Gregory A. Daddis's "Pulp Vietnam"

Gregory A. Daddis is professor and the USS Midway Chair in Modern U.S. Military History at San Diego State University. He is author of Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam.

Daddis applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Pulp Vietnam: War and Gender in Cold War Men's Adventure Magazines, and reported the following:

What were the cultural sources of sexism and misogyny in Cold War America? Did sexual harassment stem, in part, from how women were portrayed in popular culture? When young American soldiers deployed to Vietnam in the mid-1960s, did some of them see sexual violence against Vietnamese women as somehow acceptable given what they were reading as young teenagers?

These were some of the core questions I pondered while reading through scores of Cold War era men’s adventure magazines, what some collectors call the “macho pulps.” These crowd-pleasing periodicals – which monthly sold in the hundreds of thousands – featured catchy titles like Man’s Conquest, Stag, and Adventure for Men. Within the mags’ pages, pulp writers fashioned their manly protagonists as both heroic warriors and sexual conquerors. These were “real men,” defending the nation from the foreign and domestic threats of the Cold War years.

In these same magazines, however, women were reduced to sexual objects that typified mid-twentieth-century sexism. In the pulps, men controlled women, whether in the bedroom or on the battlefield. (The magazines, meanwhile, often portrayed female spies using their bodies as weapons of war and luring unsuspecting American GIs to their demise.)

Take, for instance, an advertisement from Honor House Products promoted in the July 1959 issue of Battle Cry [image left; click to enlarge]. The tag line? “‘Stuffed’ Girl’s Heads.” For only $2.98, pulp readers could purchase a woman’s plastic head – with “saucy glittering eyes, full sensuous mouth and liquid satin complexion” – mounted on a genuine mahogany plaque. Here was a “unique trophy” that offered the chance for “every man to boast of his conquests.” While the ad drew attention to the heads’ life-like appearance, it also bragged that “one of the nicest qualities is that they don’t talk back.”

Such misogynistic representations of women filled the pages of adventure magazines. And yet they were not far, if at all, outside the cultural norms prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s. While the pulps may seem anachronistic today, they resonated with their core audience – white, working-class men, the same demographic group that made up the bulk of American ranks in the Vietnam War.

Did men’s adventure magazines, and ads like the one I examined on page 99 of Pulp Vietnam, contribute to sexual violence in Vietnam? It’s difficult to prove, though certainly worth exploring. My sense is that the pulps opened up a rhetorical space for readers to think along the lines of sexual conquest, to deem most all women as objects and as opportunities – for sex, for proving one’s manhood, and for demonstrating power in the larger Cold War era.

Learn more about Pulp Vietnam at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test:Westmoreland's War.

The Page 99 Test: Withdrawal.

--Marshal Zeringue