Love, sex, death, and the making of the male Book

When I was a toddler, I was babysat by a middle-aged neighbor couple, and the husband had a collection of old magazines with covers that, as I later remembered them, featured bikini-clad Nazi chicks exchanging gunfire with other bikini-clad Nazi chicks from the decks of speeding boats. Was I dreaming? As an adult, on the rare occasions that I mentioned those magazines to people my age, no one shared my recollection of them.

Then I came across this book, which, at long last, assured me that such magazines once existed. I've now owned the book for a number of years, but I never read the opening essays and interviews until recently, arrested as I was by the pages upon pages of cover-art reproductions, which routinely display bikini-clad chicks and, here and there, Nazis and boats, not to mention exploding planes and gunfire exchanges, as well as monstrous animals, from sharks to bears to snakes to ants (!) to weasels (!!) to otters (!!!), to say nothing of the lashings and impalings and beheadings and almost every type of torture/execution scenario that could be painted and sold in postwar American dimestores without fear of litigation. What's changed since then? Only, I think, that we live in a more self-censoring culture no less sadistic and paranoiac; it's just not expressed so blatantly, though future generations will instantly recognize and sneer at our depravities while remaining blind to their own.