In July, after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was verbally accosted on the Capitol steps by fellow representative Ted Yoho (R-FL), the congresswoman delivered a powerful speech on the House floor. The problem with Yoho’s comments, Ocasio-Cortez argued, was not only that they were vile, but that they were part of a larger pattern of behavior toward women. “This is not new, and that is the problem,” she affirmed. “It is cultural. It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting of violence and violent language against women, and an entire structure of power that supports that.”
She’s right. This “violent” language—calling women “bitches” and men “pussies”—and the understandings that accompany it has a long history in American popular culture. And few cultural artifacts depict such sexist notions more overtly than Cold War men’s adventure magazines.
These “macho pulps” were an outgrowth of earlier men’s periodicals, including Argosy and Esquire. In the aftermath of World War II, magazines with suggestive titles like Battle Cry, Man’s Conquest, and True Men, exploded in popularity. The February 1955 issue of Stag, for example, sold more than 585,00 copies nationwide. The stories that filled these magazines portrayed the ideal man as physically tough, sexually virile, and unabashedly patriotic. Women, conversely, were represented either as erotic trophies of conquest or as sexualized villains to be overpowered.
Take, for example, an illustrative story from the March 1963 issue of Brigade. In “Castration of the American Male,” pulp writer Andrew Petersen decried how the “manly virtues—strength, courage, virility—are becoming rarer every day…. Femininity is on the march,” Peterson claimed, “rendering American men less manly.” To put a finer point on the message, Brigade included with the article a photograph of a sullen husband, in floral apron, doing the dishes. The message seemed clear. The masculine ideal of sexual conqueror and heroic warrior, touted in nearly every issue of the pulps, was under assault.
Indeed, in Cold War men’s adventure magazines, “real men” were never “pussies.” They courageously defeated former Nazi henchmen and evil communist infiltrators. They exposed femmes fatale who were engaging in “sexological warfare,” using their physical bodies as weapons of war. And they seduced women across the globe, one navy vet describing himself in the pulps as a virile “bedroom commando.”
Yet just below the surface of these hypermasculine narratives, a subtext of anxiety loomed. Read a different way, the pulps might also be seen as a form of escapism from deep anxieties about not measuring up in a rapidly changing postwar society. Fears of being emasculated by Cold War suburbia and a consumeristic society pervaded these men’s magazines. Pulp writers, as seen in the Brigade article, habitually expressed concerns over American men becoming “soft.”