After six years of anonymity, Belle de Jour, the ultimate 21st-century blogger, who documented the “Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl,” has been unmasked and dragged into the light—or at least into the popping glare of flash bulbs. With her insatiable appetite for sex, her masochistic tastes, and her frequent and free-flowing discussion of “anal being the new black,” Belle’s blog caused a sensation when it first appeared in the summer of 2003. Belle de Jour made Sex and the City look like Little House on the Prairie.
[I]t “is a terrible indictment of the way that this country values academia that a woman has to turn to whoredom whilst waiting to get her viva.”
She juggled “appointments” with men, and once she was finished raced home to tap away, reporting back to a readership that tipped into the millions. “Have you slept with anyone famous?” is the banal question she was most frequently asked during pillow talk. Since outing herself this week, Belle, or rather Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a 34-year-old born and raised in Florida, with a sparkling academic career in the U.K., is now very famous indeed. Now a Bristol-based research scientist into the effects of toxins on children, she says she turned to prostitution after moving to London from Yorkshire, where her family lived, and finding herself cash-strapped as she tried to finish her Ph.D. Moral relativism, especially for female columnists on Fleet Street, has faced a tough week, presented with a woman so keen on sex she was happy to “get paid for what I would have done for free.” The supposed ultimate male fantasy, of the prostitute who loves her job, according to Belle, really can exist.
Belle was an extraordinary addition to the cast of confessional, first-person, erudite heroines of the last decade, not least Bridget Jones, the diarist in Helen Fielding’s semi-autobiographical books, and Carrie Bradshaw, the fictitious columnist. Myla knickers are to Belle what Jimmy Choos were to Carrie. There is virtually no other story that has had editors, male and female, salivating to know its nymphomaniac author’s identity. Speaking this weekend, she said it was a “perfect storm” of inclination and circumstances that had forced her to break cover: “It was time. I’ve felt so much guardedness and paranoia about remaining anonymous recently… I don’t want this massive secret over me any more.”
Like her life, swimming in her stockings and stilettos through the dark side of London (endless mini-cabs and brief stopovers in expensive hotels), the ensuing circus this week is perfectly of its time. Belle/Brooke is naturally a tweeter. “We went to the Times willingly, after the Mail had their reporters warned off my work premises by the police,” she tweeted over the weekend. Since failing to snag Belle, like a series of quivering rabbits out of hats, the Daily Mail has thus far magicked for its readers a brokenhearted ex about to serve in Afghanistan and Brooke’s father, who, it turns out, blames his own frequent use of prostitutes for giving prostitution a “human face” to his impressionable young daughter.
If ever a woman both embodied contradictory—almost schizophrenic—impulses, it is Belle. The unveiling in the Sunday Times gave us both the Madonna and the whore, the angel and the witchy woman: Hooker-Belle wrapped in black satin like a present on the cover of one section, and on another, Scientist-Brooke looking frankly quite adorable, in a kooky kind of academic way, trotting innocently through the streets, wrapped up in a jersey dress and woolly scarf.
Zoe Margolis, aka Abby Lee, author of the blog and book Girl with a One Track Mind, says she is “unsurprised” by the feeding frenzy. “They spent months attempting to out her when her first book was published, and now that her identity is known, it feels like they’re now trying to get payback by dishing even more ‘dirt’ on her.”
Toby Young, the autobiographical British journalist, has repeatedly denied that Belle’s colorful nightlife was an elaborate product of his imagination. “The media can’t resist the cat-and-mouse game of trying to identify an anonymous author or blogger,” he said. “Throw sex into the equation and you’ve got a full-fledged witch hunt on your hands. Personally, I’m quite relieved the speculation has ended. When my name was first linked with hers, my wife got the wrong end of the stick and thought Belle had named me as one of her clients.”
It was almost as though no one could believe that Belle, the happy prostitute, could be real, hence the compulsion to expose her as a fake. For historian Lisa Hilton, on whom suspicion fell because she wrote a column about erotica in literature for The Erotic Review, it was less of a laugh. She was named (wrongly) in a front-page story three years ago as Belle. It was she says, “a bit of a joke for a while, but when it went on and on it was boring and it was upsetting.”
“If I was going to be bitchy, I would say that it’s tougher to be a writer than it is to be a hooker. Men will fuck trash more easily than they will read it,” she says, displaying some of the ball-breaking verve that marked her out as a suspect. Whilst aggravated by the witch hunters, Hilton says she has “no beef with the woman herself. I take my hat off to her; she made a valid choice and it worked for her. I have no truck with a certain kind of Guardian-type woman who maintains that she must have been deranged, or damaged, or psychotic.” Even more seriously, as an academic writer herself, she says it “is a terrible indictment of the way that this country values academia that a woman has to turn to whoredom whilst waiting to get her viva.” Only Belle, you imagine, could have accused a client of having copied his favorite fantasies from London Fields.
The determination to find Belle shows the way in which prostitution, and the idea of a highly educated woman being one, has more power to shock than anything on Belle’s A to Z of sexual activities. From Catherine Deneuve’s Belle de Jour (after which she named her blog) to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and underage Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, we get our cast of call-girl characters from culture. Outside of art, it remains, if not a taboo, then a predilection that doesn’t fit with public life. Belle describes one of her clients saying he doesn’t understand “why my colleagues would have an affair with some girl in the office, and risk a marriage, when they could have someone like you.” A friend who worked for Eliot Spitzer described his fall from grace, for his team, as “like a death.” A straightforward affair might not have been as fatal to his career. There is no way Bill Clinton would have remained president had Monica Lewinsky been paid, as opposed to (ironically) an intern, with no wages (honest or otherwise).
You don’t have to stray very far in London or New York to find a whole regular cast of aging, overfed types with their “nieces” or friends in tow. Annabel’s, the supposedly exclusive private club, recently threatened to ban members who repeatedly turned up with a gaggle of Belles. That little strip of Mayfair might be a few postcodes and a million miles from King’s Cross, where crack addicts walk the streets, but it’s all as heartbreaking. But on sex work, Belle, who maintains that she wasn’t exploited, sounds as though she’s about to thank her madam in an Oscar acceptance speech: “Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn’t. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect.” For all her luck, there’s a naïvete there, too. Finally exposed as “real,” the element of fantasy remains. However lacy the literary lingerie in which she packages her experiences, it’s hard to see Belle’s story as having much to do with the desperate reality of the world she left behind.
Olivia Cole writes for the Spectator and the London Evening Standard. An award-winning poet, her first collection, Restricted View , will be published this fall.