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MAKE ADULTERY GREAT AGAIN
A Man's Review of Rivals by Jilly Cooper and Ask Not by Maureen Callahan, two books my wife made me read after she finished them so we could talk about them walking the dog.
Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles is a famously horny pile of romance novels, the best and most famous of which were published between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. The series is loosely connected by a series of common characters across novels, all members of British old gentry, media, arts, and show-jumping worlds. The primary theme is that everybody fucks everybody. They are constantly fucking their own and each other’s wives, girlfriends, husbands, toyboys, mistresses, daughters, sons, employees, members of parliament, friends, enemies, business partners, bosses, employees, coworkers. There’s always an animating plot around Olympic show jumping, 80s business backstabbing, competitive polo, or some other thing; but the plot just exists to throw the characters into bed in different combinations. In this case, Bad Guy Lord Tony Baddingham's television empire is up for government license, and faces off against a rival consortium of the Good Guy Rupert Campbell-Black’s scrappy band of upper class upstarts for control of the airwaves.
— Bad Laws Make Good Stories: The animating MacGuffin of Rivals is the regional television franchise for Corinium’s fictional region. The byzantine set up of the old British IBA was fairly enough explained in the book, but I had to look it up anyway because I didn’t believe that any country could run a system that tremendously stupid. England was split into regions which each had a single licensed broadcaster. Periodically, the license would be subject to a new competitive bidding process. New television companies are created and bid for the franchise of the existing broadcaster, claiming they could do a better job. Some government commission reviews the applications, trying to determine who would produce the best PBS crap as a sop to the goals of the government. The consortiums in turn put in an application pretending they are going to make all kinds of socially responsible PBS crap for the community, while privately planning to make immense amounts of money off of the limited government monopoly they’re going to be granted. The animating story here is that you have Tony Baddingham, hard charging first generation nobility and businessman, who owns Corinium which has the regional television franchise from the government. A number of Tony’s enemies (his Rivals if you will), who mostly hate Tony for a variety of personal reasons related to business society or romance, lead by Rupert Cambell-Black Declan O’Hara and Freddie I-Don’t-Remember-His-Last-Name, form a new consortium, Venturer, to try to take the franchise from Tony’s Corinium. Around this core conflict, the characters form alliances and betray them, they spend themselves into bankruptcy, and they mate. Boy, do they mate. I’ll grant this: the premise is irresistible. An absurdity of British law in the 80s creates this high stakes, cloak-and-dagger cutthroat business process; and Cooper spins it into a lost world. Eighties upper class England is as foreign and fascinating a world under Cooper’s pen as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Rowling’s Hogwarts.
— When Does Sexuality Stop: Almost every POV character gets through at least two other POV characters. Nobody married stays loyal, for the most part spouses don’t even overly care about infidelity, the jealousy comes when your mistress fucks someone else. At most, revenge for a spouse’s affair takes the form of one’s own affair. And on balance, there’s something charming about it all. The thing I like about Rivals is that it is primarily and unapologetically about adult sexuality. The major characters are in their thirties and forties, and it is their romances that concern us. There are some teenagers and twenty somethings who hook up, some with adults, but the teenagers aren’t privileged as more attractive physically or otherwise except as specific facts about individual characters. This is mostly a book about characters firmly in middle age falling in and out of love and each other’s beds. Maybe I find that reassuring: I’m a thirty something man, so reading about women finding forty something men immensely attractive is speaking to me. Cooper’s characters are scrupulous about consent without being at all annoying about it; the rakes never cross that line, though a spot of domestic violence is presented as bad but no worse than anything else. Adultery and infidelity are bad, but not fatal, at some level they represent vitality and masculine virtue (in both men and women). Review a list of US Presidents, and the notorious philanderers land higher on the list than the prudes. FDR, Jefferson, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Trump, Eisenhower, Reagan; all effective and important presidents, all had issues with marital fidelity. In recent years Carter, Dubya, Obama, Biden all appeared to be above suspicion with their wives; none were very effective presidents, none left much in the way of a positive legacy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; adultery affirms traditional values of marriage better than promiscuous serial monogamy or divorce at the first sign of trouble.
