Two things struck me in the aftermath of my interview with Belle de Jour last
week. The first is that several of my female colleagues in the media
appeared to be deeply personally offended by the fact that Belle, or rather
Dr Brooke Magnanti, wasn’t at any point raped or beaten up during the 14
months she spent as a call girl.
There were vague disclaimers to the effect of “of course, thankfully, nothing
terrible happened to Magnanti”, but the basic thrust — as it were — of their
argument was that the lack of rapes/beatings meant that her experience was
not representative of prostitution and therefore fraudulent in some way. But
how would they know what was or wasn’t representative unless they’d been in
a lot of rooms with a lot of customers themselves?
Magnanti never suggested that her experience was anything other than
subjective, but she did tell me “the vast majority” of her clients “were
more polite, nicer and treated me better than many ‘normal’ men on dates. No
one wants to be ‘that guy’ [the one who abuses prostitutes]. Besides the
agency had their real name, their real landline number, their real credit
card details”. She had, she said “never left an appointment” before time was
up and only two clients had made her feel uneasy.
Now that Belle has outed herself, I wonder why it remains so difficult for
people — or indeed the law — to understand that not all prostitutes conform
to the stereotype of the abused, trafficked, addicted victim. Of course such
women exist in vast, shaming and regrettable numbers. But to claim, as so
many commentators did last week, that this is the only version of
prostitution that exists seems to me extraordinarily naive.
The fact that I don’t wear a grubby mac or a trilby with a press card in it
and don’t spend my evenings going through your bins doesn’t mean I’m not a
journalist — only that I’m not one kind of journalist. The fact that Susan
Boyle isn’t Beyoncé doesn’t mean she isn’t a singer. Nice estate agents must
exist; you do (not often, admittedly) come across a human-seeming traffic
warden or member of parliament. So why maintain that there categorically
cannot exist a single former prostitute who a) doesn’t think she did
anything morally heinous and b) never got assaulted?
What do people who don’t believe in version 2 of prostitution make of the fact
that, to take just one example, many of the “girls” from the organisation
run by legendary French procuress Madame Claude in the 1960s and 1970s
didn’t end up broken with track marks up their arms but married to
politicians, aristocrats and other public figures? We’re still told there is
no difference between a trafficked 15-year-old from Ukraine who’s kept in a
basement and a 28-year-old old PhD student who contacts an escort agency of
her own free will. Like, doh. Of course there’s a difference.
It is a morally perplexing difference, admittedly, but claiming it doesn’t
exist is a piece of pig-headedness that does no one any favours. It’s saying
either that women have no free will or that they will be banished from the
wimmin-loving sisterhood if they have the temerity to make a choice that
said sisterhood considers “wrong”. (Remember Squealer in Animal Farm,
justifying dictatorship: “But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions,
comrades, and then where should we be?”) And how can you help the women who
need it if you insist on lumping them with the women who don’t, like some
well-meaning, half-bonkers Victorian vicar?
Which leads me to my second point: I was struck by how many people still
operate on the Scarlet Letter principle. I understand why, up to a point:
prostitution has become so mythologised that the very word makes “ordinary”
women feel insecure: we think that, like in some dark fairy-tale,
prostitutes are possessed of magical sexual powers that could, in one fell
swoop, destroy our domestic contentment.
Men find this either exciting or scary or, I expect, both. But the Scarlet
Letter principle — all prostitutes are evil, prostitution is evil, anyone
who has anything to do with it must be publicly humiliated — rather fails to
take societal mores into account.
I’ll be blunt: I am sometimes quite hard-pressed to see how an expensive
hooker differs wildly from an under-dressed “party girl” out on the town
with someone loaded. That distinction has, surely, become blurred to the
point of erosion. Except that there are two differences: only the prostitute
gets her chip-and-pin machine out at the end of the evening and only the
party girl has a lifestyle that is lauded in celebrity magazines: only she
becomes a role model.
To be honest, I have more respect for the woman who recognises the transaction
for what it is. Look at the two girls: one, self- reliant, gets the cash and
walks away, job done. One is at the mercy of someone else’s wallet, not for
a couple of hours but for weeks, months, maybe even years on end. Who’s the
victim? Who’s being had?
Then of course we have the “ordinary”, “fun-loving” girl who drank herself
into a stupor last night and serviced some bloke she met in a bar and his
two leery mates. Is she lying there this morning because she really admires
prostitutes or because she’s modelling herself on the girls she reads about
in those magazines, the girls with the plastic tits and the permatans and
the “fantasy” lifestyles, the girls with dozens of boyfriends and a
self-proclaimed ravenous appetite for sex?
This isn’t a defence of prostitution, which I don’t much care for — not so
much on moral grounds as on the grounds that many prostitutes have a
horrible life and do themselves huge emotional and psychological harm. But
not all of them. There are worse and more dishonest ways of getting cash out
of men. Colleagues at the Bristol hospital where she carries out medical
research into childhood cancers said: “This aspect of Dr Magnanti’s past is
not relevant to her current role at the university.”
Anyone expressing amazement at the ease with which Brooke Magnanti has been
rehabilitated should take a look at the real world. Of course she’s been
rehabilitated: her colleagues are clever enough to know that compared to
what else goes on out there, she was a class act.
+ I tried to watch I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! the other
night, only mildly hindered by the fact that I didn’t know who any of the
“celebrities” were.
The show, in which contestants are grotesquely humiliated for a fee and for
the public’s viewing pleasure, features a return to the Australian jungle by
Katie Price, aka Jordan — not so long ago a post-feminist heroine, now the
most reviled woman in Britain for her treatment of, and subsequent divorce
from, the singer Peter Andre (still with me? I’m afraid we’ve gone
dramatically downmarket).
The public votes for Katie to do revolting things involving slime, cockroaches
and worse every night and she gamely obliges, sometimes crying and retching
as she does so. The idea is clearly for her to rehabilitate herself through
abject humiliation — we’re back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet
Letter, actually.
Having once loved Price, I now find her appalling, but not half as appalling
as the public whose idea of the moral high ground involves the ritual public
humiliation of someone they don’t like; presumably at some point she breaks
and then is forgiven.
“Medieval” doesn’t begin to cover it: this is the equivalent of a jeering mob
kicking someone round the playground on the basis that they’re not very
nice. I actually felt dirty watching it.
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