The Real Belle de Jour

There's something odd about the controversy surrounding Belle de Jour. Ordinarily, a woman who's had sex with a lot of men tries to deny it, and people attack her by calling her a whore. In this case, the lady is loudly insisting that she's a whore, and people attack her by insisting that she isn't. And the truly fascinating part of this is that the prudes who are attacking her don't think she deserves to be a whore. True whores suffer for their whoredom, which serves as proof of their virtue. Since Belle hasn't suffered, she's not virtuous enough to be a whore. Either she's an outright fraud, or a whore manqué.

It's fairly common for celebrities to have their identities defined for them by members of the public. Us and People magazines and the tabloids make their money by telling their readers who the subjects of their articles are. They spin fantasies that their readers buy because they are based on a few facts and involve real people.

Belle gets the same treatment from a different class of professionals. The people who are spinning tabloid fantasies about her don't work for tabloids. They are respected feminists and journalists who work for top rank newspapers. And the fantasies that they've created don't merely tell us who she is, but whether or not she actually exists. As Ermine Saner summarized it in The Guardian,

There was much speculation that she had been created by a writer or a collection of writers; that she didn't genuinely sell sex; that she wasn't even female. Her experiences, said some people, including sex workers, didn't ring true.

Since Belle has succeeded in keeping her real name hidden, no one can talk to people she's known or worked with and confirm her stories. The only evidence is what Belle has chosen to say about herself. So let's look at that briefly.

First of all, while Belle may have drawn a lot of attention, she's not the first upmarket escort to write about her experiences. And the other escorts who have written about it have used their names and exposed themselves publicly, making it possible for anyone who has the means and the will to do some sleuthing and look for evidence of fraud. So far, there's no evidence that their stories are fiction. Furthermore, other escorts tell a similar story; they did it for the money and it was a job. Sometimes they enjoyed it and sometimes they didn't, but they weren't traumatized or seriously abused. And from personal conversations, I can say that prostitutes who don't want to publish their stories or expose themselves publicly say similar things. This is all anecdotal evidence, and it doesn't tell us what proportion of prostitutes feel that their work is just another form of paid labor, but it does tell us that there are prostitutes who feel this way.

It's this general story, sex work as a job, that offends so many people. Nina Hartley has experienced the same thing over the course of her career in porn. No one can deny that she exists or that she made porn; the evidence exists in too many videos. But while the facts are undeniable, her detractors deny her experience of those facts. They deny that a woman can experience sex work as anything other than degrading, and therefore Hartley's description of her experiences is inauthentic. If Hartley had published her experiences anonymously, her feminist opponents would have claimed that she was an invention. They would have claimed that no woman could have written Hartley's story and she could only be the product of a male imagination.

So while Belle remains anonymous, and her story remains uncomfirmable, the story itself matches stories that can be confirmed. The general outline of her story isn't inherently unbelievable or unrealistic.

In addition to attacks on the general story, Belle's detractors claim that the details are unrealistic. The Guardian brought in an ex-madame to say that Belle's clients weren't the sort of men that the madame had seen when she was in the business. The ex-madame had apparently specialized in lonely older men, which was clearly not the demographic that Belle appealed to. Belle's niche seems to have been younger men in search of a good time, as opposed to older men seeking companionship. Younger men are known to hire prostitutes, so while the details of Belle's clients may not have matched the ex-madame's experience, they do match what is known about one segment of prostitutes' clientele.

One columnist at The Guardian went out and found a prostitute whose experiences were very different from Belle's, and used this as evidence that Belle was lying. The basic line of argument was "my prostitute trumps your prostitute." As I've pointed out, there are other published accounts of prostitution that back up Belle's general story, just as there are other accounts that paint a picture different from Belle's. One story doesn't trump or cancel out the other. Different people have different experiences.

There are people who take the tabloid approach to Belle. They accept the facts as she presents them, but try to define her identity by giving the facts their own spin. For example, Belle likes mild BDSM. It's not particularly harmful, or dangerous, and it provides some extra stimulation that some people get off on. For some people, this is Belle's dark side. That's a value judgment. Everyone's entitled to their value judgments, and their entitled to publish them, but doing so establishes their own identity, not the identity of the person being judged. Calling Belle's kinks dark tells us that someone is frightened by them, but it doesn't give us any negative information about the kinks themselves. It doesn't tell us that they cause physical harm, or psychological trauma, or early senility, or an increase in the crime rate. It does tell us how some people perceive sexual practices different from their own. Attributing this perceived darkness to Belle is a form of fantasizing.

And some people criticize Belle's writings and associated TV show for glamorizing prostitution. The glamorization consists of not depicting the dangerous lives of streetwalkers and similar prostitutes, and of not telling about escorts who got into escorting, discovered it wasn't what they wanted to do, and want to get out. The situation would be similar if Karl Lagerfield wrote his memoirs of his career in the fashion business and was criticized for not devoting the book to the plight of ill paid and ill treated Guatemalan seamstresses. It's true that there are clothing factories where workers receive very poor, even abusive treatment. It's also true that some people have tried to break into high end fashion design and have failed, emerging bankrupt and shaken by the experience. However, if I bought a book with the expectation of reading about Lagerfield, I would be disappointed if it turned out to be about everyone else. The memoirs of successful people do tend to glamorize their professions by leaving out the stories of people who failed, but that's the nature of autobiography; it isn't about other people.

I don't know anything about Belle de Jour that everyone one else doesn't know. In spite of the title of this post, I don't claim to know who the real Belle de Jour is. And I'm willing to admit that I'm probably just as gullible as the London Times, who hired a supposed expert in writing style to analyze Belle's writing and published the results on the front page. (The expert's claim that the writer Sarah Champion was Belle turned out to be false.) I could be taken in by someone who researched prostitution and wrote a fictional account of her life as a prostitute. The point is not that my knowledge or intellect are superior to the people who cast doubt on Belle's story. The point is that we have no evidence that she isn't who she says she is, or that she didn't do what she said she did. A sustained attack made without evidence doesn't tell us anything about the person being attacked; we need evidence for that. But an unsupported attack is evidence that tells us something about the people making the attack.