Belle Du Jour - Diary of a London call girl

http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

I don't know if this is because of my inherant distrust of blogs, or my inherant distrust of people with "alternative sexual lifestyles" (and I ain't talking about homosexuality before you ask).

Not hairy enough.

I dunno. It could easily be real. Maybe she's a nympho.

I don't know, but even on a very cursory reading, this sounds like a fantasy (college girl who likes reading Eugenides and Rick Moody, sounds like a caption for a soft porn shoot) with too many unlikely episodes ("my hand goes where no hand has gone before. Namely up a woman who is on the phone to her boyfriend in Italy." - bad porn writing alert!)

Plus, that line about getting her London geography wrong, as if she's trying not to get caught out...

!!!!!!!!!!

!!

-- suzy

Hey lady, don't make me break out the Minnesota jokes.

[This statement was issued on behalf of all short red-headed writers from Wolverhampton]

"I was pleased to see today that 'Belle de Jour' ,the internet's most talked-about web diary, has a book deal. According to Publishers Marketplace, 'Belle' the London call girl, who may or may not be a literary name masquerading as a high-class hooker, has inked a deal with Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Orion to turn her anonymous tales of love-for-money into a manuscript due for delivery in August. The film rights are also being frantically contested. Is it worth the hype? Well, yes actually. I've been hooked since it picked up a Guardian 'blogging' prize late last year. If you liked Bridget Jones, you'll like this - and 'Belle' also has the advantage of being better written."

Anna, C's red hair came from the same place as her clothes: Yamyam's House of Velvet, Tarot and Patchouli. Yours is genetic. There is no comparison.

(have met members of the family - younger sibs - back when CM was a neighbour. Let's just say Peter Jackson might well have been inspired by them)

Underneath that, there's other fantasies I reckon - the 'i-wish-i-could-find-a-callgirl-who-was-this-clver-and-then-it-wouldn't-be-so-grubby' and 'she's-sp-clever-and-could-do-something-else-so-perhaps-maybe-deep-down-women-who-are-callgrils-really-love-shagging'.

Similarly with the call girl, actually. She might not be named but she is supposed to be a prostitute, and if she isn't, then I don't know how much of an insight into the world she describes I am gaining. It wouldn't automatically make it worthless - it would just change it. Perhaps this is very rockist of me.

x-post

Back in the days when I thought this might actually be real, I remember thinking "ha ha, isn't she pretentious? Some of this writing is cobblers but its all very entertaining". Now I just find myself thinking "ah, this is cobblers".

Anyone remember Richard Geefe from The Observer a few years back?

This is a terrible image - it makes me think of superfrantic nodding.

If it's real, it's exploitative and disgusting, if it's contrived, well, bloody hell, it makes me believe in the Class War. A nice writer "telling it like it is" about the sex trade, and other worlds they have no experience of, from the safety of the middle class.

But what it ultimately boils down to is yet another excuse or justification for the sex trade, another lie we've been sold under the banner of "sexuality equals female empowerment" selling us prostitution as some kind of journey of self discovery, making men (and women) feel better about it, rather than facing the nasty reality of pimps, organised crime, exploitation, drugs and disease.

No need to worry about prostituion - the girls LOVE it, don't they? Nice try. As erotic as a midnight jog round Kings Cross.

depends on the outfit

I was pretty convinced that I knew who Belle de Jour was ... I'm still moderately sure.

I also know Caitlin Moran and I'm reasonably sure that its not her.

The latest is that it's journalist Lisa Hilton, above, who writes historical non-fiction about courtesans and is a graduate of New College, Oxford. She also came second in the Vogue writing contest in 1999. Gossip mongs say she 'worked' in hostess bars for ages too.

Hahaha

(...Doomie?)

*though I'm sure she'll say she was just caovering for her ;)

Also, when I said this wasn't Sarah's style, that really means she's never discussed these topics with me and she's not the type that mentions designer shoes in her work anyway. I can't imagine her doing this unless she was trying to prove a larger point, as she was once very annoyed at the class barriers she faced in publishing as a working-class Northerner. BTW the article you're citing was cobbled from a Times piece.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1177196,00.html

basic message of madame cyn's piece - it's fake, it's an author, probably a man. Despite ms p's past history of outrageous self-mythologising, I suspect she is correct. The whole bit in the 2nd last paragraph - "in my day we did it properly" etc, you've heard it a 10000 times before from her, but it still makes me laugh, I'm afraid. I wonder if "belle" is martin amis haha.

if it had come out as something made up from the start then presumably the level of interest would be much lower. its likely there wouldnt have even been a thread on it, in such a case

That isn't to say that these diaries are the gospel truth. The diarist will be hiding her tracks like mad, so I assume stuff like her hair colour, origins, background, location etc. will be false trails. She mentions no public events that I can see (surely a current diarist would be commenting on things like the Madrid bombing - there's a tip for you, Belle)) so I have a feeling that the diaries - or at least the punter action parts - are set in the past. Maybe she did this a few years ago. That would make her much safer from present exposure and explain why she can be bothered with writing a book.)

