- Jilly Cooper said the #MeToo movement made men afraid to flirt with women
She has made no bones about her disdain for the #MeToo movement against sexual assault.
Now Jilly Cooper has gone as far as to mock the campaign in her latest book – by naming a cat in the story ‘MewToo’.
The 86-year-old has previously said the movement has made men afraid to flirt with women, and said she would not neuter the characters in her books.
Of her new ‘bonkbuster’, Tackle!, set in the world of football, she said: ‘The only reference to MeToo is a cat called MewToo.’
Ms Cooper added: ‘It’s terrifying for the younger generation. You can’t put your hand anywhere now.’
And of historic complaints being aired, she added: ‘All this cancelling is very frightening, isn’t it? Of course women want passes made at them.
‘People come out of the woodwork from centuries back and say, “You leapt on me when I was 14 and you were 15.” ’
Ms Cooper, who previously said she thought the MeToo movement had ‘diminished’ men, also suggested people were ‘too tired to have sex now’.
In the interview with The Oldie magazine, she mused: ‘They don’t seem to do it so much now.
‘There aren’t any parties, are there? Everybody was behaving horribly before. The upper classes have always behaved horribly…that was quite nice to observe.’
Even Ms Cooper’s new novel, the tenth in her racy Rutshire Chronicles which began in 1985 with her bestseller Riders, has cut back on the raunchy scenes.
She said: ‘There’s not nearly as much sex as there was before. The publishers thought there might be some more.’
And she joked: ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it. Writers ought to write what they know and at 86 I don’t leap up and down any more.’
Reviewing the book, writer Rachel Johnson called it ‘a long, joyous, overdue tease of woke and #MeToo’.
