In the 20th century, the governments of many countries produced glossy magazines in foreign languages which were used to promote the nation’s image overseas.
Recently I was looking at two such magazines from the two Vietnam’s in the early 1970s. The different ways in which they represented their respective country are very interesting. Many covers have pictures of young women, but the way young women are represented are very different.
Here are a few images. The first come from Viet Nam Magazine, a magazine which was published in South Vietnam. The table of contents page for this magazine provided information about the cover photo of the issue. I will write below the photos what is written about each photo in the magazine.
“This is the willowy, graceful and refreshing beauty of the Vietnamese girl which caught the eye of VNM lensman Dong Thai Dien. Their names: Le Mai and Thanh Mai of the Le Bao Tinh High School in Saigon.”
“Miss Pham Thi Hieu, well-known singer, relaxes among flowers at Saigon zoo.”
“Movie and stage luminary Kim Vui holds Presidential Award for best performance by a movie actress in 1970 for her role in “Chan Troi Tim” which is packing movie houses all over South Vietnam.”
“Nguyen Thi Kim Anh, 24, finished her high school education in a Catholic institution in Dalat and now works in a business firm in Saigon. She goes for tennis and swimming and hopes to travel abroad someday.”
“Pretty, vivacious, and young Nguyen Thi Tuy-Phuong has a flair for clothes that leaves Vietnamese teeners agape with envy. Miss Phuong received the best-dressed prize at the Pop Festival held in Saigon last Jan. 30. The taste for clothes runs in the family. A younger sister, Nguyen Thi Tuy-Nga, who we intend to feature in a future issue, copped second prize.”
The magazine that the government in North Vietnam produced was called Viet Nam. Many of the covers of this magazine also feature pictures of women. However, there is no information about who they are.
I’m guessing that omitting any personal information was intentional. Perhaps the idea was that these people were not individuals but represented all Vietnamese women.
In contrast to the images presented in the North’s Viet Nam, the South’s Viet Nam Magazine does not give the sense that there was a war going on. You also do not see any working class people.
I was therefore surprised to come across this image of a woman in a rice field on the cover of Viet Nam Magazine. However, when I read the information about the picture, it said. . .
“Actress Bach Lan Thanh poses by a rice field that promises a bumper crop. Once a rice exporting nation, Vietnam is nearing self-sufficiency in this product and looks forward to exporting rice again in the near future.”
Finally, the Viet Nam Magazine also carried this advertisement promoting tourism.
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If you were to update to today’s representations you would find that the Southern national vision of femininity has endured over. When you read the popular press today it’s all about beauty queens (hoa hậu) and models (người mẫu) who also cross over into singing and acting. For the former, look at the “culture pages” on the Dân Việt website published by the newspaper Nông thôn Ngày nay.
http://danviet.vn/p1c30/van-hoa.htm
Many women want to be beautiful and most men like to look at beautiful women. I don’t think any social engineering effort has ever succeeded in altering these basic facts for very long. If anyone ever does succeed at it, it will probably lead to the extinction of the human race, as it will eliminate the desire to procreate.
It would be interesting to see changes in representations of men in Vietnam too. Now you can see images of well groomed, muscular metrosexual young men like Ngô Tiến Đoàn (winner of some of the international male model contests) and other male models. actors and singers. It would be interesting to compare these images of men with those of South Vietnam’s Republican Era.
So I just went and looked for pictures of men in the South Vietnamese magazine and. . . basically there aren’t any. Ok, there are some, but very few, and none of the equivalent of the women on the covers (i.e., young, hip and successful). There are some pictures of cyclo drivers (a “Vietnamese taxi driver”), some laborers working for the export industry, and some politicians, but very few.
In contrast, the magazine had a regular section called “Vietnamese women” in which it always had a picture or two of a young beautiful Vietnamese woman.
My guess is that this was the policy (if not merely the bias/predilection) of the men who produced the magazine. If you want foreigners to be attracted to your country (especially one at war), just show them peaceful pictures of beautiful young women. Keep the “threatening” pictures of young men away.
Just like the advertisement at the end of this post, the message seems to be that “South Vietnam is a great place. Nothing here but beautiful young women. . .”
Thanks for these two posts on the preference for images of good-looking women on magazine covers!
I wonder if this strategy or preference can be observed in other parts of this part of the world too. In Myanmar at least, during the same period, magazine covers almost always featured photos of young women, including those with intellectual and literary content! These magazines weren’t even a marketing tool for an international audience; its readership was exclusively local. We can’t blame an outsider looking at just the magazine covers from this period for wondering why there were so many women’s magazines!
Like what you said, it is instinctive to enjoy the sight of attractive women. It’s true of both men and women (I do that all the time!). I once asked a senior figure in the Burmese art and culture scene about featuring women on the cover of even literary magazines, and his response was just as simple: who doesn’t like looking at a pretty girl? It was so obvious to him, my question was ridiculous.
This said, even if this inclination were simply guided by primal instinct, I am curious about the multiple factors and conditions that led to such a practice and phenomenon. A purely intellectual exercise perhaps.
Thanks again for sharing these!
Good idea. I’ll take a look at the magazines again. I took some pictures of men on the cover of the North Vietnamese magazine. I’ll post those soon. The South Vietnamese magazine did not have many images of men on its cover, but I’ll take a look inside to see what is there.
I think these magazines were produced by men, and the readers were likely to be men too. I agree that the idea was portraying South Vietnam as nonthreatening as possible. My guess is in the mind of the magazine producers and the readers, the women in these pictures appeared to be young, hip and beautiful, therefore they are dumb (it did not matter even if some of the women were university students), and therefore they are nonthreatening. Or perhaps they were women, therefore they were dumb, therefore nonthreatening?