I’ve been using the term “fetish fuel” since at least 2010, but I didn’t make it up. I heard it from Dr. Faustus but he doesn’t claim it; he credits the TV Tropes site, where (prior to them having a sweeping and bloodily-destructive #Pornocalypse moment back in October of 2010) they defined fetish fuel as anything having an unambiguous sexual subtext that’s not explicitly sexual or pornographic. In that era the TV Tropes fetish fuel entry offered dozens of examples, ranging from the Little Mermaid’s seashell bikini to the outfits worn by the notoriously-lovely women who help and assist stage magicians and assorted vaudevillians. More recent entries (but still pre-pornocalypse) offered a more well-honed fetish fuel definition, while shunting off the examples to a different (and also pornocalypse-doomed) Turn On Tropes entry:
In a nutshell, Fetish Fuel is when something in a work isn’t explicit nudity, sexual activity, or something else pornographic, but still causes sexual arousal in the viewer. Usually the cause is that this sets off something sexual for a viewer, particularly a Fetish a viewer has, hence the name. But unlike Nightmare Fuel, this can be intentional just as often as not. See Fanservice and Author Appeal; and see Turn On Tropes for a list of tropes that are often fetish fuel.
All of which is a long-winded way to explain my astonishment at seeing cellophane pop up in a clearly-intended-as-fetish-fuel way in a 1960s men’s magazine. The February 1961 issue of Ace, to be precise:
To my personal sensibilities, cellophane is fairly unsexy stuff; it crinkles and is noisy and unpleasant to handle. But the fetish imagination wants what it wants, and if this photographer didn’t have a cellophane fetish, he or his editors must have been pocketing sponsored-placement fees from DuPont.
Photo above is part of a full two-page spread, which identifies the lovely model as Clara Barrie:
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