What the sanitising of Jilly’s bonkbuster tells us about liberal hypocrisy on sex
By Libby Purves
PUBlISHeRS worry about book covers. They have long meetings, fret about impact and marketing, and copy one another’s ideas (there was a phase when everything had back-views of women staring at the sea, and another when it was trugs full of flowers on a white background, very Joanna Trollope).
Sometimes the cover has little to do with what the poor author actually wrote: a novel of mine about an addict mother abandoning her baby was published with a floral cover and promoted for Mothers’ Day.
But the original cover of Jilly Cooper’s magnificent 1985 bonkbuster Riders, set in the showjumping world, was spot on: a peachy female bottom in tight jodhpurs, with a big, tanned male hand in a red hunting jacket cuff resting rather intimately on it.
Now, to general mockery, the 30th anniversary edition comes out adjusted: a slimmer bottom and a smaller, more tentative masculine paw touching it higher and further out.
louise Mensch, the author and former Tory MP, finds the decision prudish; feminist Germaine Greer finds the changed cover boring and (obviously) would rather it was a woman groping a man. Novelist Victoria Hislop says it’s bland.
a few are like the writer Marian Keyes: offended by the old cover, she piously says that nowadays we are ‘more enlightened and respectful’ about women’s bodies.
Respectful? enlightened? are we heck! The extraordinary thing is that this prim, feeble toning down of the old cover comes at a time of wholesale pornification of media. Children at school snigger over their smartphones and share internet images of sexual degradation, and the effect on boys’ attitudes to girls is increasingly and disturbingly evident.
TV drama lingers appreciatively over rape scenes and sprawling female corpses, and the tedious, sadistic nastiness of Fifty Shades Of Grey made it a bestseller.
AT leaST on Jilly Cooper’s cover it’s the woman who’s holding the whip. Unlike the weedy, submissive heroine of Fifty Shades signing sex contracts with a rich man, the Cooper heroine is an Olympic rider. a top athlete, a winner in her own right.
That sums up the difference between the big, bouncing sexy blockbusters our Jilly wrote in her heyday, and the weird, guilty yet prurient attitude to sex so prevalent today. There is rarely any humour in modern mass-market pornography — no sense of mutual joy or, vitally, trust.
The default setting is cruel and harsh, treating women as little more than props, bits of recreational kit for the elaborate, often perverse, gratification of men.
I find it weird that some apparently enlightened women — who would despise Jolly Jilly — may tut at the original Riders cover as being misog- ynist, but defend the sexual ‘freedoms’ and artistically filmed dramas perceived to be a sign of female liberation.
Jilly Cooper’s secret was to tap into the happy absurdity and cuddly enjoyment of sex: a mutual pleasure, not a commodity.
I loved Riders, and have re-read it a couple of times since (the horses alone are worth it). likewise Rivals, the wonderful portrait of a battle for a regional TV franchise. Polo is another one set in the horse world.
My interest only fell off when Jilly introduced her very own spanking sadist, Roberto Rannaldini the orchestra conductor.
at her peak, her ‘naughty bits’ represented something healthy, enjoyable, cheerful and human.
Her early short novels (all named after very middle-class heroines — Harriet, Imogen, Prudence) conjure up a vanished world of Sixties larkiness: young girls in their first jobs and shrieky flatshares, falling for the wrong men and finally finding the right ones — often stern chaps who reprove their flightiness, but love and need them.
Not very feminist — actually, Jilly Cooper is always rather mean with her portraits of humourless, lankhaired left-wing feminists, and I have shaken my head at her over this. But the core of her writing, especially her evocations of love and sex, remains healthy: jokey and full of appetite for life.
The language is gushingly excitable, the metaphors hilarious (otters, space rockets, say no more . . .).
Her women are not objects, submissive victims or even trophies: they enjoy rolling around in the cow parsley, bluebell woods, horseboxes (or, indeed, a helicopter) every bit as much as the men do.
The many, many girls seduced by womanising rascal Rupert Campbell-Black in Riders are always keen for a re-match and yearn hopelessly for him (it’s clearly his hand on that white jodhpured bottom).
BUT Jilly’s heroines are not enslaved, or not for long: when a woman does fall for a wrong ’un, even if the lovemaking is delightful, she comes to realise her mistake and instead seeks out true love, where it is even better.
The heroes settle down, too: Campbell-Black (allegedly modelled on Camilla’s ex andrew Parker Bowles) finally falls in love with the kindly, dyslexic, innocent Taggie and remains devoted through every subsequent book, never straying. For all the exuberant sex scenes, in Jilly Cooper’s books, and those of her better imitators, there is much moral and emotional good sense. Decent people end up with one another, safe and faithful, however awfully or stupidly they behaved before. When someone is unfaithful in a proper relationship or deceived by an exploitative one, she writes with painful truthfulness about the hurt and desolation of the victim.
Her only nasty sadistic character, the dastardly conductor Rannaldini, gets his come-uppance; her only vicious heroine, Octavia, the bitchy vamp in the book of that name, ruins her friend’s engagement, but is made to suffer by losing all her money and having to take low-paid jobs.
Sometimes, especially in our Jilly’s more ludicrous sex scenes, I am reminded of the seaside postcards of Donald McGill: pneumatic ladies, yearning men, honeymoon couples, captions such as ‘I’ve lost my little Willy’ and jokes such as: ‘I like seeing experienced girls home.’ ‘But I’m not experienced!’ ‘You’re not home yet!’ and that makes me remember George Orwell’s marvellous essay on the vulgar Thirties postcard.
He analyses the jokes, pointing out that the conventions behind them show how surprisingly moral they actually are: a joke is a ‘harmless rebellion against virtue’, and so can only work when society has a sense of what virtue is.
He points out that the gags about honeymoon couples carry the implication that ‘marriage is something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event in the average human being’s life’.
Jokes about nagging wives and tyrannical mothers-in-law imply ‘a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for granted’.
In the same way — though in a society far more at home with divorce than Orwell’s era — Jilly Cooper’s bonkbusters have an underlying sense that love, marriage and home are what we all strive for. The moral is that physical appreciation of one another is joyful.
Sex is certainly a powerful, erratic force, able to be exploited by selfish people to make others unhappy. But that’s not what it’s for. When buttock-pawing Rupert CampbellBlack marries Taggie, he’s well aware he doesn’t deserve his good luck.
He’s not a pornographer’s predator with a ‘red room of pain’, as in Fifty Shades, and she’s not some moronic, self- deluded masochist. Jilly’s world is a better one.
So as far as I’m concerned, the chap on the book cover can keep his hand where it was in 1985, doing no great harm.