Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men’s Adventure Magazines by Gregory A. Daddis

Abstract

Gregory Daddis's Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines is a fantastic book that delves into the creation, reinforcement, and perpetuation of “martial masculinity” in the Cold War and its impact on the U.S. war in Vietnam. Daddis defines martial masculinity as the idea that men must prove their manhood through military service, sexual conquests, and domination over minority populations. Men's adventure magazines, also known as “pulps,” were a prominent channel through which American males, both young and old, established and reinvigorated martial masculinity. Daddis argues that “men's adventure magazines from the post-World War II era crafted a particular version of martial masculinity that helped establish and then normalize GIs’ expectations and perceptions in Vietnam” (p. 5).The pulps offered a haven for the disappearing ideals of martial masculinity in the early Cold War. When the masculine conception of war—based on stoicism, independence, and strength—declined in the years after World War II, the adventure magazines perpetuated those ideals to their readers. Veterans of World War II and the Korean War often read these magazines because, in an era when domesticity and softness seemed to threaten masculinity, pulps helped veterans remember how they had earned their manhood via military service. The magazines also attracted another class of readers: working-class youth. In an interesting and important discussion, Daddis shows that publishers targeted working-class young men. As Christian Appy argued in his book Working-Class War (1993), most of the soldiers drafted during the Vietnam War came from the working-class population. Thus, the pulps found significant influence among the majority of young people who eventually fought in Vietnam (pp. 15–16). This insight is crucial in helping readers to understand the prevalence and influence the pulps had on the men actually fighting the war.Organized thematically, each chapter addresses a topic that young readers found in the pulp magazines. Daddis demonstrates how each of those subjects had negative consequences on the readers once they fought in Vietnam. The themes include the notion that war is honorable and rewarding; that war is a man-making experience; and that foreign women, especially Asian women, are savage, seductive, and ready to please American men. As young readers read their pulps, these themes created false perceptions of war that eventually caused physical and psychological harm to Vietnamese citizens and U.S. soldiers themselves. Indeed, by hiding the true costs of war, such as injury and death, the pulps reinforced the myth of the Greatest Generation from World War II and emphasized that war is an honorable affair. Nearly every adventure magazine included a heroic soldier saving women in distress. These women were often dressed scantily and ready to emasculate men because, as the pulps insinuated, that was an inherent trait of women. The magazines exhorted men to be careful around women because they never knew which seductresses were spies (pp. 102–108). To prevail over these women, pulps suggested, men had to assert their authority through sexual dominance.The magazines desensitized their readers, who, when they came of age and deployed to Vietnam, likely believed that it was okay to treat Vietnamese women as sexual conquests. The pulps also had other dangerous consequences. They created within many young men a false sense of war by deemphasizing the political war and emphasizing acts of heroism. When many of the pulp-reading soldiers realized that war was not glorious, noble, or clean, they became disillusioned and behaved aggressively toward the Vietnamese, especially through sexual domination. Disillusionment caused some U.S. soldiers to resort to acts of violence against non-combatants, including grotesque instances of rape. In the end, the war in Vietnam sounded the death knell of the pulp magazine. Although the publications influenced the way many men fought, the war revealed the true façade of martial masculinity. Many U.S. soldiers no longer believed that hypermasculinity was necessary to win wars; in fact, aggressive forms of masculinity now made them “uneasy” (p. 219).The book focuses on martial masculinity, but Daddis ensures that readers gain a better understanding of gender history as a whole. He analyzes the relationship dynamics between men and women and how those relationships could foster or threaten a person's sense of manhood. His discussion of rape in the later chapters is a clear example of the perceived relationship between masculinity and femininity because it shows how men felt threatened by women's new assertiveness in society. To combat women's expanded roles, men believed they had to reassert their dominance. Daddis thus bridges gender and war studies in a new way by demonstrating how popular media, such as pulps, linked domestic gender norms to the conduct of war.Daddis also applies racial and ethnic analysis to the pulps, albeit to a lesser extent than his incorporation of gender history. He contends that the magazines attracted only white men because they were portrayed as the heroes and sexual conquerors. In contrast, the pulps often portrayed minority groups as lesser men and enemies (p. 35). Even when stories of heroic African Americans in combat came to light later in the Cold War, pulps very rarely praised them. Pulp Vietnam shows that the pulps often perpetuated the racial stereotypes so prevalent in American society during that time. The adventure magazines created and reinforced martial masculinity, and they emphasized that whiteness was a defining trait of true masculinity.Daddis writes so clearly and descriptively concerning the drawings contained within the magazines that the reader can often develop mental images of them. Pulp Vietnam is full of pictures from the actual men's magazines, and they appear just as one imagines them. The images, their symbolism, and their themes are so clear that they make it hard to find weaknesses in Daddis's core argument.The book is very well written, but if Daddis could have expanded upon any one thing, it is the idea that some Cold War youth rejected the pulp magazines’ themes. In his conclusion, Daddis includes one paragraph of veterans who did not subscribe to the pulps’ ideals. Daddis could have expanded on this more. Even better, he could have included a short discussion in each chapter of men who rejected the teachings of the specific chapter themes, such as the portrayal of women or whether war was a true man-making experience. Nevertheless, this is a small criticism of an extremely strong book. Historians and scholars wanting to expand their knowledge of military, racial, or gender history will find multiple uses for this work.