NORTHWESTERN ART REVIEW
MAGAZINES AND MAGAZINES: PLAYBOY AND THE VIETNAM WAR-ERA ATTITUDES
Playboy’s role in perpetuating this sexually imperialistic mindset was nothing to scoff at. But because of the magazine’s suggestive subject, many critics dismissed it as just another masturbatory aid. From there, Playboy gained the notorious reputation of “entrapping young American men [in a state-of-mind] where bachelorhood [was] a desired state and bikini-clad girls [were] overdressed, where life [was] a series of dubious sex thrills.”22 This sentiment mirrored the larger societal culture war between many American soldiers and conservative religious/civil leaders. These leaders “warned of the social dangers of moral laxity”23 that accompanied the “[beguiled] promise of indulgent and unabashed pleasure [overseas that caused young men to] throw off their work ethic.”24 Here, not only did moral conservatives highlight and make mainstream the stereotype that “promised” men sex from Asian women abroad, their perception
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here, like he presumably would with “picky” or “good moralled”16 women in the States because of how desirable he was to Asian women. The lack of Westerners used to be a cornerstone in “picturesque views of the Orient,”17 but now that he could be seen in the same photograph as her, she was obtainable—conquerable. And, in this image, the woman was a mere prop to communicate this overarching, Western-dominating message. Second, in Nik Wheeler’s American GIs and Vietnamese Prostitutes (fig. 2), an Asian woman’s “submission” and “hypersexuality,” as well as Saigon’s rape culture was reinforced. In this photograph, he surrounded her with a power stance—notice his visible muscles, lunged leg, and arm on the wall. Even if she was there willingly, she could not easily leave. Meanwhile, she passively “allowed” him to grope her breast, as her arms were to her sides and her posture slightly stiff. He knew his hand-positioning was crude though—one could tell by his boyish smirk, the woman’s uncomfortable side-eye to the camera, and the un-intimateness of the publicly occupied space. Her smile was a bit off too, even disingenuous compared to the woman in fig. 1, as though she was silently screaming for Wheeler to help. Then, the backside of her hand subtly and politely pushed the G.I. back near his thigh—hidden to not arouse anger in the men (especially given her inherently lower status and assumed consent) and impersonal to not arouse him. This incorrectly assumed consent was likely why neither him nor her were looking at each other and why his eyes were exclusively glued to her breast, only acknowledging the parts of her he had interest in. Still, despite her awkward body language and a perverted hand on her breast, the two people in the foreground continued their conversation as normal, and the two G.I.s outside smiled as they watched their fellow solider grope a Vietnamese woman. They found it entertaining that he used her like an object with which to take “humorous” photos. What these two photos had in common was its “attempt at documentary realism,” a symptom of Orientalism.18 These photographs were made to look like the “readily-available sexuality” of Asian women were factual and definite. Especially considering the Vietnam War was the first televised and widely photographed war, cameras were a symbol of news and objective truth. As if, American soldiers had tapped into a novel and legitimate resource that they were enthusiastic to share back home. Consequently, these images, amongst a plethora of artifacts, enabled American men to bring “back to the United States their stereotypes of Asian women as ‘cute, doll-like, and unassuming, with extraordinary sexual powers;”19 This “became an expectation White men had of all women of Asian descent.”20 As a result, half a century after the war subsided, “several million tourists from Europe and the United Stated visited Thailand annually, many of them specially for its sex industry”21—an industry that continues to boom today because of the same dangerously outdated stereotype against Asian women.