Mid-twentieth-century American fetish erotica was molded by very specific historical, juridical, and social forces. In particular, an examination of this little-known magazine reveals the ways in which Coutts mobilized existing popular press formats in order to circumnavigate vice laws and censorship authorities using coded language, double entendre, and a complex semiotics that amounts to what Mikhail Bakhtin called the double-voiced discourse, that is, an often ironic or parodic form of communication that says one thing and means another, thereby addressing two audiences simultaneously.
Addressing this dearth, the subject of this article is Bizarre, a "fetish" erotica magazine produced in Canada and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and its editor, the English artist John Coutts, also known as John Willie. IN HER BOOK EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP between fashion and fetishism entitled Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power, American fashion theorist Valerie Steele writes that "fetishism, like pornography, has a history." (2) Unfortunately, neither fetishism nor pornography has been well documented in contemporary scholarship, and fetish pornography and many of the other visual and textual materials increasingly described under the popular umbrella term "kink culture," have been even less well studied. the freedom to say what we like, wear what we like, and to amuse ourselves as we like in our own sweet way. It has no particular sense, rhyme, nor reason, but typifies that freedom for which we fought.
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