Nothing had prepared me. Some years back I had read The Story of O [sic], intrigued by the beginning, horrified after a few pages, repulsed long before the end. Sadomasochists in real life were black-leather freaks, amusing and silly in their ridiculous getups. If a friend, a peer, had told me she had herself tied to a table leg at home after a full day’s work at the office– well, it has never come up. God knows I would not have believed it. [Pg.54]
Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill, published 1978, is the semi-autobiographical account of her brief, obsessive, masochistic affair with an unnamed man. It was eventually adapted into the notorious Nine and a Half Weeks film in 1986, starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.
I had viewed and read about the film quite a bit before I read the short novel. It differs in several significant points. (For convenience, I will refer to the POV character as Elizabeth and her lover as John, though he is not named in the book.)
Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.
Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.
If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link, or a paragraph for each category and/or write your own introduction.
For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s more appealing for readers.
Here’s an Example of Elust 189 re-posted by Sex Worker Search with a unique title, intro and comments next to the links.
The more people do the reposts, the greater the value Elust has for everyone with a link included in terms of site visitors it generates and for SEO from all the new backlinks you get.
Garrett, Jane. 2024 John Willie: A Bizarre Life. Schiffer Amazon
Jane Garrett has written another biography of mid-century kink artist, photographer and publisher John “Willie” Coutts, best known for Bizarre magazine.
Pérez Seves, Richard. John Willie: The Story of John Alexander Scott Coutts. 2024 Amazon
Coutts in a relaxed moment.
The latest in Richard Pérez Seves’ series of biographies of kink figures in the 20th century documents the life of John Alexander Scott Coutts, better known as “John Willie”, the artist and publisher of Bizarre magazine. Along the way, the reader also meets Coutts’ freethinking model, muse and wife, Holly Faram; the “g string king”, Charles Guyette; National Police Gazette editor Edith Farrell; Harry Bodham-Wetham, AKA “Achilles”, high heeled shoe artisan; photographer and producer Leonard Burtman; and mysterious individuals known only by nicknames like “the Chicagoan” and “Little John” and “A Manhattanite”.
Coutts was a key node in a globe-spanning network of misfits, eccentrics and entrepreneurs. Born to a wealth English family, Coutts could have led a comfortable life, but instead walked away and ended up an itinerant labourer in Australia, then a merchant seaman. In the recorded interviews that are the foundation of this work, he described himself as unusual even from an early age, aware of his strong attraction to women in high heels. His interests brought him to the fetishistic letters in London Life magazine and then to a friendship with contributor “Achilles”, an alias he later used for himself. His dissatisfaction with the fetish content of London Life led him to create what would eventually be Bizarre (he admits he pirated fetish letters from the earlier magazine), but contingencies like WWII and his own difficulty in getting a steady income got in the way. He had to support himself as a seaman while he published the magazine and distributed it by hand on consignment. It was not the “get rich quick” scheme he had dreamed.
Holly Faram, Coutts’ wife, muse and model.
Coutts networked with people in the softcore magazine publishing space, including National Police Gazette editor Edith Farrell and girlie magazine publisher Max “Robert” Harrison, who bought Coutts’ Sweet Gwendoline damsel-in-distress comic strip and other works. Harrison put Coutts in touch with brother-sister duo Irving and Paula Klaw, who had been turned on to the market for new bondage/fetish media by the mysterious “Little John”. Coutts’ artistic perfectionism clashed with Klaw’s profit-driven style and fear of the authorities. The artist had to censor his own work, sometimes hand-painting underwear onto nudes, before the publisher would accept them.
Coutts also disliked Klaw’s business practices, such as not paying models and getting photographers to pay for access to the models and having to hand over their own work for Klaw to sell. Coutts, who prided himself on being a gentleman and a professional with his models, was the producer-practitioner of fetish media, on the border between producers like Klaw and Harrison and the numerous anonymous fans and practitioners. This business partnership did not last.
Bizarre was Coutts’ labour of love, which was both its saving grace and its greatest hindrance. As a one-man operation that was full of his meticulous artwork with realistic bondage, not to mention photography, it couldn’t hope to be published monthly, as promised. Instead of forgettable schlock, Bizarre was haphazardly published art. That’s why we remember Coutts and his work now.
There’s dark stuff in this story too: Coutts’ failed marriage with Faram, his struggles with alcoholism, and the tragic story of how one of his models, Judy Dull, was kidnapped and murdered by “the Glamour Girl killer”, Harvey Glatman.
After he gave up publishing Bizarre and mainly worked as a photographer in Los Angeles, Coutts was diagnosed with brain cancer. Radiotherapy gave him a brief extension, during which he agreed to be interviewed by Paul Gebhard of the Kinsey Institute. The transcript of that interview became the foundation of this work.
Pérez Seves’ book is a beautiful portrait of Coutts and his world, illuminating a history that so easily could have been forgotten. The reproductions of Coutts’ artwork and photography add to the value.
Editorial aside: I think the time is ripe for a John Willie biopic.
Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.
Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.
If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link, or a paragraph for each category and/or write your own introduction.
For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s more appealing for readers.
Here’s an Example of Elust 184 published by Femina Viva with unique comments next to the links.
The more people do the reposts, the greater the value Elust has for everyone with a link included in terms of site visitors it generates and for SEO from all the new backlinks you get.
Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.
Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.
If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link, or a paragraph for each category and/or write your own introduction.
For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s more appealing for readers.
