It's a Man's World

Carlo McCormick

For all its claims to normalcy, there is something ineffably perverse about 'straight' America. As pulp and noir vernaculars reveal the obsessions and fetishes in our culture of repression, IT'S A MAN'S WORLD lays out the aesthetic topography of the Erotic Other as a surrogate for our own thwarted desires. Here is stunning historical evidence of the convoluted sexuality lurking in our epic archetype of the Real, True and All Man.
—Senior Editor, PAPER

The Los Angeles Times

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. — Gary Indiana

Publishers Weekly

Alternately called "adventure magazines" and "armpit slicks," publications like True West, American Manhood and Challenge for Men enjoyed their heyday from the early 1950s through the early '70s. With their campy cover paintings of men at war, hunks on horseback and buxom women, these magazines gave blue collar workers "warnings, how-to's, and comforting memories of wartime." For Parfrey, they're worth looking at today because "they tell us so much about American working-class fears, desires and wet dreams." Parfrey intersperses this collection of full-color reproductions with essays by contributors on subjects ranging from exotica and "the sadistic burlesque" to the Cold War. The essays will be helpful to readers trying to make sense out of such images as UFOs closing their clamp-like hands around fretting females with their shirts unbuttoned (from Peril: The All Man's Magazine), and a burly, shirtless man straddling a flagpole flying a torn American flag (from Climax: Exciting Stories for Men). (Aug. 15) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Parfrey, a cultural underground writer and publisher of Feral House, edits a collection of provocative and controversial artwork and interviews from the obscure "adventure" genre of men's pulp magazines, primarily culled from the magazines' heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these magazines were the precursors to today's Playboy and Maxim, with titles like Swank, Man's Story, Man's Illustrated, and Stag filling newsstands with tales of men's bravery and adventure. Covers featured artwork glorifying men's "maleness," objectifying women, and demonizing villains. However questionable or distasteful the genre may be to some readers, Parfrey competently chronicles and analyzes it, including interviews with humorist Bruce Jay Friedman, former writer and editor of several pulps, and illustrators such as Mort Kunstler and Norman Saunders. This examination is best viewed as a behind-the-scenes look at the art and manufacture of men's magazines during this time period, primarily useful as a supplement to academic works on the subject of pulp magazines. A marginal purchase, then, for academic libraries with popular culture collections.-Katherine E. Merrill, SUNY at Geneseo Lib. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.