The doctor herself may be the remedy
'Belle de Jour' shows that prostitution can be made to work to the advantage of women, writes Eilis O'Hanlon
The identity of Belle De Jour, the woman whose blog about her time working as a high- class prostitute was turned into a bestselling book and successful prime-time TV series, has finally been revealed after six years in the shadows, and it turns out that it was Florence Nightingale all along. Well, not actually the lady with the lamp, but near enough.
Dr Brooke Magnanti is a "respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology" at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, part of Bristol University's Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information. Blimey. That's some job description.
Either way, we get the point. Brooke is a serious brainiac -- Stephen Hawking in a G-string -- who turned temporarily to prostitution when she ran out of money while finishing her PhD. So much for the rumours that the real Belle was actually author Toby Young of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People infamy and that the whole blog was a post-modernist joke. Nobody would pay Mr Young £300 an hour, Belle's apparent going rate during her soliciting days, to sleep with them.
To not sleep with them, maybe.
So much, too, for the feminists who always poured scorn on Belle de Jour's continual insistence that she had enjoyed her experiences as a call girl, and remained undamaged by them. Nothing infuriates the sisterhood more than a victim who refuses to accept that she is one.
When the person making those assertions was anonymous, it was easy to dismiss her as deluded. Now that a real person has taken her place openly on the other end of the argument, the debate isn't quite so one-sided. Now Dr Magnanti has a chance to answer back directly.
In some ways, this educated, blonde 34-year-old is their worst nightmare. Not only does she have the audacity to be highly intelligent (and here it's not quite clear whether the offence in the eyes of feminists is for an intelligent woman to be a prostitute, or for a prostitute to dare to be smarter than they are), but she also compounds the error by being practically a saint in her respectable public persona. The woman looks for cures for childhood cancer, for heaven's sake. How much more beyond reproach can she get?
Nonetheless, the backlash has started in earnest -- or perhaps backlash isn't quite the right word, since feminists never had any time for Belle de Jour's story in the first place. In many ways, their attitude to prostitution is the same as the dog-collared do-gooders of Victorian days, who thought a fallen woman's only role was to be rescued from a life of sin by her virtuous betters.
Thus it's been more a cranking up of the counter- call girl activity, with female Guardian columnists rushing to the barricades to shrilly declare: "The sanitisation of prostitution goes on, coercing us into a room where we will accept anything."
Excuse me? Surely all we're being asked to accept here is reality? Prostitution doesn't go away just because we disapprove of it.
Nor does accepting that selling her body can be a valid lifestyle choice for some women -- even enjoyable and empowering, as Belle de Jour always maintained her own experience was -- mean that it's not a terrifyingly sordid, dark, dangerous and demoralising way of existing for the vast majority of other prostitutes.
The Guardian helpfully reminds us of the statistics: the vast majority of prostitutes were abused as children; most have been raped and/or beaten while at work; prostitutes have a 40 per cent greater chance of dying prematurely than other women; they also suffer higher levels of post-traumatic stress than soldiers returning from battle. None of this is disputed.
Brooke Magnanti's background isn't all hollyhocks round the door either. Her estranged father has admitted sleeping with more than 100 prostitutes himself, some of whom he introduced to his daughter in her 20s. He also has a history of drug abuse. Psychologists would have a field day dismantling the network of buried impulses and motives which led this woman down her chosen path.
The question is, having accepted that danger and despair are the reality for most women who work in the sex trade, 90 per cent of whom reportedly want to get out of the industry, why pick a fight with the other 10 per cent who don't?
We should listen to their experiences too, because they're equally authentic. That has nothing to do with glamorising prostitution. It's about admitting that prostitution is a complex business, and that punters and providers alike are complex, multi-faceted individuals, not mere generic stereotypes.
Ultimately, it also means accepting that Belle de Jour may be the antidote, rather than the disease. Not all prostitutes can see themselves portrayed on the small screen by Billie Piper, or have their thoughts on servicing businessmen in four-star London hotel rooms printed between hard covers by respectable publishing houses. No one knows that more than Brooke Magnanti, who freely admits she was "unbelievably fortunate in every respect".
But her positive experience of being well paid for doing what she considered a not very difficult job in a safe, warm, healthy environment far from the squalor of the streets needn't be the exception. Barring a miraculous transformation in human nature, prostitution will always exist, so why not ensure that it works to the advantage of women like Dr Magnanti rather than at the expense of damaged Eastern European crack addicts?
Besides, it's not only prostitutes who trade their bodies to men in return for material comforts. Many desperate housewives do likewise. It's just that they call it marriage.
Her female critics can accuse Belle de Jour of many things, but she was never a hypocrite.
Nor do all women have the cushy advantages in life of our new collective European Foreign Minister, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, who has now attained one of the highest posts in the EU despite never having stood for elec-tion once since being parachuted into the House of Lords in 1999. Nice work if you can get it. And yet the baroness is the one who has the cheek to say: "I'm very proud of being a woman."
Originally published in
