Belle de Jour is the nom de plume of a blogger purporting to be a middle-class London prostitute.
Her online diary, which can be found at www.belledejour-uk.blogspot.com, chronicles her daily life and professional encounters, and has proved popular enough to propel the always anonymous Belle onto the features pages of several newspapers. She is, we are told, unshockable, and literate enough to discuss Iris Murdoch with punters post-coitally. I’d have thought the point of going to a prostitute was for her to be really fantastic at really outré sex, not for her to sweetly share her thoughts on The Sea, The Sea, but there you go.
There is a question mark over whether Belle exists at all, and after reading this book, which is laid out like a diary, with the days of the week listed in French (a nod to the 1967 film Belle de Jour, in which a masochistic housewife called Severine, played by Catherine Deneuve, becomes a part time prostitute), I must say I have my doubts: she sounds (and reads) like a by-numbers male construct, or a deliberate female take on the same.
Consider: very unusually indeed (uniquely, one might say, for someone in her line of work), Belle doesn’t seem overly preoccupied with money. I know that these days we’re all supposed to think that prostitution is a profession like any other, but it’s not. It is a horrible job, in which lardy blokes with halitosis penetrate you while you pretend to love it, and that’s just for starters. The only thing that ameliorates this bleak state of affairs is cash, and plenty of it. But Belle doesn’t seem to care much about money. At the beginning of the book, she is impressed by the ease with which she can earn it, but by a quarter of the way through she is having days off and pottering about as though money were really the last thing on her mind. (On one of these days off she masturbates; the implication is that she can’t pass a day without her clients’ good lovin’. Yeah, right, because that really happens outside of men’s imaginations.)
Also, Belle discovers early on that she makes a good dominatrix. But then she decides to do the normal jobs, too. This is extremely odd. The first kind of work lets you keep your knickers on and is highly paid; the second doesn’t and isn’t. And any professional dominatrix worth her latex would rather die than turn submissive tricks in slightly naff hotels. But we are asked to believe that ambidextrous Belle loves her job so much that she just can’t do without a good seeing to from a stranger every now and then. For quite rubbish money. Hmm.
To muddy the waters still further, Belle’s own fantasies, as opposed to the fantasies she is paid to enact, involve being on the receiving end of a quite unusual degree of brutality. One of the most disturbing aspects of Internet porn is that you are never more than a couple of mouse clicks away from sites where all the women on offer have two black eyes and are bleeding from the mouth; as a punter, you are invited to believe that these women got that way by choice. Now, either I am so dissociated from my own gender that I have somehow missed some great seismic shift in the past few years, and everybody else loves the idea of being electrocuted and then kept in a hole, or this new nastiness is indicative of hatred and fear of women on a really epic and troubling scale. I was disturbed, in the course of this book, to come across more peddling of the notion that women long to be brutalised. Even if Belle is real, and she really does yearn to see her own flesh tear, it’s hard to see what good sharing this information with the rest of us might do.
Belle writes with panache, but her stories about sex with clients soon become yawnsome, as do her problems with various boyfriends and their predictable difficulties with her chosen career path, as do underdeveloped stories about her family. There are some sharp, funny moments — I enjoyed Belle’s theory that anal sex is the new oral sex, ie, that simply everybody’s at it except the prudiest of prudes — and I liked her remark that, in these days of infants in “Babe” T-shirts and grannies in Spandex, you can always tell the working girl by her suit.
But I didn’t like this book, with its spoiled-girl braggadocio: “The first thing you have to understand is that I’m a whore,” reads the first sentence. I found the idea of a pampered, middle-class girl going into prostitution out of laziness icky rather than intriguing: falling into it faute de mieux is one thing; coming to it via comfortable indolence another (though it is hardly as novel or as noteworthy as the author seems to think it is). And really, how much of a show-off do you have to be to volunteer a free blog about your life? There is something about Belle’s relentless me-me-me tone throughout that reminds me of how every woman who gives birth imagines herself to be the first person to experience motherhood, and thus imagines herself to be rather more fascinating than she actually is.
There is an interesting first-hand book to be written about prostitution. Sadly, this ain’t it. And the sex is unsexy. That’s if you believe a word of it, of course — and I expect believers and nons will divide along gender lines. Male readers might reflect that all that is missing from the book is a story about a punter so talented, so magnificent, that our awed, grateful protagonist waives her fee. Female readers might just roll their eyes.
JUST ANOTHER DAY
Mardi, le 9 décembre: I walked into the hotel, large coat bundled tight around me. It was more insurance that none of the tools of the trade would fall out than protection against the sharp weather. The client undressed while I laid out the things he had requested: blindfold, The Persuaders, choke-chain collar and nipple clamps.
“I’ve never done this before,” he said, eyeing the whips.
Doubtful. Still, his fantasy, not mine. “I’ll be gentle with you, then,” I said. I was lying, and we both knew it.
We were finished in exactly an hour. Sometimes the job seems too easy to be believed.
Available at the Books First price of £10.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
READ ON...
websites:
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com
Where it all started
books:
Love for Sale: A Global History of Prostitution by Nils Ringdal (Atlantic £17.99)
From the Old Testament to Pretty Woman
