An escort agency manager identified only as James told the London Times's Helen Croydon that the TV version of Belle's story made some young women proud to be prostitutes. He says,

The TV series did glamorise it [...] Whether that is good or bad I won't say but I noticed that after it was shown, our younger girls - the ones aged 18 to 21 - started to think that what they did was cool. I call it the ‘Belle de Jour phenomenon'. They used to want to hide it but recently I hear they have come clean to friends - boyfriends, even. Not only has it become acceptable to them but some even aspire to it.

So will the revelation that Belle de Jour is Brooke Magnanti — educated, currently with a loving partner, and apparently with no regrets — convince more young women that prostitution can be cool and even risk-free? Magnanti's (alleged) ex, who has begun an extremely long-winded blog about her, has this rather bizarre answer:

Anyone who reads it and decides to take up prostitution because of it has much deeper issues. Her blog and books were merely the litmus paper that indicated/highlighted it, not the cause.

For example, having watched Twilight you don't just then fall for the next moody, pale adolescent you see. He might be a ravishingly intriguing vampire who can unlock the door to an exciting world, allowing you to escape your rather mundane one. However he might also just be quiet because he has nothing to say and pale because the world he will show you hidden in his bedroom is the Online Gaming forum he inhabits everyday when he should be out in the sun kite surfing every now and again as well. He will be fat, spotty and myopic by 30, not eternally youthful with good cheek bones. There is nothing wrong with the former, but don't be surprised and berate him for it when it happens.

Twilight references aside, the Daily Mail offers a cautionary tale for any young woman who might want to follow in Magnanti's footsteps. The lead is classic Daily Mail — "This week the anonymous sex blogger Belle de Jour revealed her true identity as a scientist and claimed she enjoyed her work as a prostitute. But can any woman justify glamorising prostitution?" — but Christina Errington's story is disturbing. She writes about having unprotected sex with older men as a university student, first because she needed the money and later as a form of retaliation against her overprotective and uncommunicative parents. Two men hit her, and she says "it took me several years of being in a trusting and loving relationship [...] before I could make love without stirring up unpleasant recollections of my life on the streets." She concludes her piece thus:

It is easy to say, as Brooke Magnanti did this week, that selling your body for money doesn't hurt anyone. But it does, and the damage that is caused to a woman's self-respect is sometimes irreparable.

It's clear that prostitution can carry psychological as well as physical risks, whether or not a prostitute is educated and middle-class. But it's somewhat unfortunate that Errington implies she deserved to lose her self-respect because she did sex work. Croydon writes that "those entering this sort of 'work' must have specific non-emotive character traits to be able to handle the psychological strain," and it's obvious that Errington, who took up prostitution in response to poor family relationships, felt this strain keenly. But what "non-emotive traits" would someone need in order not to feel it? Was Magnanti's comfort with her profession the result of her personality — which her ex describes with the words, "she wiped her nose on her sleeve and ate peas off her knife whilst discussing advanced astronomy etc at the dinner table" — or simply of good luck? It's hard to know, perhaps because both Errington's story — the fallen woman scarred by her days of selling herself — and Magnanti's — what Croydon calls the "happy hooker" — are such popular media narratives. What's missing from the public conversation about prostitution — and what continues to be missing despite Magnanti's confession — are nuanced portrayals of both the attractions and risks of sex work. These exist — Michelle Tea's Rent Girl is one. But they get less attention than stories that fit into established prostitution cliches, which, despite her new candor about her identity, Belle de Jour's still does.

Image via Daily Mail.

Happy Hookers: The Other Belles De Jour [TimesOnline]
I Was A Student Call Girl Like Belle De Jour - And The Shame Will Never Leave Me [Daily Mail]
Untitled Post [Brookes Owen]
Belle De Jour's Father: I'm Broken-Hearted After Discovering Her Past [Telegraph]

Belle de Jour revealed herself as scientist Brooke Magnanti in an interview yesterday with India Knight of the Times of London. She says she took up prostitution as a way to make quick money while finishing her Ph.D, and that she had begun to feel "it was time" to acknowledge that period in her life openly, not just in her anonymous books and blog entries. Knight's piece also references "an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth lurking in the background," but Helen Pidd of the Guardian says the real impetus was a forthcoming exposé in — of course — the Daily Mail. Pidd also writes that some are angry at Magnanti for "glamorising and normalising" prostitution.

