Soft vs Hard Masculinity

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is one of the most iconic horror films of the Golden era. References to it can be seen even in children's cartoons to this day. There's an entire book series dedicated to parodying the title aimed for children. All about different, often aquatic, monsters that make their way into a kid's school.
And that's where the references stop. There's a monster, it came from a lagoon, it's funny, laugh.

But I think that with the progression of time the actual subtext of this film has been ignored.
That this film was made to praise "soft masculinity".
The set up for this discussion is simple, there are two men Mark and David.  Both like the same girl, Kay, and this film is the trial they go through in order to "win" her.
 Mark is an action hero blonde man who sees the creature as something to kill before it kills them, and is jealous of David and Kay's relationship. David doesn't want to kill the creature, at least until it kidnaps Kay, and thinks with his brain. If the movie were to follow your standard action hero movie David would die and Kay would end the film kissing Mark (despite only having lost the man she loves mere moments before).
But that doesn't happen, in the last underwater scene of the film, Mark is killed by the monster. His body floats to the surface and Kay is dragged off for David to rescue.


(Side note: Marks blond hair and white shorts also provide an interesting color contrast with David's black hair and shorts. Both spent most of the film wearing the same color shorts but after Edwin is attacked and injured Mark had changed, this gives the audience a sense of the two-toned nature of the argument the film is presenting. Either you are a hard or a soft masculine type, there is no in-between. Though it could also have been done just so that when the underwater fight went down the audience could still know who was who.)
David uses a knife to attack the creature, which at first made me think this was his, and by extension the films, way of embracing hard masculinity. But he is unsuccessful in actually killing it, it is only with Lucas and Carl shooting the creature does he actually "die" (he doesn't until a few sequels later).
I believe it was one of our first readings (one of Williams or Clovers) that made the claim that guns aren't a phallic weapon because they don't allow the user to get close, they don't allow for the same revelry in gore that horror films are so fond of. By using a gun rather than an overly phallic harpoon or the standard knife as the weapon that kills the creature the film has rejected the traditional notion of manhood.