You’ve probably seen at least one click-bait article
featuring a series of garish and campy covers for the men’s adventure fiction
magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. They
feature bright colors, exclamation points, and outrageous article titles, “Weasels
Ripped My Flesh” being the prime example.
We’re supposed to look at those magazine covers and laugh at the naked
salesmanship of their creators, and the crass simpletons who consumed them.
Well not this lug, sister.
Go peddle that smoke water somewhere else, because those who sneer at
the once-popular and now maligned men’s adventure genre are fools.
To start with the easy observation, the men reading
those magazines were reading. That's a huge point in their favor right out of the gate. Their
attention wasn’t yet snared by 100 television channels, video games, the modern
day news cycle, cell phones, and of course the internet and blogs like this. Criticizing them for reading the wrong way is
a lot like criticizing them for eating the wrong kinds of vegetables.
Sure, they were reading, says the cynic, but look at what
they were reading. That was trash with
no redeeming value. Those stories
represented simple fare for simple minds with simple tastes.
The men reading these magazines were former GI’s, the men
who came of age wading through the surf surrounded by death and flying lead. They spent their young adulthood crawling
through mud, holding dying friends in their arms, and chasing exotic women
through strange foreign lands. They learned
more about the world and about life through a year of direct experience than
most college kids learn in a decade of classroom study. When it was time to relax, they sought out
reading that would help them recapture the thrill and excitement of those
formative moments, and materials that reinforced their self-image as brave men
fighting the good fight against long odds.
The stories in those early men’s adventure magazines,
regardless of how well written they were, were not just empty brain food. Instead, they served to reinforce the
cultural ideal of hard working and (generally) honest men fighting their way through
a hostile world. These were tough men
facing difficult times – as we all do – who read as a means of reconnecting
with the masculine need to strive, to build, and to protect.
Today the illiterati turn their noses up at the very idea of
a masculine ideal, and it is this rejection of the western approach to manhood
that leads them to reject stories of violent defense of the innocent, of struggle
against the odds, and of brotherly camaraderie.
The tough guy tales of the past have been ejected from the universities
and the schools by weak minded people who cannot even recognize what a man is,
let alone why trying to be a better one would be something worthwhile.
We’re not done here.
We’ll go into this in more depth in later posts. For now, just remember
that your reading tastes could do a lot worse than emulate guys like these.
Be a man. Read more
manly.