I think she is quite a good writer, and I'm glad this thread has pointed her out to me, because I will go on reading. I don't like the wishy washy bits about shoes, handbags, and pants; but I find this blog to be the only readable sex blog I've ever come across.

DV on the money, surely.

not been updated for a bit - it's because it likes to write about things from the past so that its trails can be hidden

But I suppose the media interest in it is that they think there's a story there. And the story wouldn't be "writer makes up blog" but "educated young woman's parents find out she's a call girl", with all the follow-up stories that might produce. I think that's sad, really. Exposées are onkly justified when the public interest is at stake. (For me the Clinton story, for example, wasn't so much that he was having an affair as that he was having it in the president's office and therefore abusing his position. Or should I say, having his position abused.)

And whether people like Sven Goran Erickson and Judith Chalmers have affairs or not is a matter of little more than prurient interest, surely.

(My English neighbours in Mpls are descendants of John Gay who wrote the BE. Apparently scandal occured mid C19 causing family to change name to Wild. Go fig)

(oops!! sorry mark!)

"Let's change the name to something like Wild, that'll NEVER be caught up in a scandal!"

"Snogging furiously"?

(Bad writing and the reason she can't keep a man - all in one sentence.)

She has contacted me because she’s had enough of being anonymous. There is also an ex-boyfriend with a big mouth lurking in the background; outing herself while she still has a measure of control over how it happens seems the sensible option. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917495.ece

Brave - she'll get a tax demand from the Inland Revenue, based on her career earnings in the 'informal economy'.

Snogging furiously.

....the quality of Belle’s prose is high....

Uh? I thought it was pretty bad, myself!

Phew, so that's all over then. I've known BDJ's real identity for nearly four years (and was duly tipped off in advance about today's Sunday Times piece), and speaking as a congenital blabbermouth, it has been AGONY keeping quiet about it!

if you see her, can you tell her to stop hurting britain?

xp are you one of the alleged six people mentioned by India Knight or is she talking bollocks?

Congratulations to Brooke Magnanti for bravely outing herself several years after everyone stopped giving a shit.

DC OTM ^^^^^^

Big fucking whoop. This is "can't even be arsed typing careometer.jpg"-level tedium.

from the BDJ blog today:

Anonymity had a purpose then – it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on. But for me, it became important to acknowledge that aspect of my life and my personality to the world at large.

I am a woman. I lived in London. I was a call girl.

So fucking what? It's depressing that this was sufficiently titillating enough for the world at large (or rather men-at-large) to inspire a best selling book, two TV series and a third on the way, and a new 'BDJ Guide to Men' book. I'm disappointed by my own gender, who let themselves be so willingly exploited by so bland a story.

And the quality of the writing - (again, from todays blog entry)

....Belle will always be a part of me. She doesn't belong in a little box, but as a fully acknowledged side of a real person. The non-Belle part of my life isn't the only ‘real’ bit, it’s ALL real. Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.

Cliched crap.

xpost: To the best of my knowledge, there were another five, possibly six people who had worked out who she was, but who weren't in direct contact with her. (I didn't even tell her that I knew, as I couldn't see any positive benefit.) Anyhow, it sounds like the Mail were about to dish the dirt on her anyway, so she seized the initiative and pre-empted the story on her own terms. Yes, it's a bizarre set of news values that dictates that this is even a story, let alone lead item on Page 1 of the newspaper, but that's in part due to the mad guessing game that took place in the first half of 2004.

i had no idea the blog was still going!

thought the interview was really interesting and the sour dismissiveness here unnecessary.

mike, how did you work out her identity? presumably you can say now...

also, this has bugged me forever. i'm SURE it should be "belle du jour", as in the title of this thread, but both blogger and the film she took her name from are "belle de jour". am i misremembering my french grammar or have they got it wrong?

Yeah, that's bugged me forever! It should be the same as 'soupe du jour', only I'm not 100% sure that's right either.

Also, I'd be very surprised if men were her whole, or even her main, readership.

^^yeah i agree, i think i mentally filed it as a more risqué bridget jones aimed at a similar audience

i haven't actually read it for, like, 5 years but the tone was down-to-earth and humorous rather than titillating, wasn't it?

“Look, of course trafficking occurs. It’s awful. Awful. Desperate. But you don’t have a go at prostitutes — you have a go at border controls. You do something on the policing front. I thought his remarks were so reductive and also slightly patriarchal, and I was upset at being used as a counter-argument — ‘Belle de Jour says this, but she is of course fake.’

