What would the late Jilly Cooper have made of Taylor Swift’s decision to write a celebratory song about her fiancé’s penis? Cooper, who died yesterday aged 88, was the undisputed queen of the British bonkbuster, and influential in shaping the post-war revolution in sexual mores that would come to characterise the baby boomers. Swift, who at 35 is almost young enough to have been Cooper’s granddaughter, is the global pop sensation whose albums were, until recently, the soundtrack of choice for romantically disappointed women everywhere. Except now she’s getting married, to an enormous, handsome athlete, and this unexpected felicity seems to be having an effect on her work.
Her latest release, Life of a Showgirl, is all rescues from loneliness, hopeful love after long dark nights of the soul, joy at being really loved for the first time, and dreams of ditching the celebrity life for suburban motherhood. And then there’s the dick song. Wood is surely the most polarising number on Life of a Showgirl. One listener declared it the best on the album; another said: “I miss who I was before Wood”. I think Jilly, author of immortal lines such as “Penis Grigio”, and “his leaning tower of pleasure”, would have laughed merrily at “The curse on me was broken by your magic wand”.
But Wood is not a dick song like Cardi B’s WAP is an “Ask for a car as you ride that dick” song. It’s not about transaction, but astonished, delighted pleasure. Swift has swapped the mood of romantic yearning, which led me once to characterise her as a distant descendant of the Gnostics, for a kind of winking, sexually-replete smut that wouldn’t be out of place in the Rutshire Chronicles.
“Swift has swapped the mood of romantic yearning, which led me once to characterise her as a distant descendant of the Gnostics, for a kind of winking, sexually-replete smut.”
But far more than fan accusations of “tradwife propaganda”, what’s truly revolutionary on this song is the pivot from yearning to “ah-matisation”: a radio-friendly version of “dickmatisation”, a colloquial term for the trance state supposedly induced in women by very good sex. An “ah-matised” Taylor Swift marks the end of the era Jilly Coper began: one in which lust was always privileged over loyalty. This age, which Jilly had a hand in crafting, saw the eternal tension between sexual desire and lifelong loyalty normatively resolved in favour of desire. Now, though, after two decades of making transitory and sometimes broken-hearted lust and yearning into music, with Life of a Showgirl Swift has created a hymn of praise to a delightedly lustful “happy ever after” — an album that expresses both a promise of and hope for lifelong loyalty. But will Swift be able to preserve this newfound “forever” from her own content-hungry fans?
I don’t care what the culture mavens say: Jilly Cooper and Taylor Swift are, in their respective genres, storytelling greats. Cooper’s oeuvre has already outlasted most of the dreary literary fiction published over her lifetime, while searing as indelible a mark on the psyche of every middle-class Englishwoman of a certain age as Swift has on those millennials and younger. Likewise, Swift’s songwriting captivates so widely because she is, like Cooper, a storyteller above all else. Each of her songs captures a mood, a character, and just enough narrative to sketch a scene, into which the listener can pour their own experience.
The central concern of both storytellers is love and sex. But they approach this from opposite ends of the same age of sexual liberation, and diametrically opposed personal situations. Until now Swift has been famously, chronically single; but Cooper was already married when she began writing. And the real accolade for “tradwife propaganda” should go not to Swift but Cooper, for the non-fiction book that was her first publication. How To Stay Married, published 1969, is full of tips that wouldn’t be out of place in today’s cartoonish “tradwife” discourse. “If you amuse a man in bed, he’s not likely to bother about the mountain of dust underneath it” is perhaps true, as far as it goes, but today it’s not fashionable to say so unless you’re an influencer with an online course in “Embracing Traditional Gender” or suchlike to sell.
But Cooper’s interest in marriage from her very first writing days underlines the core preoccupation of her life’s work, and (from the opposite direction) Swift’s: the tension between desire and lifelong commitment. Cooper’s characters tend to be charismatic, rich, ambitious and highly sexed. Everyone is always cheating on their spouses, and either having screaming sex or screaming rows, or sometimes both at the same time. And yet even the most obnoxiously arrogant, horny heroes and heroines generally get their “happy ever after”: even the uber-rogue Rupert Campbell-Black, whose heart is captured by the innocent and angelic Taggie O’Hara.