Here’s an Example of Elust 183 published by Mx Valentina with unique comments next to the links.
Youtuber Matt Bernstein speaks with Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub (of the podcast In Bed With The Right) about “The Incoherent Sexual Politics of the Right”. The right wing/conservative resurgence we’ve seen over the past decade or so swings widely from the puritan to the libertarian in sexual matters. There’s a desperate scramble to seize the sexual high ground, to present themselves as the side of beauty and pleasure, and denigrate the sex of queer people and feminists as ugly and boring.
In particular, the conversation follows the trajectory of the “tradwife” image, epitomized by the “raw milkmaid dress”. They describe how the tradwife went from the epitome of conservative female modesty and domesticity to a sexualized fetish outfit over the span of only a year or two. Classically Abby, one of the best known advocates of tradwifism, shut down her Youtube channel late last year, because of the raunchy side of her supposed supporters.
There’s a long-standing precedent of female clothing that is supposed to de-sexualize the wearer becoming sexualized and fetishized; e.g. the French maid cliche. That a fetishized version of the tradwife image would appear so quickly is hardly surprising.
It represents the internal rift in the conservative movent, between the puritan and libertine wings. The image of the tradwife in Evie magazine, as modest yet seductive, sexually adventurous yet strictly hetero and monogamous, proved untenable. They couldn’t reconcile that dialectic.
Puritans and libertines have one thing in common: they both believe they should have control over other people’s bodies. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, the patriarchal, theocratic fascists of Gilead subdivide women into specialized groups, each with their own sartorial code: handmaids in red for reproduction, wives in blue for running households, aunts in brown to manage handmaids, marthas in green for housework, and jezebels in fetish costumes from the old “decadent” days. They’re all different parts of the same system.
Elust is the only place where the smartest and hottest sex bloggers are featured under one roof every month.
Whether you’re looking for sex journalism, erotic writing, relationship advice, or kinky discussions, it’ll be here at Elust.
If you have a post included, please re-post the latest edition on your own blog, ideally with your own unique comments next to each link, or a paragraph for each category and/or write your own introduction.
For SEO purposes, non-identical re-posts of Elust are much better for search ranking, and it’s more appealing for readers.
Here’s an Example of Elust 180 published by Sextoy DB with unique comments for each post.
The sexual dynamics of the American conservative resurgence have been fascinating over the last few years.
Evie Magazine is a conservative women’s magazine first published in 2019. Its aesthetics and content reflect the “trad life/trad wife” movement, creating a pastoral fantasy of rural, agrarian labour combined with an idealized hetero-nuclear family. At the fringier end of things, Evie’s content splices into ideologies like pronatalism, anti-vaccination, the benefits of “raw milk” and other health quackery, transphobia, anti-feminism, COVID denial, QAnon, etc.
It’s epitomized by the “tradwife” image, a (white) long-haired woman in a white or print dress, hair kerchief, and cowboy boots who has had borne and raised several children while running a country farm and baking her own bread daily, and yet somehow still looks like a fashion model. She does no paid labour outside the home, instead leaving that to her commuting (white) husband.
Strub, Whitney. 2011. Perversion for Profit : The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Amazon
I’ve been reading Whitney Strub’s book, and despite its age, it is still very relevant in explaining the culture war over pornography in American politics. One of the things he details is though American history is littered with censorious firebrands like Anthony Comstock, those moral crusaders frequently stumbled over the problem that the majority of Americans don’t care very much about pornography as an issue. Men like Comstock and Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature could mobilize a small, but vocal minority.
As Strub tells it, when the neoconservatives and the New Right rose to cultural power in the 1970s, they had to reconcile their belief in small government, free markets, and libertarianism with more culturally conservative allies, particularly evangelical Christians.
Thought it sought a socially conservative, generally religious voting base, the New Right was heavily corporate-sponsored, and such groups as the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress recognized the value of neocon thought in legitimizing their project of deregulating American markets even as they reregulated American morality.[Pg.190]
We’ve seen this strange-bedfellows alliance ever since, creating people who believe the Invisible Hand should rule everywhere except areas like pornography, abortion, and queer issues.
In 1979 the New Right organizer Paul Weyrich had come dangerously close to admitting the movement’s emphasis on social issues was a shallow commitment designed to garner evangelical votes while obscuring the substantive procorporate agenda of New Right politicians: “Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” he said. Certainly the corporate benefactors of the New Right’s organizational superstructure valued profits over ideology; Coors, for instance, was headed by a reactionary zealot whose donations largely funded the important Heritage Foundation. But when the company recognized the consumer power of the gay market in 1979, it unhesitatingly ran ads in the gay paper the Advocate. [Pg.191-192]
More than 40 years later, we still see the same dynamic, even if the names have changed: trans people instead of gay people, puberty blockers instead of abortion, “cultural Marxism” instead of “the permissive society”. The 2023 brouhaha over trans streamer Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light suggests that the free-marketers sometimes back down when challenged by the cultural conservatives. Donald Trump himself embodies this contradictory political alliance: a man with multiple wives and a history of sexual indiscretions, who has been on the cover of Playboy magazine, can somehow be favored by the Christian right and even more reactionary forces. Grifters and quacks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson constantly stoke culture wars over issues of sexuality and gender, anything to drown out considerations of economic policy from the discourse.
I’ve said it before, and I hope I’m wrong, but I still think it’s only a matter of time before BDSM takes the place of trans in this particular social-political complex.
