The Brooks-Cameron texts give a glimpse of the sexualised shires

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/05/brooks-cameron-texts-glimpse-sexualised-shires

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There's much to like about the countryside, especially at this time of the year, when it's about to come in to its own. One day soon, the hunt will come past, the racehorses will be out snorting and cantering around leaping and bounding. Women and men clad in tight jodphurs and slapping their whips against their boots will stride past, dogs at their heels. For I live in the shires, a strangely sexualised world full of innuendo – as inadvertently revealed by the "horseplay texts" between Rebekah Brooks and Cameron.

In one of the texts, Cameron said he liked "that fast and unpredictable ride" – he was apparently referring to a horse lent to him by Brooks' husband Charlie, a racehorse trainer. Metropolitans have raised an eyebrow at this. But for country folk, this is exactly how it is. This is how everyone speaks here: it's all "unpredictable rides", "interesting fillies", "stroppy mares", "a feisty handful", "a roll in the hay", "a good mount".

This is life among the horsey set in the country. It's all "jolly good fun", a bit Jilly Cooper's Riders meets HE Bates' Darling Buds of May. It's an outdoors life full of hip flasks and "joshing" around. There's a physicality in the countryside that just doesn't exist in the city. Sometimes, the outdoors can feel like one big gym, with all those hills to climb and horses to mount and muck to be moved. Horses sweat and steam and ripple with muscles. Blacksmiths do the same, always half clad, even in the winter, disrobing as the heat rises. Farmers stride around, guns slung over their shoulders, shooting pretty much anything that moves. The countryside can feel beyond rules, out of the norm, a place where the usual just doesn't apply. Politics feels a million miles away.

Urban types tend to assume that Cameron fits right into this world, but I imagine he may still feel pretty confused by the huntin', shootin' and fishin' set in his Oxfordshire constituency. We don't do sophistication in the country. We do mucking out, bedding down. We smell of hay and straw and animals. People in the country look after their animals better than they look after each other. Horses are groomed and shone and talked about as if they were husbands or lovers or children. I have female friends who talk about "my boy" and they are not referring to their male children.

There's a rather basic simple sexual energy to it. The hunting people that pass by my house wear colourful jackets (red or mustard, depending on the pack). They wear tight jodphurs, carry long whips, dig spurs in to the sides of their fiery steeds. There's lots of dashing about and drinking from stirrup cups. It's not complicated. People walk in and out of each other's kitchens, drinking, eating, boots on, no one is worrying about the state of the floor.

Social rules don't seem to apply in the country. The polo set are constantly swapping partners and getting jiggy in horse boxes and behind the pony stalls during the long summer. The sexual innuendos behind it all are hardly subtle. Most men persist in thinking that if a girl can ride a horse, she is doing it for sexual thrills.

There's a competitive element to it as well. Charlie Brooks obviously "out-horsed" David Cameron. It's like a test: "Can you handle that beast?" Cameron fell for it. We've all done it. I've got on and ridden horses I should have run a mile from just to prove a point. For men, it puts a question mark on their derring-do, their virility, their ability to be brave. How fast will you go? How high will you jump? People die hunting, they die eventing and yet that threat of death, paralysis or brain damage doesn't stop anyone. We all want to go faster, jump higher.

The essence is, did David Cameron prove it? Did he pass the machismo test? "Fast … uncontrollable … but fun." Well, he seems to have taken it in good humour, if nothing else.