“The thing is that people are complex. 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.

“Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn’t. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect. The people at the agency looked after us appropriately and instructed us appropriately and weren’t going to put us in harm’s way if they could possibly avoid it.”

She is, she says, “entitled to speak about it, or write about it, as I lived it”.

This isn't good enough. Her sheer evasiveness of India Knight's concerns over the image of prostitution she's helped perpetuate is somehow even worse given that she actually used to be a call girl. I'm a little disappointed Knight didn't push her harder on this issue.

India Knight is appalling though. Check out this atrocity on the death of the dinner party from last week's paper.

you're ascribing an agenda to b.de jour that i'm not sure exists matt - hasn't she repeatedly said that she's not trying to "perpetuate" any image of prostitution, just to tell her own story? and that one shouldn't generalise about the industry?

It doesn't matter whether she's "trying" to perpetuate anything, she is perpetuating it. And she's not telling her own story, it's primarily a work of fiction and any elements of her own story that are there are clearly embellished enormously.

I don't think pointing out that the blog was/is poorly-written (which I think it is), or pointing out that the fact that this is a news story at all is an indictment of news values in yer modern media is "sour dismissiveness", really.

TBF no-one here has exactly talked about news values in yer modern media here so much as suggested that the reason no-one should give a shit is that this was a thing in 2003 rather than 2009. Which doesn't strike me as the primary reason that no-one should give a shit y'know? I mean it's all a very Sunday Times type story so I can see why they jumped on it given that their readership doesn't chiefly comprise jaded ilxors, but I read the link, then went to the shop and it was on the front fucking page of the paper! Which *was* a bit woah.

she was being doorstepped for the past month by reporters who had figured it out, the times is just who she decided to finally tell, to make it all go away.. fyi

as a writer of semi-autobiographical fiction who has explicitly stated that her experiences shouldn't be taken as a reflection of the whole spectrum of prostitution, i don't see what else she's obliged to say.

it's not an indictment of any values, it was a good and interesting feature.

xps

i mean i can understand why people are jaded and it's mostly justifiable but kneejerk jadedness is so tedious, and misplaced here

I didn't think the feature was interesting (only read about 1/2 of it before ennui set in), but I think India Knight is a poor writer, I didn't like her style at all when she wrote for the Observer or the Guardian, I forget, and I haven't cared much for anything I've seen with her byline since.

I thought at least one person did mention news values! Maybe I'm projecting. I think it's a nothing story, which doesn't deserve to be in the news at all, let alone on the front page! It's one of the few things that still winds me up about "the media", this endless stream of trivia stories, pushed up into "news", for reasons which I just don't get. This is just one more such thing, it annoys me, it's not important, barely even gossip-column material really.

anonymous author of best-selling, widely-covered book dealing w/hot-button topic reveals her identity, thus opening up the possibility of talking about that topic in more detail = this is absolutely a feature worth publishing! even if it is a bit out of date. front page splash is weird but it's exactly the right thing for a weekend magazine feature. and jeez, if we limited newspapers to SERIOUS IMPORTANT ISSUES only they'd be even smaller than they're becoming.

i mean if you thought belle de jour was a good writer in the first place you might think differently?

whenever people complain about trivial fluff stories in the newspaper they often seem to think that the SERIOUS IMPORTANT APPROPRIATE topics are eg politics, even though that world (as reported) is even more trivial, superficial and meaningless.

Sorry Pash, Mike did actually mention news values - he seems to be a bit more positive towards the whole circus tho

I think that stuff which actually affects people's lives in some material way, which generally would be more politically based stories, I think? Although not politics as reported in the UK press, which I agree is often trivial and superficial - is more important, and thus more newsworthy than some stupid viral internet thing from six years ago, yes.

I would be quite happy to see less newspapers, and the newspapers that exist shrink in size. I think that one of the main problems with the UK national press is that there's too much of it. Too much space to fill, week after week.

If she was a better writer, then I might think differently about it, maybe I'd rather see her write her own story instead of having it mediated for us by India Knight, who is no better a writer than BdJ herself, possibly worse.

Issues such as these are why I haven't bought a Sunday newspaper in over a year, and rarely buy read a daily.

i mean if you thought belle de jour was a good writer in the first place you might think differently?

Yes I would, but then it would be something approaching literature as opposed to something that's basically useless fluff. I think people have every right to be sour and dismissive about it regardless of its newsworthiness*, because the writing is terrible, the politics or avoidance of the politics behind it are dubious at best, the interview is by-and-large a free pass by a previously harsh critic of BDJ and it's an internet fad that is about four years past its sell-by date.

It's not kneejerk jadedness it's entirely justified jadedness about something which is generally indefensible on any grounds other than making loads of cash for the person who wrote it.

*I think it is newsworthy, maybe not front page newsworthy but who knows what that even means any more.

