Beauty and the Beast
Posted Under: Blogging,Employment,Feminism,Gender Politics,Literature,Media
This week the identity of one of the internet’s most infamous bloggers was revealed. Belle de Jour, who wrote anonymously about her life as a highly paid call girl turned out to be Dr Brook Magnanti, 34, a research scientist in Bristol. Cue moral outrage and titillation – the favourite combination of the right-wing press.
“By turning out to exist, she has acted extremely irresponsibly – and I think it’s time she had a good hard think about what she’s done.” – Sam Leith, Evening Standard.
However, as the column inches expand one important fact seems to be skirted over again and again: Dr Magnanti, a specialist in ‘environmental toxin exposure and child health’, turned to being a call girl as a PHD student when she couldn’t pay the rent.
Dr Magnanti may be pragmatic and matter-of-fact about her choice – which is a red rag to the bull of the tabloids who want contrition and renting of clothes (and if they can get a picture of that, so much the better) – but it can’t have been an easy choice. For all her claims that it ‘ain’t no thing’, the fact that she worked as a call girl for only one year (2003-2004) and never went back speaks volumes. I think it’s fair to guess that the experience of fictionalising her experiences (which continued far longer) was probably far more enjoyable than the experience of prostitution itself.
The first question I found myself asking was this: how can it be that a research scientist – and someone researching an extremely valuable and worthy subject at that – had to turn to prostitution to survive? Where are the grants, the support, the thanks of a grateful society? Just how little do we value science in this country?
Dr Magnanti’s employers, Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, have issued a statement of tacit support: “This aspect of Dr Magnanti’s past is not relevant to her current role as a research scientist.” In some ways, it is though. It is doubtful from what we know that Dr Magnanti would have been able to become a successful research scientist (or, I grant you a successful fiction writer) without earning £300 the hard way on a nightly basis. How dedicated was this woman to science that she put herself through that level of hardship?
There’s an extremely successful HBO series called “Hung” that’s just started airing on More 4. The story is similar – high school teacher can’t make enough money to survive so turns to prostitution (the situation is supposed to be funny because – guess what? He’s a guy!). It’s an age old story and if you think it’s unusual you would be mistaken. How many actresses, models and presenters get their breaks via the casting couch? It’s the thin end of the same wedge. We just don’t expect it of ‘respectable’ professionals.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about the hidden misery of being unemployed and I have been inundated with comments and emails from people in truly terrible circumstances and desperate to talk about it. I wonder how many of them in their darkest days toyed with the idea of turning to the sex industry for work? I know I have. I wouldn’t do it – much in the way that I wouldn’t self harm, I have an inbuilt damage limitation compass called ‘fear’ which stops me – but there are many who eventually do cross that line out of desperation and terrible necessity.
The tabloid response to the unmasking of ‘Belle’ has been nothing short of a verbal stoning. One of the most interesting responses for me was this:
“For me, the worst aspect of this whole sorry story is that such an intelligent woman, with all the privileges of a good background and education, should make such a low-down, straightforwardly bad choice.” – Bel Mooney, The Daily Mail
Gosh, what is it about the respectable middle classes that makes them assume that it is impossible to be well educated and make really bad and dangerous choices (obviously they only expect it from the working classes?)? This patronising myopic attitude is almost as prevalent as the idea that if you are smart and well educated you will never be unemployed or poor. I know both to be false from personal experience. In fact, in my view, you are almost more likely to make bad choices in your life when you are impoverished, well educated and ambitious. Because you have both the ‘luxury’ of choice, an awareness of options that you might not have had, and an immense pressure to succeed (thanks to the expectations of people like Bel Mooney).
In the words of Dr Magnanti: “People lead complicated lives. I’m not the only person walking around who’s an ex-call-girl, believe me. And you can’t say I’m not real, and that my experience isn’t real, because here I am.”
Dr Magnanti is neither a feminist icon nor the new Eve but a flawed individual who could easily have been me or many of the other women I know. And she wrote about it exceptionally well.
Reader Comments
Got to say the idea that because she is very clever it is ESPECIALLY outrageous that she should have been pushed to work as a sex worker, leaves me rather cold. Guess that’s because im a socialist rather than a meritocrat. Certainly protecting people from nfortunate social and economic arrangements should not as you seem to suggest be a mmatter of our gratitude towards them.
And how much desperation on her part does this really indicate? I mean sure sex work may not be pleasant but neither is cleaning toilets for 40 hours a week, yet people still find themselves doing it.
Also you haven’t elaborated at all on what is uniquely degrading about this relative to other forms of work. If I was down on my luck and someone offered me a 100 quid for the chance to take me from behind, then assuming it was safe, I might well consider it.
I think Liz probably assumed, quite reasonably, that one doesn’t have to explain why many people find prostitution uniquely degrading. Sure, cleaning toilets is also rather degrading, but most people don’t apply a Marxist analysis to their working lives. The proletariat may have nothing to sell but their labour, but, whether we like it or not, that’s become an accepted norm. What has not become accepted is that people who cannot sell their labour might choose to sell their bodies. We may well want to challenge the strict demaraction of the two, but we can’t ignore the prevalent view that prostituting certain parts of one’s body is morally worse than prostituting your hands or your mind or any thing else you need to sell for a tiny wage packet in an unfulfilling job.
In related news, this made me laugh from Stewart Home.
http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/?p=3051
‘Yes, the bozos who claimed I was Belle de Jour were completely deluded’.
There’s a problem with the uniquely degrading/not uniquely degrading argument that exposes anti-sex worker feminists (and Daily Mail columnists, strange they’re so similar…). Some sex workers may find their work hugely degrading, and want to quit. Some might not find it degrading at all, and want to quit. Some might find it degrading but less so than other work, and not want to quit. Some might actively enjoy it and not want to quit. Etc etc.
There is no universal female (and they’re always talking about female sex workers, not male) experience, and those feminists who claim there is have an agenda; namely “this is my definition of woman, if you don’t fit it you’re a bad girl/anti-feminist/dupe of the patriarchy”. Conversely, no one on the pro-sex worker rights side has ever claimed a universal experience of sex work, or that it is never harmful to anyone, or dangerous to anyone.
The important question in reading media commentary on sex work is cutting to the core of what they’re advocating. Hand-wringing about the conditions of street sex workers, the drugs, the violence, the pimps is almost never accompanied with any suggestion of what to do about it *that would actually make the women involved safer*. Instead you sometimes get utopian babbling about banning, or eradicating by other means, the sex industry – where this is not mentioned, it’s often implied.
All this Belle de Jour furore is going on in the context of the massive attack on sex worker rights and safety that is the Policing and Crime Bill – http://www.xtalkproject.net/?p=458 – although sex worker rights advocates and activists seem to have got somewhere in the feminist movement arguing for decriminalisation, the bollocks all over the Mail, Times, Guardian etc over Belle de Jour makes me suspect we’ve a long way to go
“Hand-wringing about the conditions of street sex workers, the drugs, the violence, the pimps is almost never accompanied with any suggestion of what to do about it that would actually make the women involved safer.”
- The obvious answer for people who aren’t politicians or the vanguard of morality in the media, would be legalisation, unionisation and regulation.