— The Phrenology of it All: I've said about critiques of stereotypes in James Clavell’s Shogun that saying Clavell was racist against the Japanese is inaccurate, because Clavell is really a mostly extinct kind of British racist who thinks that everyone who grows up more than twenty miles from London is just a gross stereotype. Cooper is the same. The entire book is built around racial stereotyping within the white British characters, the black characters are arguably the least stereotyped by race. The core trio: Rupert, Tony, Declan are nothing but racial caricatures. Rupert Campbell-Black is tall, thin, blond, elegant. He’s described as 6’2” and 155lbs at his athletic peak. He’s old-old money, his family seat is full of first editions and rare art, he went to the best schools and loves horses and dogs and hunting. One of them probably philandered with Charles II. Lord Tony, his rival, is up-jumped bourgeoisie, his father was the first Baron, and he’s physically the opposite: darker, shorter, thicker, bull necked, muscular, his body built by a “merciless” exercise routine. Disney's casting choices de-emphasize this, most modern American readers probably miss it, indeed Jilly Cooper might not have intended it, but what we’re seeing here is the English racial caste system. Rupert is Norman descended, probably straight from a companion of William the Bastard, from Cavaliers in the English Civil War, centuries of breeding and refinement. Tony is a stereotype of a lower class Englishman, descended from mixed Celts and Anglo Saxons, with the build of a blacksmith, a Roundhead stereotype, and with the chip on his shoulder to match. Rupert’s ease and confidence to the manor born is what makes him so attractive, Tony’s arriviste's grasping need for approval is what makes him so hateful. One of the most fascinating economic studies I’ve read is that Norman descendants remain richer than those they conquered 900 years ago. This insight animates a lot of my intuitions about race, nationalism as spook, and social class. Declan O’Hara, the Irish newsman who is the third pole of the leading tripod, is creative, brilliant, great hearted…but melancholy, moody, alcoholic, incapable of managing his life without the help of his English friends and managers. Where have we heard that before? I recall one day a friend of mine, an actual honest to god Blue-Haired Liberal with tattoos to commemorate her BLM protest attendance, saying that Mexicans were all either tall and hot, or short and ugly; not realizing she was basically talking about more heavily European Northern Mexicans vs indigenous Southern Mexicans. That people who talk about race talk about the US Census categories represents a narrowing of human perception, a reduction of perception as a function of baseline skill. The American audience might not recognize the Cavalier vs Roundhead conflict at the heart of Rivals, Jilly Cooper herself might not even realize it, but it’s there.
— Recursive Attractiveness: Rupert is attractive because he is attractive. He is of course tall and blond and rich, but the women in Rutshire find him irresistible because all the other women in Rutshire find him irresistible. He’s likened to “a bad cold that everyone’s wife catches eventually.” It’s a woman writing a book for women, there’s a certain revelatory nature to it: more than anything what makes him hot is that everyone thinks he is hot.
— The show is good, but the book is better. If you liked the show, you’ll love the book.
— I had a moment of sympathy for #menwritingwomen when I read Rupert think to himself that he needed to lose weight to seduce Cameron, as he was a little soft at 6’2 175# and should diet down to 155#. Here I am at 5’11” 195, thinking, jeez Jilly Cooper must think I’m a real porker! Jilly in general is torn between making her protagonist tall, and making him a competitive horseback rider.
And now for some real life rakes: Maureen Callahan in Ask Not sets out to catalogue the women ruined by the Kennedy clan over the course of generations. She starts at old Joe Kennedy and works her way down to RFK Jr. She plays the classics: Marilyn, Chappaquiddick. She does original interviews with secretaries seduced by JFK, brings out obscure women molested by his father, surfaces accidents and incidents involving cousins that were hushed up or too small to make the historical record at all at the time. While when I read Rivals in bed, my wife noted that I would giggle occasionally at a particularly funny quip or description; when my wife read Ask Not in bed, she would periodically gasp in horror and shock at the things that Kennedys got up too.
