This article explores male popular culture in Australia in the mid-1940s, particularly men's magazines of the period, to illuminate aspects of the psycho-sexual dimensions of Australian veterans returning to civil society. The sexual landscape of Australian society had undergone considerable transformation, especially through an increasing sexualisation of popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This provided a context for considerable sexual anxiety and tension, especially in the context of numerous stories of Australian women consorting with American servicemen during the war. Men's popular culture, especially short fiction, where more lurid fantasies could play out, often depicted women as sexually voracious and duplicitous. Many of the short stories involved love triangles where the men were betrayed by women. But the resolution of these rivalries often pathologised women while preserving the male bonds of war. Homosocial bonds were a bulwark in the troubled transition from war to peace.
This does mention some romances, but I've also included it because it seems a companion piece to an earlier article by Garton which focused on the fiction (including a lot of romance fiction) and non-fiction "directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men."
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in most issues of these magazines there were usually one or two pieces of short fiction framed around a veteran, most commonly coming home to a loveless marriage or betrayal by a faithless wife, although every now and then the bleakness of sexual relations was leavened by the ‘happy ending’ of conventional romance fiction more common in women's magazines.
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Love triangle stories are also evident in women's magazines, but the tone and tenor of these stories are markedly different to those in Man and Cavalcade. Across the three or four years when veteran stories featured in both men's and women's magazines, the love triangle story represented a distinct subset within the romance fiction in these magazines. Amongst the thirty or so short stories of returning veterans from 1945–48 in men's magazines, there were seven stories where one of the rivals leaves the scene, either because he has fallen out of love with the woman or there is some mistaken identity (where the rivals actually fall for an identical twin) and a further six where one of the rivals dies in the war leaving the field open for the survivor. There is a similar number of these love triangle stories in a random sample of women's magazines in the same period, and while happy endings are evident in both women's and men's magazines, in women's magazines true love usually triumphs while in men's magazines there is more ambivalence about return and often unhappy consequences.
Here's the abstract:
This does mention some romances, but I've also included it because it seems a companion piece to an earlier article by Garton which focused on the fiction (including a lot of romance fiction) and non-fiction "directed primarily at wives, mothers and fiancées, who were seen to bear the responsibility for rebuilding the manhood of returning men."
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