And yet if Cooper’s books glamourised the riotousness of lust, her life celebrated loyalty. She married a man she first met when she was seven and he ten, and remained married to him from 1968 until Leo Cooper’s death in 2013. They hung on through an early affair of hers, and also after his mistress revealed their eight-year affair, a disclosure she said was prompted by Cooper boasting about her perfect marriage. Who knows, maybe this experience shaped her portrayal of the one occasion when Campbell-Black does cheat on Taggie, in Mount! (2016); a far more ambivalent depiction of infidelity than is the rambunctious norm for her fiction. Taggie’s grief and sense of betrayal is vividly evoked. But eventually Rupert is forgiven, as was Leo.
In Cooper’s fiction, then, sex is a chthonic, joyful life-force, as well as one that can cause havoc. Her fiction celebrated this riot, even as her own life was characterised by unswerving loyalty to the marital bond, including in the face of the devastation that followed from Leo ah-matising someone else for a few years. But by the time Swift was born in 1989, the sexual revolution was well-advanced, with Cooper’s literary assistance: she had already published Riders and Rivals, two of the three most famous Rutshire books. Taylor Swift grew up amid the sexual mores writers such as Cooper helped to normalise: a new, more libertine set of norms, where an ever more anything-goes attitude to commitment left lust and passion as increasingly the only reliable markers of meaningful connection.
With the possible exception of 2008’s Love Story, most of Swift’s storytelling takes place against this backdrop. Most of her songs are infinite variations on the theme of lust unstructured by loyalty. Her gift for capturing those “relatable” flushes of lust, fleeting experiences of romantic uncertainty, excitement, hope, or bitter disappointment, have made her a billionaire and global pop sensation. But in becoming the only reliable marker of meaningful love, Swiftian desire seems to have lost its simplicity. Instead, it’s chronically overlaid with second-guessing, anxiety, and the scars of previous relationships. Is it going to be forever, or is it gonna go down in flames? Can I tell him how I feel? Or is it too Delicate? The upbeat songs are mostly just the ones about an exciting first meeting; implicitly, getting to know someone always ends in heartbreak.
Except apparently not always. You are, Swift tells us now, “starving till you’re not”. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what’s allowed her to stop overthinking her love life, and just feel, is the prospect of stability with her “forever night stand”. That is: with a partner who promises to be there not just for “magic, madness, heaven, sin”, but for the long haul. Swift’s two decades of chronically-single musical unhappiness made her relatable to countless fans; now, complaints about “tradwife propaganda” cash out as anger at her implying that “pledging allegiance to me, myself, and I” was only ever a way of coping with not having found her prince yet.
And this is, indeed, at least from a liberal feminist point of view, a deeply reactionary sentiment. But if it’s Taylor Swift’s truth, and now musical inspiration, they’ll just have to cope and seethe. Or perhaps, in the case of her married fans, relate to a different side of her. Perhaps a more interesting question is: what will “forever” do to the future musical output of someone whose extant corpus is so strongly associated with heartbreak?
Here, Jilly Cooper’s example might reassure: her writing career only began after her marriage. Swift herself has already expressed pleasant surprise at discovering she wasn’t in fact less creative for being less miserable. Maybe for Swift, emotional security will result in more, not less, creativity as well as more satisfying ah-matisation. But the overall arc of Cooper’s personal life also hints at what is needed to sustain this: both steadfastness, and — sometimes — a willingness to not say things. Half a century on from How To Stay Married, she told the Mail she’d got almost everything in the book wrong — except that, in the case of affairs, she still believed it best to forgive your own spouse, and not to “blab” about the misbehaviour of friends. But even aside from the ethical debate, is this kind of studied discretion even possible now?
Cooper was born in 1937, not long into the TV era. Swift has spent two decades as an object of online parasocial fascination for millions. Is it even possible under these circumstances to preserve space for private intimacy, or to ask people not to gossip? To complicate matters further, her storytelling has to date drawn deeply from her personal life. But she can hardly expose her husband as she might an ex-boyfriend. Celebrities who turn their marriage into content often end up, in due course, no longer married.
I wish Swift a marriage as steadfastly lifelong as Jilly Cooper’s. But in those slightly less hyper-mediated times, readers mostly contented themselves with obsessing over that of Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black, and left Cooper’s comparatively alone. Will Swift’s fans grant her the same courtesy? Or will they demand more details about what, er, comes after Wood?
If so, let us hope Swift doesn’t oblige. I do not want to find myself reviewing her new album Penis Grigio for UnHerd next year. Conversely, if she finds the strength to refuse, she could yet be reborn as the first global storyteller not of some new sexual Puritanism, but of a far subtler (and more horny) sexual Restoration. And having found her “forever”, she might even be able to keep it.
