In praise of the bonkbuster

I didn’t grow up with Jilly Cooper, the queen of the ‘bonkbuster’ romance novel. Well, I say that… I mean we didn’t have her books in my house, where the Kama Sutra and Nancy Friday were among the X-rated stuff in our library. Surreptitiously, I would borrow these tomes off the landing bookcases, before stuffing them down the side of my single bed, promptly falling asleep, and then forgetting they were stuffed there (much to the amusement of my mum when she came to change the sheets in the days after).

But I remember vividly going to a family friend’s house and repeatedly inspecting the well-thumbed copy of Riders, Cooper’s 1985 novel. I was mesmerised by the cover’s perfect jodhpur-encased bottom and riding crop placed just so. If the cover alone was so provocative, what might the story be like?

I’m delighted that the new Disney+ TV adaptation of one of her other bonkbusters, Rivals, is being met with such joy. Because something we’ve been very short of recently when it comes to sex is just that – joy.

Do you remember the halcyon days of your youth, when you lived and breathed for the next moment you could get your hands on your teenage squeeze? It’s that sense of passion that Cooper has a talent for reminding us of. Even though she often writes about infidelity, which is a little more complicated, she always captures the unbridled joy of all kinds of fucks – the shirtless, the knickers-to-the-side, the ‘absolutely should never ever have happened in a million years but wasn’t it hot?’.

In fact, didn’t people everywhere use to enjoy sex? Nowadays, there are a thousand ways to read about how to reignite a flailing relationship, or the lack of sexual exploits of Gen Z or, grimmest of all, the sheer number of rapes each year that pretty much never result in a prosecution, let alone a conviction. But there are far, far fewer ways to celebrate the fire-and-brimstone, hellishly pleasure-bent kind.

Cooper’s critics snort with derision at the possibility any village could get up to that much shagging. But have you lived in a British village? Even if the debauched action is not on the same scale, what goes on in Cooper’s Rutshire also goes on in everybody’s heads. Women are still more likely, according to this indomitable recent study, to suppress their desires, but it doesn’t mean that most of them don’t still daydream about a Rupert Campbell-Black cad having their entirely selfish and wicked way with them. And what man doesn’t want to explore someone else’s wife?

It’s important to note too that the period in which Rivals was set wasn’t actually some halcyon time for sex. First published in 1988, this was just as public understanding of the AIDS crisis, which began in San Francisco in 1981, was beginning to really grip. To this day, the doomsday AIDS-awareness adverts put out by the British government the following year remain far more frightening than former PM BJ’s Covid ads. Yet somehow, the British public embraced the escape offered by Cooper’s novels. Nobody worried that losing one’s head in some pastoral sexual fantasyland somehow took away from the seriousness of a pandemic that threatened to kill the zipless fuck forever. The fact that Rivals has since sold one million copies means there’s got to be more to this big beautiful bonkbuster than a flash-in-the-pan diversion from a sexual-health crisis.

And now? How many joyful books on sex can you remember reading in the past three decades? Fifty Shades of Grey certainly doesn’t count. And while I’d love to applaud myself here, even my BDSM-lite memoir, Bound to You, does climax with a chicken-scissors penectomy scene.

The Times recently described 2024 as ‘the year of sex’ in publishing. It’s true there have been a slew of new sex memoirs this year. But right now, publishers seem mainly intent on exploring ‘dark emotional complexities’. In reality, a healthy dose of escapist bonkbustery would be far more cheering for our times.

As for the ridiculousness of Rivals, it’s only ridiculous if you don’t work or have never worked in TV. Not that I would ever be so indiscreet as to reveal the exploits of media colleagues, but let’s just say, Rutshire has its grimier, nastier, subterranean equivalent in the real world. Nothing in Rivals would shock any of the people that have known it, carnally or otherwise.

What this new production of Rivals also demonstrates is how afraid we’ve become of talking about power and blurred lines as aphrodisiacs. I’m not talking about anything non-consensual. But I am talking about our sexual shadow sides that we’ve never seemed more intent on suppressing.

In fact, thinking about our current chastening sexual times, could it be that Foucault – so perceptive about the Victorians and their obsession with sex, despite their prudery – has become relevant all over again? Are we now simply mired in a kind of sexual Victoriana, only with none of the quaint covering of table legs and all of the inner turmoil?

I say yes. Which is why the Great British public deserves Jilly Cooper’s glorious, galumphing, hedonistic and – crucially – joyful nostalgia take on shagging.

Nichi Hodgson is the author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder and Bound to You. Follow her Substack here.