Oh, Tanya Gold, how I do want to bash you over the head with a wet fish. You have great intentions, and genuine feminist credentials, but you say such silly things so disarmingly well. In today's piece on Belle De Jour, who has this week been outed as Dr Brooke Magnanti, research scientist and former impoverished PhD-student-come-high-rent-hooker, Gold appears to fall back on the old staple of laying the hate on other women for negotiating patriarchal capitalist society in the best way they see fit.
That the Belle De Jour industry glamorises and misrepresents prostitution is obvious. Very few sex workers are blessed with the options, education, support network,health, security and financial backing that the eponymous blogger enjoyed. In fact, the Belle De Jour industry is one of the first topics I ever had an article published about, back in 2007. In the piece, I argued that the corporate media machine has done a great disservice to the woman we now know to be Dr Brooke Magnanti:
Every feature that lifted Belle De Jour’s writing from the merely sordid and sensational has been edited out of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Neither the show itself nor the ubiquitous advertising campaign manage to convey the brooding, self-assured, intelligent sexuality that infuses the blog and tie-in book with a compelling and challenging energy.
On billboards and bus-stops across the country, an eight feet-high Piper in, alternately, a rubber mini-dress or a matching thong and push-up bra, is draped across the frame, lazy as a Playboy-bunny: the apotheosis of unchallenging, accommodating sexuality. The caption declares: ’My body is a big deal.’ What is that even supposed to mean? Clearly, that Belle’s body is important because it is on sale. Hardly a mantra to inspire the teenage girls who will be watching this show in their droves and thinking, ’I could do that’.
Both Piper and the show’s producers are adamant that they are not trying to represent an industry – merely ’telling one woman’s story.’ I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t cut it: as any fule kno, a show with a publicity campaign of this magnitude, with prostitution as its main theme and a sex worker as its eponymous central character, does represent the sex industry – period – whether or not its producers acknowledge the fact.
Significant points of contention from the book have also been smoothed over for television, such as the fact that Belle has a boyfriend who’s privy to her secrets. In Secret Diary of a Call Girl there is an ex who has no idea of her profession – implying that the idea of a sex worker with a fucntional romantic partnership would be just too unorthodox for the popular imagination to handle.
Similarly, the opening plot-arc of The Secret Diary of A Call Girl could hardly be more disheartening. Belle falls for a client, good grief! While it is conceivable that ITV may indeed have the balls to opt out of the inevitable, popularist, cliched Cinderella-story that follows, the seeds of anticipation have already been sown for the handsome prince (in the guise of a city banker paying for sex) rescuing the girl with the mysterious and sinful double life from her wicked ways.
The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is, in fact, uncomplicatedly irresponsible. Producers and commentators who make claims for it as cutting-edge have clearly never watched such genuinely groundbreaking works of cinema as Narizzano’s Georgy Girl (1966) or Lucas Moodysson’s harrowing Lilya 4 Ever (2002). Belle De Jour is a blogger and, ultimately, an autobiographer: she is not writing popular entertainment. ITV2 is, and it does not have the luxury of evading the responsibility that comes with its programming decisions.
The show is over-hyped, plays into worn-out misogynist cliches and unequivocally glamourises and misrepresents the dangerous world of prostitution. That it is ’one girl’s story’ will probably have little effect on the many vulnerable young women – young women without Belle’s maturity, university education, support network, self-posession and financial safety net – who will, however briefly, watch the show and consider prostitution as a viable career prospect.
In the two years since I wrote those words, ITV has capitalised with increasingly drooling excitement on hamming up its version of Belle De Jour as an uncomplicated stereotype - something the real Dr Brooke Magnanti manifestly is not. Tanya Gold is wrong to suggest that Magnanti herself is irresponsible. She has every right to discuss her often problematic and complex experiences as a woman in this society, whatever her life choices.
