What does the new cover for Jilly Cooper’s seminal bonkbuster say about sex in the 21st century? Does it reflect a new prudishness – or a growing obsession with spanking? In the anything-goes world of Fifty Shades of Grey and Miley Cyrus, plain old posh shagging needed a twist
Jilly Cooper’s seminal bonkbuster, Riders, has had a cover change: it’s pretty subtle, but they did it for a reason. In 1985, it featured a woman in jodphurs, holding a riding crop, with a guy’s hand inching toward her crack. The model, Jane Warner, recalled in the Daily Mail: “There was a lot of ‘where is the hand going to go?’ But it was done in a nice but naughty way.” For the 2015 version, the hand has been moved nearer the top of her arse; Louise Mensch described it as prudishness, while Marian Keyes said it was “more enlightened and more respectful and more responsible about women’s bodies”. They’re both wrong, but I mean that in a nice way. If you look at the image – what’s in this book, and why you might like it – the publishers are plainly intimating something. The hand still has meaning, right? It is no longer going anywhere, but it still has intention. The new position suggests authority and control more than plain sex. They’re clearly trying to say that it has spanking in it. In the wake of Fifty Shades of Grey, they’d be mad not to.
In fact, there is almost no S&M to speak of in Riders (plus, the act of sex is pretty sketchily drawn. It’s not where you’d go for tips, put it that way.) Cooper’s main fetish is for posh. The sexual essence of her heroes is in their drawl and their rambling piles (houses, that is). Even the much-less-good-looking friends who surround the posh are irresistible to women, being also posh. The male characters who are not posh serve as a kind of niche perversion. Indeed, I’d argue that the whole bum-fingery subtext to the original image’s composition was a nod to the obsessions of the English upper class, and as such was a near-perfect signal of what the book was likely to be about.
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