I was one of them. As a young teenager with no experience whatsoever of eroticism, finding a copy of The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous in a charity shop was my first real foray into smut (if you don’t count Forever, by Judy Blume, which reads like an Enid Blyton novel once you’ve been initiated into Rutshire life). I remember reading it covertly, under the covers and with a torch, correctly assuming that Cooper’s novels would not be high on my parents’ list of improving books they wished for their daughter to read.
I was riveted from the get-go. The men were uniformly ghastly – macho, sexist and brutish – and none of them seemed to like the women they wooed very much. But none of that mattered at all once I’d gotten to the dirty bits. I stayed up until 3am reading that first book, and once I’d finished, I immediately went out and bought the rest. I was gripped by a world where groping, whipping, and spanking were as ubiquitous as the horses that Cooper loved to write about. I don’t think I gave it much thought back then, but re-reading some of her stuff this morning made me feel a bit weird about how horny horse-adjacent romps made me back then. I wonder if I had unearthed some Pavlovian response to stables that I’ve (thankfully) never had the chance to explore.
Before the internet made porn accessible to teenagers with a click of their phone, novels like Riders and Rivals were the millennial way of exploring our emergent sexual urges. Looking back with my rose-tinted glasses on, I think there was something quite wholesome about reading about sex before seeing it on screen, or having it yourself. It helped that Cooper seemed quite keen on the women (mostly) enjoying themselves too. Take this memorable passage from Rivals: “‘I need a bit more stimulation on my clitoris,’ demanded Cameron. Rupert obliged. ‘In England, we pronounce it clitter-is.’ ‘It’s cly-toris, and please be gentle.’” Thirteen years old and finding out how to pronounce clitoris – now that’s what I call an education.
Cooper’s novels probably gave me an unrealistic expectation of what my adult sexual experiences would be. I’ve never shagged a Tory (to my knowledge) and I’ve definitely never copped off with anyone who owns an Aga. But my early forays into the world she created gave me a sense that sex should be fun, and that feels far healthier than stumbling across PornHub as a teen. I haven’t re-read them as an adult, (and would bet a hefty amount that they haven’t aged especially well), but I was glad to see last year’s Rivals adaptation introducing a whole new audience to Cooper’s work. Clearly there will always be demand for horse-adjacent smut. Just maybe don’t examine that yearning too closely.
