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 polarizing 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 characterize 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.

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 favor 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 glamorized 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.

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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 characterized 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 normalize: 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.

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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-matization. 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 misbehavior 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.

But out in the real world, time moves on, and even the sacred world of Jilly was not entirely immune. In August, the writer Flora Watkins shared the sad story of how she was defenestrated from the Jilly Cooper Book Club, originally formed by two friends who wanted somewhere to “drink champagne and shriek about Jilly”. Eventually, though, the culture wars crept into the JCBC, and Watkins clashed with fellow members over — inevitably — the trans issue. After tweeting “It’s women who go through the menopause”, Watkins found herself booted from the WhatsApp chat. The last message she saw was someone saying that it would give them “great pleasure” to tell Watkins “to fuck off from us for good. Bye!”

All this implies that now may not be the wisest of times to bring Cooper to TV. But that is what Disney+ has decided to do, with an adaptation of Rivals, the second Rutshire novel. You can imagine huddles of executives holding crisis meetings, frantically trying to reshape Rupert into something contemporary sensibilities can accept. Not only is he irredeemably posh, he also loves blood sports; worse than that, he’s a Tory MP. In Rivals, the main object of his affections is Taggie O’Hara, who can be no older than 19, while Rupert is in his mid-thirties. He announces his interest in her by sticking his hand up her skirt while she’s waitressing.

These were marks of Rupert’s caddishness in the Eighties, when both novel and series are set. Now, they’re near-insuperable taboos — the assault, obviously, but also the age gap.

By contemporary mores, Rupert Campbell-Black could be seen as not just a cad, but as a predator. As an article in Reason explained last year, a term that originally described the sexual exploitation of children by adults, “grooming”, had been stretched to apply to situations where all parties were adults. But even without his morality-offending excesses, you might wonder if there’s any room today for the kind of character he is: the charming libertine, the compulsive seducer, the overgrown manchild whose own gratification defeats all else. If Rupert fits any modern archetype, it’s the “fuckboy”, defined by journalist Nancy Jo Sales as “a young man who sleeps with women without any intention of having a relationship with them or perhaps even walking them to the door post-sex. He’s a womanizer, an especially callous one, as well as kind of a loser.” A “fuckboy” is not someone to be desired.

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The new romantic hero can be found in the pages of Sally Rooney — Cooper’s successor, in that she’s the contemporary queen of the dirty book, but a very different kind of novelist. In a Rooney story, you’re only supposed to be turned on by what’s good for you. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page,” noted the critic James Marriott. In the words of Ann Manov, Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, offers “two supposedly problematic males who make love tenderly and give love fiercely”. In other words, not that problematic at all.

You certainly can’t imagine a Rooney character killing a fox or groping a server and being rewarded for it with a throbbingly hot sex scene. And so, in order to make Rupert Campbell-Black palatable to modern tastes, the TV show has changed… well, actually it’s changed almost nothing. The Rupert played by Alex Hassell is, with a few tweaks, the Rupert of Jilly Cooper’s novels, right down to the saucy banter. In the opening scene, after joining the mile-high club on Concorde with the journalist employed to ghost his memoir, Rupert smirks: “I always believe in laying one’s ghost.” It’s a line that comes directly from the book.

Olivia Nuzzi, the New York Magazine journalist who lost her job after allegedly sexting one of her subjects, the one-time presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr, might feel some nostalgia for Jillyworld. In Jillyworld, sex can be just fun. Yes, people fall in love ill-advisedly and get hurt, usually by Rupert Campbell-Black — it wouldn’t be any fun if there weren’t any risk involved. But for Cooper’s characters, erotic possibility is everywhere, and pleasure doesn’t come with a morality test. In a later episode, Lizzie (a romantic novelist and Cooper proxy, played by Katherine Parkinson) looks around a garden party and wonders if everyone there is committing adultery: the answer is probably yes, and the implication is that this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Part of the pleasure of Rivals is the sheer relief of this position, after a slew of dramas such as The Affair and Apple Tree Yard which have portrayed infidelity as not only a severe ethical infraction, but the portal to a total unravelling of the protagonists’ lives. While the conventional romantic novel ends with marriage (or, if you’re Sally Rooney and marriage seems intolerably basic, then at least with a vague suggestion that a couple is now in it for the long haul), for Cooper, marriage is just the background for illicit desire and more potential couplings — which is why she’s been able to return to the same cast of characters for so long now.

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Even if someone in her novels does try to stay faithful, it’s very unlikely that their partner is doing the same. In Cooper’s saucily pragmatic universe, the happiest union might well be the one with a little room for indiscretion on both sides; the most convincing forms of monogamy often occur between people who are married to other people. This might not be a model that many of us would like our own spouse to follow, but it is undeniably quite sexy. Some might even argue that “being quite sexy” is the whole purpose of romantic fiction — or at least, a more important part of its purpose than training female audiences to fit their pleasures to their morals.

This version of Rivals has also arrived almost exactly as the trend for “bad vibes TV” (as the critic Sophie Gilbert has called it) has reached exhaustion point. “Lately,” she wrote, “TV has felt to me like one long bad trip, a season of moody episodic rhapsodies that eschew the conventional architecture of narrative for something more subliminal, and more disturbing.” Shows such as The Bear and The Lady in the Lake have become fixated on inflicting their characters’ trauma on the audience, at the expense of storytelling and entertainment. One thing you can be very sure of with Cooper is that you won’t be encountering a brutalising dream sequence or an experimental rendering of grief psychosis. In Rutshire, people pull their socks up when bad things happen.

Perhaps Rupert Campbell-Black isn’t a hero out of time: he’s a hero just in time. The Eighties he belongs to might never have really existed but the fantasy he represents still does. As the number of shapely male bums on show demonstrates, Rivals is absolutely designed for the female gaze, and the female gaze (it’s fair to say) is tired of being hectored. The female gaze would like to be free to want bad things, and not be told that there’s a terrible price to pay for getting them. The female gaze is ready to have fun again.