
volatile and vulgar quantity that home and family life
were designed to "contain" it, siphoning chaotic
energies into productive, uniform channels. Yet it was
well understood, in the suburban dream homes of the
1950s, that the male essence was prone to spillage and
explosion; the rituals of postwar marriage included
the male's periodic defection from the nest, in the
form of cocktail party brawls or fishing and hunting
trips.

For many decades now, popular and political culture
has promoted a fantasy of the 1950s as a long idyllic
moment when family life, gender roles and moral values
were fixed in utopian perfection. Yet it is clear from
the subliterature surveyed by "It's a Man's World"
that at least half the gender equation was deeply
troubled by the restraints of domestic life and felt
most energized and fully alive imagining situations of
mortal peril and physical combat, ones that included
supine and often half-dead female bodies in urgent
need of rescue or whip-wielding vixens to be
overpowered and tamed. A restive, neurotic quality
slips into the mix in publications like Dare, Exposed,
Crime Confessions and the like, in which the men's
adventure sensibility is brought to bear on
contemporary life in America. The same tropes of
deadly exotic menace, applied to the landscape of
middle-class domesticity, reveal the social
schizophrenia of an idealized era.

Along with their characteristic obsession with sex as
a pointedly underdescribed, lavishly prefigured mating
of hunters and gatherers, the men's magazines devoted
to subjects closer to home than saber-toothed tiger
attacks or "Teen Terrors of the Tamiami Trail" suggest
the suffocating, panic-stricken undercurrent of
American conformity, in features like "What Are Your
Homosexual Tendencies?" and "How to Tell if Your
Girlfriend Is a Lesbian." The racial tensions roiling
under the era's apple pie crust erupt in both the
Photoplay type of Hollywood item ("Joan Fontaine and
Her Negro Screen Lover Court Racial Explosion!") and
more directly libidinal, generic articles ("The
Interracial Sex Experimenters") whose illustrations
stimulated the miscegenative impulses the articles
decried or condemned.

"It's a Man's World" features several interviews with,
and reminiscences by, the people who labored on the
pulp magazines in their glory days, including Bruce
Jay Friedman and Mario Puzo. The world of the pulps
was simply a venue where some writers could make a
decent, if frantic living, rather than a deliberate
engine of ideology or politics; the magazines'
fortunes rose and fell according to the public mood;
their stories usually had some loose relationship to
documentary reality and arguably a stronger
relationship to cinema than literature. Often a
powerful illustration became the occasion for a story
rather than the other way around. Speed of production
was everything. There was a wealth of retrograde,
stereotypical bromides embedded in the pulps, and the
impetus was simply to entertain the escapist fantasies
of a grimly stratified, imaginatively constipated,
lethally conformist era, continually recycling
whichever stock villains, deadly threats, sexual
innuendoes and combat paraphernalia had proved their
appeal at the newsstand.

The writers themselves attest to having no idea who
the readers of these magazines were, though they sold
in huge quantities; the decline of the men's adventure
pulp appears to have been steady throughout the 1960s,
its audience eroded by hybrid high-lowbrow offerings
like Playboy, reaching a nadir during the Vietnam War,
which none of the pulps rendered in an appealing way.

"It's a Man's World" deserves a companion survey of
the contemporaneous "middlebrow" literature of
disaster: novels such as "Alas! Babylon," "On the
Beach," "A Canticle for Leibowitz" and other works in
which the nuclear threat was terrifyingly manifested
as fait accompli. When we recall the role of paranoia
in the construction of normality during the Cold War,
the men's adventure magazine becomes an artifact of
considerable charm, providing scenarios of the
individual fighting formidable but legible adversaries
against daunting but not impossible odds. If the pulps
looked back to a just war of improving sacrifice or an
earlier time of struggle against nature, the nuclear
fiction of the period looked to a future of moral
relativism, ecological catastrophe, political
incoherence and the all too plausible extinction of
everything.

Gary Indiana is the author of several novels,
including "Do Everything in the Dark." 


Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times


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