Life & Wisdom Quote by Jilly Cooper

It lands like a cocktail-party grenade: flirtatious on the surface, reactionary in the aftertaste. Jilly Cooper is playing with a very particular late-20th-century British anxiety, when the "New Man" emerged as a cultural mascot for post-feminist respectability: emotionally literate, domestically competent, politically correct, a man who knows his way around a nappy and his feelings. Cooper, whose fiction thrives on swagger, sex, and social gamesmanship, punctures that image with a single, barbed reversal. The line flatters readers who feel suffocated by moral fashion, suggesting that desire doesn’t necessarily obey the era’s approved script.

The subtext is less about men than about performance. The "New Man" isn’t condemned as kind or equal-minded; he’s framed as a type, a self-conscious project. Cooper’s implication: nothing kills erotic charge faster than a man auditioning for virtue. In her world, attraction is sparked by risk, appetite, a faint whiff of impropriety. The sentence positions authenticity (or at least unvarnished cheek) as sexier than enlightened branding.

Context matters, too: Cooper’s oeuvre often romanticizes old hierarchies while winking at them, letting readers enjoy the fantasy while pretending it’s just naughty fun. That wink is the mechanism. It gives cover to an anti-PC jab by dressing it up as taste. The quote works because it’s both invitation and provocation: a permission slip to admit, with a smirk, that progress can feel like a mood killer even when it’s morally correct.