— You don’t know how much JFK Fucked. You think you do, but you don’t. His career starts with PT 109 and Profiles in Courage, but he wound up on PT 109 because he lost his desk job in Naval Intelligence in DC after he had an affair with Inga Irvad, a Danish journalist and Nazi spy. He kept giving Jackie Chlamydia, and as a result she threatened divorce, only stepping back when old Joe offered her a million dollars not to break up the marriage. He didn’t just fuck his secretaries, he seduced college girls at campaign rallies then hired them as secretaries then shuffled them off to jobs elsewhere in DC once he only wanted to fuck them occasionally, or transferred them out of town if their fathers were important and kicked up enough of a fuss. RFK meanwhile was the MAC to JFK’s DENNIS system: when JFK was done with Marilyn Monroe and she was falling apart trying to get through to him at the white house, RFK would Move in After Completion and seduce her himself. He frequently did this with JFK’s castoffs. This was in addition to RFK fathering 10 children on his wife, Ethel, so many that they named two of them Mary. When you consider RFK Jr.’s infamous diary (covered at length here by Callahan) it almost feels like it must be genetic. Though at the same time, imagine being the famous son named for a famous father who is both sainted and famously libidinous…it must be a strange way to live.
— The Kennedy Curse: Much has been made of the Kennedy Curse. Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy were wealthy and powerful and had four beautiful and talented and brilliantly educated sons, groomed for power and success from birth. Joe Jr. would die in WWII, blown up in an experimental drone aircraft bomb gone wrong. Jack was shot. Bobby was shot. Ted would be the only one to die in old age, and not without his own tragedies: a dead girl at the bottom of a river, a wife gone mad. The five daughters fared a little better: Kick died young after her husband died at war, Rosemary was lobotomized, but the other three did ok I guess. In the next generation, JFK Jr. would crash his small plane into the ocean, RFK Jr’s wife would kill herself, RFK Jr.’s brothers David died of a drug overdose and Michael in an idiotic skiing accident, Maria Shriver would be publicly cucked by her husband Ah-nold with the couple’s maid, a cousin raped and murdered a neighbor in Connecticut, two of RFK’s granddaughters would die of a drug overdose and a canoe accident respectively, Joseph P. Kennedy II crashed his jeep in Nantucket and paralyzed his girlfriend. So, yeah, a lot of bad shit happened. But when you dig through it, you start to see the seams: half of the incidents were just driving drunk, JFK Jr. wasn’t actually licensed to fly that plane, Michael Kennedy died trying to play football while skiing which they had been repeatedly told not to do, Joe Jr. died while flying an experimental suicide B-17. So much of the curse could have been avoided by doing a little less stupidity.
— How Do You Square the Circle?: I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that. And I just absolutely GAGGED on that one, because how does Robert Caro of all authors not interrogate that line of thinking? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to honesty while also cheating on your wife with Marilyn Monroe? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to truth while also covering for your beloved brother’s numerous infidelities? How do we square the two RFKs, Caro’s devoted father who doted on his ten children, with Callahan’s hornball jetting to California to fuck a fallen starlet? I think you can draw a coherent set of values, a classical masculine set of values, that explains how a man can call himself a man of honor, and be seen as a man of honor by his peers, while lying to his wife about sex. This was the norm for much of history. But I’m frustrated that I so rarely find a piece on the Kennedy brothers that tries to square the circle, you have the soft focus Camelot heroic histories and you have the hit pieces. I want someone who tries to do both! We see the same, for what it’s worth, with Trump today so often. You get the turbolibs who view him as a pig-slimeball rapist; and then you get some in the MAGA crowd who will with a straight face claim that none of it ever happened and he’s a good loyal husband.
— Amateurs Talk About Strategy, Professionals Talk About Logistics: Bill Clinton famously wandered how exactly Kennedy got away with it, how he smuggled girls in and out of the White House. And the sheer scale of the operation blew my mind. I don’t have half as responsible a job as JFK, and I can’t find time to golf let alone to keep a half dozen mistresses happy and on tap. Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time? And the things he did to buy off Jackie! He exclaimed after a Chanel shopping spree in the thousands “She’s breaking my God damn ass!” But he couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t afford the messy public blowup If she left him. The strategic blow by blow of the operation would be legendary.
There’s such nostalgia for the Kennedys, for that era. I have a velvet picture of JFK in my basement, in honor of my great grandmother who had it in her kitchen for forty years. But it was an era when patriots were patriots, when men were men, when presidents were hot brilliant war hero ladykillers. And somehow, I don’t know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. I’d take JFK over Biden any day. As a president, or a golf partner, or a drinking buddy out on the bay with the sails full and the glasses half empty. But maybe never leave him alone with my wife.
As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.
The problems for the "hot brilliant war hero ladykillers" archetype gets complicated with details, scale, and scale's inverted cousin, depth. Let's approach this from a few angles.