(x-post)

Yeah, but Mike's part of the blogosphere, including a couple of anonymous ones who've already been outed. You need to adjust for solidarity bias.

'Girl with a One Trick Pony One Track Mind - a blog by Abby Lee (pen name of Zoe Margolis, in which the author writes in detail about her life as a sexually active young woman in London. Outed by the Sunday Tmes in 2006 ("By day she worked on Harry Potter. But by night ...")

Petite Anglais - As anonymous blogger Petite Anglaise, Catherine Sanderson chronicled her life as an English single mother in Paris - and was sacked from an accountancy firm when unmasked.

What a tired clapped out internet meme this is, he added - no doubt sourly.

if belle de jour was just a "viral internet thing" then sure, but the bestselling book(s) and successful tv adaptation would seem to indicate it has a bit more traction than that! it's a no-brainer for the arts section and while front page is a bit excessive, definitely deserves to be pulled into the news section too.

i'm not really familiar with the oeuvre of india knight but that wasn't a badly written piece.

xps

basically where you're all wrong is in seeing belle de jour as just an internet fad/internet meme.

Yeah it's not *just* an internet fad but as a phenomenon in it's own right its still one of declining interest as you can tell by one look at the TV show's viewing figures.

lex the answer to your q about "DU" vs "DE" is that it's a poetic thing - i.e. "city of night" by john rechy

that is good to know! does it apply across the board, wherever "du" might apply?

It's been a slow old Sunday, newswise, hasn't it?

"Y2K bug brings down grocery till in Staines"

lex i'm not sure but i can think of other things like that, like the Arc de Triomphe - it's not an arch of THE triumph ("oh, THAT triumph?") but of triumph in general i guess

I kind of agree with lex here, it's obviously of interest considering the popularity of the books, shows etc. Of course it's going to be covered in the news. It could've been a better written or more interesting article, certainly.

There are many known instances of well to do, educated young women paying their way thru university by being escorts for a little bit. Its not new and its not news.

Havent read the blog, mind.

Will this make more people watch the film? If so, some good.

"Y2K bug brings down grocery till in Staines"

Also in this week's Sunday Times, Makosi reveals what really happened in the Big Brother jacuzzi.

I kind of agree with lex here, it's obviously of interest considering the popularity of the books, shows etc.

Not really sure what the disagreement is. This is certainly newsworthy, though not really interested if it should have been on the front page of the Sunday Times or the Arts and Culture section.

I don't see any problem with the dismissiveness - with India Knight's unquestioning interview* , with the quality of BdJ's writing, or why the news coverage generally.

* e.g.

"I have a pathological aversion to being in debt. My mother’s family are Jewish; there’s this hoarding thing, saving, being prepared "

WTF?, as the Telegraph observed...

mike, how did you work out her identity? presumably you can say now...

I still can't really say, because it involves other people. I put a few things together, made an inspired guess, and had the guess confirmed. Then once I did know, I was able to spot all sorts of clues that were only apparent to people who knew. I've done a blog post about it. It's in the usual place.

Mike thanks to your blog post I worked out I know someone who knows her personally. Clearly this is god's punishment for me spending most of yesterday being snarky.

really interesting post mike! if you feel like saying one more thing, i want to know what the chance remark from billie piper was. presumably unintended on her part?

http://thegrandnarrative.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/beating-a-dead-horse.gif

Is there any proof that she actually was a call-girl and wasn't making it all up?

looks more like a tubby llama to me xp

xpost: Unintended, yes. And that's all you're getting, sorry!

she's quite fit

I am trying to imagine the eyebrow-raising and level of snark by my former colleagues at her current place of work.

Mike thanks to your blog post I worked out I know someone who knows her personally. Clearly this is god's punishment for me spending most of yesterday being snarky.
― Space Battle Rothko (Matt DC), Monday, 16 November 2009 10:19 (11 hours ago) Bookmark

Dr C and N. right?

Me and Belle de Jour – ‘Could it be Brooke?’ - another member of our shadowy little UK blogging cabal finally breaks rank.

saw her being interviewed by billie piper yesterday. surprisingly cheery 'chatty' type of interview (though a hard serious interview prob wouldnt work would it) and not sure i totally believed her (understandable) front. seemed a bit of an intellectual pose. she seemed quite vulnerable beneath the surface. wasnt too hard to see. i think she should have remained anon though. more interesting.

is that video up anywhere?

Billie.And.The.Real.Belle.Bare.All.2010.WS.PDTV.XviD-aAF is at most places. Was this women in a car accident or burned? She has bad scarring on her face. She also seems to have lost her American accident.

did they really bare all?

... Lost her American accent.

thanks svend, i'll be looking for that soon.

i was surprised about the scarring. i wonder what happened. and when that happened.

Angry pimp?