The smell of ink, the thrill of testosterone

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.