Magnanti says she charged £300 an hour (her cut was £200, or about $335), and was "very lucky" never to have had any problems with her clients. But Pidd also quotes Finn Mackay of the Feminist Coalition Against Prostitution, who fires back:

To come out saying, 'It's so wonderful' is a slap in the face to the great majority of women who have had horrendous experiences in the sex industry. I'm glad to hear that she hasn't been burned, beaten, buggered, raped and spat on, but she shouldn't sell down the river those whose experiences are different from hers by glamorising and normalising sex work.

On the other side, public health professor Helen Ward says,

Belle de Jour's case is not the norm, but it's not that unusual either. Policy makers tend to portray sex workers as either drug-addicted young women [...] or as trafficked migrant women who have no control over their lives. But I've been working with sex workers for over 20 years as a researcher and as a doctor, and I know that there is a wide range of people involved in sex work.

This last statement is key. Not all prostitutes are graduate students pulling down hundreds of dollars an hour for safe sexual encounters, nor are they all streetwalkers exchanging blowjobs for drugs. What separates Magnanti from women Mackay mentions may be simply the presence of other options. Magnanti says she chose sex work over waitressing or borrowing from friends and family. She also worked as a computer programmer at one point but found prostitution "so much more enjoyable." Magnanti had both a support system she chose not to utilize and other marketable skills — sex work, for her, was freely chosen as the most attractive of a number of possibilities.

For many prostitutes, that's not the case. The Chicago street prostitutes Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner spoke to for Superfreakonomics often don't have education or monied friends to fall back on, and for them prostitution may be more necessary than "enjoyable." As Levitt and Dubner point out, their experience with sex work is also very different — they make less money than Magnanti, and they face greater risks. Levitt and Dubner don't really address the fact that prostitution is just one of the many areas where being middle class and white gives you a significant leg up. But Magnanti is now in a position to address this.

Now that she's out in the open, Magnanti could point out that her writing doesn't "glamorize" prostitution — it merely reveals that for some women, sex work can have big payoffs and manageable risks. For others, it can be exploitative and dangerous. Women (and men, and children) around the world need protection from forced prostitution, no one should have to view sex work as the only option, and prostitutes living in poverty deserve protections (like legalization of their activities) that might not necessarily be popular with high-end prostitutes who rely on illegality for high prices. The truth is that prostitution as a whole is neither glamorous nor dangerous. Instead, it's as complex as the sexual urges prostitutes satisfy. Magnanti is well-placed to examine its complexities — let's hope she does so.

Belle De Jour Drops Her Anonymity [BBC]
Belle De Jour Revealed At Last: Scientist Who Penned Diary Of A London Call Girl Outs Herself To Foil Daily Mail [Guardian]
Now I'm Not Anonymous... [Belle de Jour]
Sexblogger's Tale: How My Life Changed Forever [Guardian]
I'm Belle De Jour [TimesOnline]
Belle De Jour Says Her Mother Supports Her [Telegraph]

Why is it that when the newest prostitute on the block, or should I say blog, comes along, they're always at such pains to tell us how fabulous it is to have sex with men for cash, and how they aren't really prostitutes, they're high class call girls , or international escorts, like Jet Set Lara, who also likes to think of herself as a courtesan, she tells Marie Claire this month.

And they've always got Ph.D's in biophysics, and they're all trained in the Japanese tea ceremony and speak five languages and they're all so utterly detached and just a little world-weary and even though they screw men for money, they're somehow, well, more interesting and better people than you, you commonplace pathetic little drab.

Lara charges $10,000 a day for a fuck, but hey, she's spending $7k a year on underwear, and a girl's gotta make a living.

"The men I meet l like expensive toys - I suppose I fall into that category, so spending $25,000 on a tryst with me doesn't seem like that much to me. I've forged some amazing friendships through this business......I correspond with authors, political journalists and even a former Bush aide, all of whom see me as their muse."

A muse! Not a prostitute! We're sure there are truckstop whores in Kenya who say exactly the same thing about all the taxi drivers and truckers they "correspond" with for $3 a go in their roadside shacks.

It's a grand old life, this fucking people for money thing.