"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"
I do bemoan the fact that Congress is now only 5% or so military veterans. And, of that, an elevated amount are non-combat veterans (this in a nation coming off of 20 straight years of deployed warfare). And isn't masculinity in crisis? Shouldn't we have more ass-kicking real life G.I. Joe's on Capitol Hill?!
Well thank god for the likes of Eli Crane, Dan Crenshaw, and Marcus Luttrell! Not exactly. These guys are all former SEALs. They're badass credentials are unimpeachable. And they're wildly ineffective in congress. This is not only objective but obvious. One of my favorite examples is Eli Crane who for some reason decided to go on record with a gossip columnist for politico. This is bizarre. Politico is a DC specific news outlet that covers the "deep inside baseball" of Congress and The White House. Their reports are often ex-communications junior staffers and they live and die by their connections to politicians and their offices. There's a lot of quid pro quo and handshake deals. To be en effective politician, you have to know how to handle the press. You can't be too coy, you can't be an open book.
The one thing you don't do is go on record, multiple times, talking shit about your colleagues personal lives. It doesn't matter the party affiliation. There are 530+ members of Congress with complex networks of personal friendships, loyalties, and favors. Saying crazy shit about each other's policy positions is totally fair game, but you don't tell a reporter - on record, cited by name - "yeah, actually, that person drinks too much." This is because it will then be impossible to get anything done because no one wants to spend time with or trust you - you might dime them randomly in a gossip column.
But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.
Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.
Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.
"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"
This is more directly related to @FiveHourMarathon 's post. Can adultery be heroic and masculine if done correctly? If I am flying around bedding starlets instead of masturbating with my goon goggles on, my wife could maybe find some pride in that, right?
The problem here is when we consider scale, both large and small. It's possible to read the JFK sex files, chuckle, roll your eyes and go "Different times. Guy was an asshole. Got laid a lot, though." But what you're dismissing is the real human toll it all had on people like Jackie, Marilyn, and the countless nameless secretaries who undoubtedly went through all kinds of mental and emotional anguish (and, in some cases, physical - STDs, yall).
Okay, but, that's a couple dozen (a hundred) people. And it's not my problem. Can't we still, you know, try to support the idea of "Responsible cocksmen-ery"? No, we can't, because people will be irresponsible and, frankly, bad at it and irresponsibility and incompetence at scale are awful for society.
If men are suddenly "empowered" (lol) to run around like JFK trying to seduce the pants off of every waitress, it ends with the emotional and mental anguish of full families, with violently acrimonious divorces, with kids with fucked up families, and, on the harsher end, with actual no-debate-about-it sexual assault. Additionally, if I a have reasonable suspicion that my drinking buddy wants to Oval my Wife's Office, I might get a few whiskey's in me and decide to take a swing at him. Remember, men kill each other for money/drugs, respect (hierarchical preference in a male dominated space), and for control over specific females. Making Adultery Great again is a good way to Make America Murdery Again.
The archetype fails, here, when it's extropolated to scale. The sociological mechanism of monogamy-marriage is explicitly to create high social penalties to being a cad so that society doesn't eventually devolve into jealousy-motivated murder madness.
It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite. There's a reason they called it "Camelot" - the Kennedys, specifically, are the closest American got in the post WW2 era to anointing our own royal family.
As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die. JFK catching a hot one from Lee Harvey Oswald's blammer prevented what I think was a highly likely outcome for his presidency - nothing gets done and JFK flames out publicly when his affairs become too much for Jackie to bear. The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.
I think actually this is exactly the mindset needed to fix most of our political problems. We absolutely need no nonsense leaders who aren’t afraid to at least verbally meet each other on the parking lot after work. The current crop of “leaders” have long since perfected the art of doing things that they procedurally cannot do (thus ducking the responsibility of not actually doing the things that need doing), or hiding really bad ideas in thousand page bills full of nonsense and then pretending that in order to get something done, they simply had to vote yes on a bill with “let’s shoot Taylor Swift” in it, because it had something else in there. You still own voting to shoot Taylor Swift. The mindset drilled into the elite and leadership of the military is that you are responsible. You are responsible for yourself, your team, the results of actions you took or didn’t take, and the actions and decisions of your team that you didn’t do anything about. They are not likely to pull the same kinds of things that our leadership does now.
