Hi °C | Lo °C I wonder how many men looked at the photograph of Dr Brooke Magnanti — who outed herself the other day as the real Belle de Jour, blogger horizontale — and thought to themselves, “Yeah . . . well I reckon I'd pay £300 for that”.
I know I did — and it's not because I'd pay £300 for that.
Personally, I'm so bashful about intimate contact with strangers that my ears go red when I have my hair washed at the barbers, so I reckon commercial sex might be quite tricky, quite apart from any ethical objections.
What I meant was that she didn't look as if she'd been overpriced — particularly when you discover that you could have had a fascinating conversation about neuroscience before getting down to business.
Attractive, smart and self-assured, Dr Magnanti considerably complicates matters for those who speculated that her Belle de Jour blog was actually a dangerous fantasy — either some middle-aged male's sweaty daydream about a poule du luxe or a heavily cosmeticised version of a much less attractive reality.
Had Belle de Jour turned out to have a crack habit, rather than a ruinous addiction to higher education, things would have been so much simpler for those of us (myself included) who feel uneasy about all forms of prostitution.
In one respect she is a fantasy — a living equivalent to Laurie, the law-student/call girl that Josh Lyman ends up sleeping with in the very first episode of The West Wing.
It's just that the fantasy appears to be real. Nice girls ... clever girls ... do.
This is partly the point, according to Dr Magnanti.
She said: “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.”
Rather curiously, though, her insistence that life is more complicated than our moral prejudices sometimes allow for, goes hand-in-hand with some simplifications of her own.
She is breezy about the work involved, insisting that it was “so much more enjoyable” than working as a computer programmer (although the thought occurred that cleaning drains might claim as much).
And she presents her choice as a dispassionate calculation about income and qualifications. It all sounds wonderfully, healthily straightforward.
She admits she was very lucky in only encountering one or two clients who made her feel uneasy — the acceptance of her luck doesn't really seem to affect the fact that she presents her experience as perfectly ordinary.
Then you see an odd detail in her story.
Her father, with whom she is not currently “in contact”, is described by her as “a do-gooder ... he helps women”.
Explaining how she might open the tricky conversation she has yet to have with him she jokily speculates: “Maybe . . . you know all those lovely streetwalkers that you try to help ... ?”
This is a little startling, is |it not?
An only daughter who, for unspecified reasons, isn't talking to her father adopts a profession rather pointedly connected to |his work.
And you see the photograph that Dr Magnanti has posed for the interview — seated on the edge of a bed in a silk negligee — routine work-wear for a courtesan, I suppose, but not a conventional get-up for the medical scientist she is now presenting herself as.
She doesn't make any bones about the fact that she's prepared to trade sex for money (or publicity perhaps).
But there still seems to be an odd elision here between Belle and Brooke.
And it strikes you that, however willing she was to get into the sex trade, now she is in a bit of a bind with regards to how she talks about her past.
Admit once, even to a degree, that it had been unpleasant, or demeaning, or distressing to her sense of her self and the entire structure of confident self-assertion would begin to wobble.
I suspect that it's not just lives that are complicated, but that Dr Magnanti is, too.
And that those complications, if revealed, would give a less insouciant, untroubled account of the decisions she took.
I'm curious to know, too: if it was so enjoyable and so well paid, why did she stop back in 2004?
