The Politics of Sexual Looking: Pin-up Girls, Male Voyeurs, and the Problem of Eroticized Citizenship during World War II

In 1943, the Post Office charged Esquire magazine with circulating materials of an “obscene, lewd and lascivious character” and threatened to revoke the magazine’s permit to mail at the lower second-class rates reserved for periodicals. Postal officials specifically objected to a series of pin-up drawings known as the “Varga Girls,” which figured prominently in the three weeks of public hearings held by the Post Office Department.  Esquire’s representatives claimed that their pin-ups “glorified” a distinctly “American” vision of womanhood and provided morale-boosting entertainment to young male servicemen.  By contrast, lawyers for the Post Office Department took issue with the magazine’s embrace of male desire and female sex appeal as the basis for American gender relations.  World War II brought a heightened sense of urgency to these concerns.  Post Office representatives argued that the modern ideal of heterosexuality proposed by Esquire, with its embrace of male self-indulgence in visual and consumer pleasures, threatened to undermine the spirit of sacrifice and duty essential to the nation’s war effort and to distort the image of the nation on the global stage. Esquire’s representatives, meanwhile, claimed that the suppression of their magazine reflected the authoritarian leanings of the Post Office Department, and called upon the public to support their struggle for “freedom” from censors at home as well as fascists abroad.  The competing discourses that emerged in the course of the Esquire hearings briefly highlighted critical analysis about the gendered order the depictions reflected and helped to constitute, but ultimately led to the framing of the issue in a way that made such criticism difficult to sustain.  Using the transcripts from these hearings and press coverage of the event, this paper examines how, why, and to what effect female sexual display and male visual pleasure became a “problem” capturing national attention during the war.