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A couple of reasons why you don’t see that many soldiers in political office anymore:
With a couple of exceptions like Grant and Eisenhower, most soldier-politicians are not career military. Most of them joined because of a big war, did 3-5 years in the military, and then got out and and started climbing the political ladder. You don’t really have that kind of soldier any more. Most people who join the military are either working class and trying to get some civilian job market skills and education for free, or they really want to be in the military. The first type likely isn’t going to have any bourgeoise-class political ambitions anyway and the second is just going to stay in the military for life because they like it. The especially elite units are often made up of the second type.
The really elite units like the SEALs, green berets and snipers tend to select for a certain personality type, they even run psych evaluations to get that personality type. And to put it bluntly, that personality type is “lightly on the sociopathy spectrum”. You need that if you want a guy who can kill 50-200 people over the course of their career without having a mental breakdown, and who can fight in the pretty calm and detached method of modern warfare and isn’t just a Viking berserker. I want to be clear, these guys are (mostly) not bad people or serial killer types, and most of them have very peaceful and mostly pro-social lives outside of the military. The problem is that type of person often comes off as weird, and often comes off as a jerk. If you want a good example, look at how many people (even conservative pro-military types) were kind of disturbed by Chris Kyle’s autobiography. This guy never did anything bad outside of combat and had a stellar service record, but it sounds like it was written by a working-class Patrick Bateman. As much as we joke about politicians being psychopaths, that is not a personality type that really gels well with politics.
However, when you hear "the smart but lazy, you make into officers, as they have the mental clarity to make the tougher decisions", this is what they actually mean. You can't command an armed force (or a nation) if you're not willing to make decisions that can get your men killed, or to be more precise, ones that will outright cost you men. This can be direct, or it can be indirect (letting the CIA create a crack epidemic on your own streets so you can free some hostages means some of your men die, for instance).
If, at the end of the day, you're not willing to painfully incinerate the cutest little girl (regardless of whether or not it's actually her or you), you're not fit to command [and to be perfectly honest, you're not fit for politics either]. And that's just the way it is.
This is a distinction that's lost on many people: it's the difference between Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men and Brad Pitt's character from Fury (referenced above). The difference is, ultimately, that the former was stupid/lazy about it and the latter is not.
This is also why certain tactics are derided as "Machiavellian" despite that being how systems of governance must work to be stable. It is readily apparent that Machiavelli thought in this same way; that's why people are disturbed by his observations even though I find them to be made in perfectly good faith.
That is because Western democracies are kayfabe and the power rests elsewhere. The people in power are all like this, make no mistake.
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I bask in your praise.
Perhaps there is an advantage to service being a normal, expected thing of men of a certain class: it allows us to have the benefit of having veterans in leadership, without those veterans being likely to be freaks. War is a good activity for a man to be exposed to, but men who maximally choose war as a profession are bad choices? At a smaller scale you see that with combat sports, where some exposure to them is a positive for any man, but the men who devote their lives to it are...different.
Sure, but then you look at the other examples. Clinton certainly wasn't royalty, but he was the only president to run a federal budget surplus since Nixon, and he fucked like an irresponsible rabbit. Eisenhower was a professional military man his whole career, he kept a mistress. I'm sure the accusation of "Cargo Culting" can be made here, but odds are when you talk about your heroes before the millennium, they had a mistress (the best odds remaining that if they didn't they were gay, or completely bizarrely sexually terrified). So I'm thinking it means something!
I disagree, if LBJ made Goldwater look ugly and unstable, Jack Kennedy would have trounced him even harder. Goldwater was a bad candidate for the time.
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Supporting your point, LBJ was very much a non-combatant officer who did a minimal stint as an officer during World War II because he knew his political ambitions required it. His one encounter with enemy fire (he was on a plane that got shot at by Japanese) became embellished in his retellings until years later he was giving speeches about how he "fought in the jungles with our boys." And no one can deny that LBJ was an extraordinarily effective politician.
Undermining your point: LBJ was also a cocksman who cheated on his wife constantly. He might not have run through as many starlets and secretaries as JFK did, but he did flaunt mistresses in DC.
I remember once reading that LBJ bragged that he got more tail by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose.
Might be true, might not - one thing I am sure of after reading Caro's biography is that absolutely nothing LBJ said about himself could be taken at face value.
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