AUDASE

From The Sunday London Times
Belle lays bare the myth that every hooker is a victim
India Knight
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.