Synopses & Reviews
Mens magazines first appeared in great numbers after World War II and the Korean War. Their signature stories, supposedly based on reality, often depicted brawny he-men protecting lustful women from savages, Nazis, Koreans, or Cubans.
Its a Mans World explores a time when magazines like
Argosy and
True flourished, along with their more sexually charged counterparts such as
Stag and
For Men Only.
The book is both an art gallery and a lively history, profiling the magazines themes of bondage and S/M, racism, and sexism. Editor Adam Parfrey provides sociological context for the extraordinary covers, interior art, and articles in these cultural artifacts. Extensively illustrated with reproductions from magazines like Saga, Stag, and more, this is a colorful and lively retrospective of masculinity in the cold-war era.
Review
"It's a Man's World, [is] an exhaustive and exhausting collection of artwork from 'the postwar pulps'...[that] dispatches with highbrow classification in favor of all-out inundation." Mark Holcomb, Village Voice
Review
"[I]t is clear from the subliterature surveyed by It's a Man's World that at least half the gender equation [of the 1950s] was deeply troubled by the restraints of domestic life and felt most energized and fully alive imagining situations of mortal peril and physical combat..." Los Angeles Times
Review
"...[Feral House has] brought the socially incompatible flotsam back to us in a wonderful book, It's a Man's World." Robert Williams
Review
"Parfrey intersperses this collection of full-color reproductions with essays....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..." Publishers Weekly
Review
"...stunning historical evidence of the convoluted sexuality lurking in our epic archetype of the Real, True and All Man." Carlo McCormick, Senior Editor, Paper
Synopsis
"A panorama of lurid vintage covers and magazine layouts as well as acerbic insightful narratives from Parfrey... a sprawling, well-endowed retrospective of unbridled virility and lost mid-20th century American culture."—Spin
Synopsis
The Adventure Magazine genre of Cold-War masculinity.
About the Author
Author Adam Parfrey is the editor of Extreme Islam, Apocalypse Culture II, and the co-author of Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and the Germs. The work of Design Editor Hedi El Kholti can also be seen in the Feral House publications Russ Columbo and the Crooner Mystique and Hot Girls of Weimar Berlin and the Dilettante Press Book, Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan.