digital collage, 2021
In The Male Body at War, Christina Jarvis discusses how representations of men at the beginning of the Second World War —a militarized, muscular and hyper-masculine form—were used for recruitment and the deliberate construction of a post-depression era masculinity. More powerful still was what came after that: a hegemonic masculinity expressed not through physical strength and brute force, but through technological innovation, problem solving, and ingenuity.
This is the masculinity born out of of the Manhattan Project and Hanford engineers and scientists and the "fathering" of the Bomb. It is a masculinity of abstraction. It transcends the embodied self, yet is still in service of a toxic patriotism, colonialism, violence and dominance through technology.
The ads seek "men with unmortgaged minds"—free from communism, certainly, but also what I see as a transcendence of the corporeal weight of guilt, complicity, and horror of the realities of the Bomb and its successors.
Credit to the work of Martin Pfeiffer, aka @nuclearanthro for his incredible archive of nuclear era materials.