In S01E05, “My Pet”, Molly continues seeing (and dominating) Neighbor Guy, and starts seeing Pet, a man into puppyplay, complete with costume and collar. However, she hasn’t told either of them about her cancer. She orders Neighbor Guy to finish himself off and goes into the bathroom to finish herself off with a vibrator.
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Dying for Sex is a 2025 dramedy series about a woman, Molly, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and leaves her husband in search of sexual fulfillment.
In “Topping is a Sacred Skill”, the fourth episode of the first (and apparently only) season, Molly continues her exploration of her sexuality. In between episodes, she attended a BDSM play party and is intrigued by a dominant there known as G.
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Dying for Sex is a 2025 dramedy series about a woman, Molly, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and leaves her husband in search of sexual fulfillment.
In S01E03 “Feelings Can Become Amplified”, Molly starts taking a medication that gives her mood swings, while also struggling with vaginal dryness. She has a peculiar relationship with a man in her apartment building (aka “Neighbor Guy”): she’s disgusted by him, but she has a “mistake orgasm” by masturbating while she can hear him masturbating through their shared thin wall.
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Pillion is a 2025 romance/drama, directed by Harry Lighton and starring Alexander Skarsgard and Harry Melling IMDB
A shy gay man meets a handsome biker and becomes his submissive.
[Spoilers ahead]
Collin is an out but shy and inexperienced gay man. After singing in a barbershop quartet in a pub on Christmas Eve, he sees Ray, a tall, handsome biker who might have stepped out of a Tom of Finland illustration. Later that night, Ray is joined by a group of other bikers, some of whom are submissive to others. Ray discretely orders Collin to perform a small act of service. Collin complies, and Ray slips him his number.
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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.
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Pérez Seves, Richard. John Willie: The Story of John Alexander Scott Coutts. 2024 Amazon
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.
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.
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.
Babygirl is a 2024 drama directed by Halina Reijn and starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson and Antonio Banderas.
Romy (Kidman) is a corporate executive in an automated shipping company. She’s also the mother of two teenage daughters, and wife to her stage director husband Jacob (Banderas). One montage shows that she subjects herself to exercise and cosmetic treatments, like botox.
Her backstory is that she was raised in hippie communes, but went into the corporate world, and brings her smartphone to bed with her. Much of her job appears to be performing prepared scripts for corporate videos, full of neoliberal buzzwords. She puts a human face on what is basically an inhuman process, represented by shots of blocky robots working in an automated warehouse.
The pressures of Romy’s seemingly ideal life leave her stretched thin. After faking an orgasm with her handsome and loving husband, she tiptoes to her home office, plays maledom/femsub porn on her laptop, and masturbates while covering her own mouth.
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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.
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Sanctuary is a 2022 drama film directed by Zachary Wigon and written by Micah Bloomberg. IMDB Amazon
This essay contains spoilers.
Sanctuary resembles David Ives’ stage play Venus in Fur (film adaptation by Roman Polanski): it focuses on two people in a single location, and deals with the constantly shifting power relations between a man and a woman.
Hal (Christopher Abbot) is the heir of a hotel empire. He’s about to be appointed the CEO after the death of his father. In the luxury suite of one of the hotels, he meets with Rebecca (Margaret Qualley), who at first appears to be a lawyer who will interview him for the position. This escalates into a humiliation scene of Rebecca watching while Hal cleans the toilet in his underwear.
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