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