Don't blame Dr Magnanti, Tanya. Blame the patriarchal media machine which has delighted in erasing her experiences, denying her ownership of her own sexuality and portraying her as a bland, grinning salesperson rather than a real, complicated human being with sexual agency and emotional turmoil eking out her own niche in the modern economy. Blame a society which loves the idea of a happy hooker, but hates the notion of prostitutes as real people with emotions, agency, scruples, connections and relationships.
That the Belle De Jour industry glamorises and misrepresents prostitution is obvious. Very few sex workers are blessed with the options, education, support network,health, security and financial backing that the eponymous blogger enjoyed. In fact, the Belle De Jour industry is one of the first topics I ever had an article published about, back in 2007. In the piece, I argued that the corporate media machine has done a great disservice to the woman we now know to be Dr Brooke Magnanti:
Every feature that lifted Belle De Jour’s writing from the merely sordid and sensational has been edited out of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Neither the show itself nor the ubiquitous advertising campaign manage to convey the brooding, self-assured, intelligent sexuality that infuses the blog and tie-in book with a compelling and challenging energy.
On billboards and bus-stops across the country, an eight feet-high Piper in, alternately, a rubber mini-dress or a matching thong and push-up bra, is draped across the frame, lazy as a Playboy-bunny: the apotheosis of unchallenging, accommodating sexuality. The caption declares: ’My body is a big deal.’ What is that even supposed to mean? Clearly, that Belle’s body is important because it is on sale. Hardly a mantra to inspire the teenage girls who will be watching this show in their droves and thinking, ’I could do that’.
Both Piper and the show’s producers are adamant that they are not trying to represent an industry – merely ’telling one woman’s story.’ I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t cut it: as any fule kno, a show with a publicity campaign of this magnitude, with prostitution as its main theme and a sex worker as its eponymous central character, does represent the sex industry – period – whether or not its producers acknowledge the fact.
Significant points of contention from the book have also been smoothed over for television, such as the fact that Belle has a boyfriend who’s privy to her secrets. In Secret Diary of a Call Girl there is an ex who has no idea of her profession – implying that the idea of a sex worker with a fucntional romantic partnership would be just too unorthodox for the popular imagination to handle.
Similarly, the opening plot-arc of The Secret Diary of A Call Girl could hardly be more disheartening. Belle falls for a client, good grief! While it is conceivable that ITV may indeed have the balls to opt out of the inevitable, popularist, cliched Cinderella-story that follows, the seeds of anticipation have already been sown for the handsome prince (in the guise of a city banker paying for sex) rescuing the girl with the mysterious and sinful double life from her wicked ways.
The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is, in fact, uncomplicatedly irresponsible. Producers and commentators who make claims for it as cutting-edge have clearly never watched such genuinely groundbreaking works of cinema as Narizzano’s Georgy Girl (1966) or Lucas Moodysson’s harrowing Lilya 4 Ever (2002). Belle De Jour is a blogger and, ultimately, an autobiographer: she is not writing popular entertainment. ITV2 is, and it does not have the luxury of evading the responsibility that comes with its programming decisions.
The show is over-hyped, plays into worn-out misogynist cliches and unequivocally glamourises and misrepresents the dangerous world of prostitution. That it is ’one girl’s story’ will probably have little effect on the many vulnerable young women – young women without Belle’s maturity, university education, support network, self-posession and financial safety net – who will, however briefly, watch the show and consider prostitution as a viable career prospect.
In the two years since I wrote those words, ITV has capitalised with increasingly drooling excitement on hamming up its version of Belle De Jour as an uncomplicated stereotype - something the real Dr Brooke Magnanti manifestly is not. Tanya Gold is wrong to suggest that Magnanti herself is irresponsible. She has every right to discuss her often problematic and complex experiences as a woman in this society, whatever her life choices.
Don't blame Dr Magnanti, Tanya. Blame the patriarchal media machine which has delighted in erasing her experiences, denying her ownership of her own sexuality and portraying her as a bland, grinning salesperson rather than a real, complicated human being with sexual agency and emotional turmoil eking out her own niche in the modern economy. Blame a society which loves the idea of a happy hooker, but hates the notion of prostitutes as real people with emotions, agency, scruples, connections and relationships.
