Before Maxim, before Playboy, there was a different kind of men's magazine. Rather than simply being a catalogue of scantily clad women, these magazines featured adventures to far off places, where the shirtless "real man" was attacked by crabs, weasels, and lizards.
Adrenalin pumping and hormones oozing, vets of the Second World War were greeted back to the homefront with the sobering prospect of a post-war life highlighted by a GI Bill-subsidized education, a wife, the kids, a home in the suburbs and a grey flannel suit. But wait a minute, what about those leech-infested Burmese jungles and Nazi-choked bombed-out French villages of recent memory? For men readjusting to civilian life and craving an outlet for adventure, a new genre of magazine evolved to fill the vacuum of lost exploits and imagined lives, not only for vets but for adolescents and the Walter Mittys of the emerging atomic generation.
To me, there's quite a whiff of homo-eroticism on the covers of these magazines. Every magazine advertises savagery and the opportunity to read tales of "Real Men". The names of these magazines say it themselves: All Man, Man's Conquest, and True Men. And what exactly do these "real" men do? I don't know, but I'm betting it includes taking their shirts off.
In another sense, there is also some honesty with those magazines. Which man doesn't want to conquer something? I know I do. However, the whole idea of conquest in our current time is a big no-no; it is associated with "imperialism". During the 50s, though, a man was allowed to state openly he wanted to conquer the uncivilized world.
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