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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.
The politics of male envy are interesting. Everyone knows how women act around sexual competition, around women more beautiful, younger, more skilled at seduction. It’s a meme, a joke, a retold story, a familiar motif. Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it. One of the most interesting things you can see is a man interact with a man who has fucked his girlfriend or wife, or even with any man who has fucked more than him. There are things men yearn for but can never admit. I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum, but I find it fascinating.
I very much enjoyed the Rivals show on Hulu (Disney+ in the UK). They advertised it very heavily here, but it did very well; everybody was talking about it.
I have a handsome younger brother, and a handsome best friend. At times it bemuses me how eager so many women are to throw themselves at them. And that's in a relatively sexually conservative country like India. That's despite doing pretty well for myself, but whereas it takes me effort, they're turning down more advances because they're full or can't be arsed.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous/envious, but I don't think I've ever behaved in a counterproductive manner. It's not my experience when observing how other men behave either. I've been in friends groups with gross deltas between how successful the guys are with the opposite sex, and beyond the occasional joke, they get along fine. Of course, there's an assortative component, and a group of male friends are looks/success matched more often than not.
The former? Perfectly true, but rare is the woman who takes well to being introduced to an ex. The latter? Half of men have fucked more than the other half, and it's really not a big deal.
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