<\/p>\n
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<\/em> in a charity shop was my first real foray into smut (if you don\u2019t count Forever<\/em>, by Judy Blume, which reads like an Enid Blyton novel once you\u2019ve been initiated into Rutshire life). I remember reading it covertly, under the covers and with a torch, correctly assuming that Cooper\u2019s novels would not be high on my parents\u2019 list of improving books they wished for their daughter to read.<\/p>\n I was riveted from the get-go. The men were uniformly ghastly \u2013\u00a0macho, sexist and brutish \u2013 and none of them seemed to like the women they wooed very much. But none of that mattered at all once I\u2019d gotten to the dirty bits. I stayed up until 3am reading that first book, and once I\u2019d 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\u2019t 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\u2019ve (thankfully) never had the chance to explore.<\/p>\n Before the internet made porn accessible to teenagers with a click of their phone, novels like Riders<\/em> and Rivals<\/em> 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<\/em>: \u201c\u2018I need a bit more stimulation on my clitoris,\u2019 demanded Cameron. Rupert obliged. \u2018In England, we pronounce it clitter-is.\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s cly-toris, and please be gentle.\u2019\u201d Thirteen years old and finding out how to pronounce clitoris \u2013\u00a0now that\u2019s what I call an education.<\/p>\n Cooper\u2019s novels probably gave me an unrealistic expectation of what my adult sexual experiences would be. I\u2019ve never shagged a Tory (to my knowledge) and I\u2019ve 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\u2019t re-read them as an adult, (and would bet a hefty amount that they haven\u2019t aged especially well), but I was glad to see last year\u2019s Rivals<\/em> adaptation introducing a whole new audience to Cooper\u2019s work. Clearly there will always be demand for horse-adjacent smut. Just maybe don\u2019t examine that yearning too closely.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019t count Forever, by Judy Blume, which reads like an Enid Blyton novel once you\u2019ve been initiated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1912,1890,1938,1911,1936,1937,408],"class_list":{"0":"post-5178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lifestyle","8":"tag-cooper","9":"tag-early","10":"tag-education","11":"tag-jilly","12":"tag-millennial","13":"tag-sexual","14":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegloss.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}