Sex, Violence, Misogyny and Reactionary Attitudes

It's quite disturbing to discover that some of the people who share one's love of old seventies pop culture do so, not so much through nostalgia for the medium itself, but because they are apparently nostalgic for the archaic social attitudes it more often than not espouses.  Quite recently, for instance, the author of a blog focusing on seventies men's adventure book series suddenly went off on a right-wing rant mid way through a review, denouncing 'leftists' for their treatment of Trump and 'liberals' for their criticism of contemporary police brutality and racism. Before we go on, a quick word of explanation about these sorts of books might be in order for anyone unfamiliar with them.  Throughout the seventies many US publishers focused on putting together paperback book series, usually written by multiple authors using a single house name, which featured the action packed adventures of a male hero - sometimes a tough cop or undercover agent, sometimes a freelance adventurer or even a hit man.  Among the best known and longest running were the 'Executioner', 'Destroyer' and 'Nick Carter' series.  They were, in effect, the direct descendants of the 'single character' pulp magazines like Doc Savage.  Drawing inspiration from things like Dirty Harry in their depiction of their heroes, these books tended to include large dollops of violence, misogyny and casual racism.  

Now, I had always assumed, naively, that most people who wrote about this stuff, like me, enjoyed it on a level of being nostalgic for a relic from our childhoods and a form of pop culture, be it the mini-industry of quickly made low budget exploitation films or mass market paperback publishing - that has now gone forever.  Amongst all the schlock you could often find genuine originality and ideas that you'd find nowhere else - the 'poetry of pulp', if you like.  These were what made wading through all the less defensible stuff worthwhile.  Moreover, if nothing else, they were a stark reminder of how times and attitudes have changed - for the better, we hope - with regard to race relations, the treatment of women and minorities, for instance.  But I was wrong.  The rant I referred to seems to indicate that some, possibly the majority for all I know,of those reviewing this stuff actually endorse all the undesirable attitudes encapsulated in this sort of old pop culture, their enjoyment of it being based upon a yearning for a return to those 'good old days' when women and minorities knew their place and casual violence was seen as a legitimate form of policing.  The days when white, middle class, guys called the shots.

Which brings us to another element of that rant: the author also went off on a denunciation of such things as vaccine and mask mandates and the use of police to enforce them, sometimes violently when protests got out of hand. For me, the sub-text was clear here: the majority of these 'protestors' tend to be white, middle aged and male - the outrage felt by the author was that they shouldn't be the subject of the sort of treatment that was traditionally only meted out to minorities back in those 'good old days' of the seventies.  Police violence is only OK and justified when it isn't 'people like us' on the receiving end: those 'others' clearly deserve it, though.  All of which has rather soured my enjoyment of the artifacts of seventies pop culture and made me think long and hard about my own reasons for indulging in it.  The bottom line is that I'd like to think that I'm able to look at it critically, well aware of all the problematic attitudes and behaviours it often seems to endorse.  Just as I can look back nostalgically at the old Soho I remember, full of sex workers, porn cinemas, adult shops and dodgy bars, without actually endorsing the sexual exploitation it represented.  I can appreciate, though, that it represented a thriving, if seamy, sub-culture that has now been swept under the carpet in favour of the anemic tourist trap that is contemporary Soho.  At least in the old days it was all out in the open, a healthy acknowledgement of the existence of this side of both our culture and human nature.  Anyway, the end result of reading that rant is that I now find what I once considered an enjoyable pop culture blog an uncomfortable read, as I reassess everything the author has ever written about those books.  The fact is that the past is a great place to visit, but we can't ever go back there.  Things change and we have to accept that.