The Daily Mail
Bel Mooney
Nothing bad happened to Belle de Jour - or so she says. The famous secret blogger whose Diary Of A London Call Girl intrigued millions has 'come out' at last as Dr Brooke Magnanti, a scientist who is casually unabashed about her recent life as a hooker.
She says: 'Some sex workers have terrible experiences. I didn't. I was unbelievably fortunate in every respect.'
Naturally, I am very glad that during the time she worked as a call girl, 'Belle' was never raped, robbed, beaten, or worse.
Instead, she got to be played by Billie Piper in a high-jinks TV dramatisation of her blog and made a lot of money. But 'unbelievably fortunate'? Oh, please!
Excuse me, Dr Magnanti, you chose to be used for all varieties of sex by any man who had a spare £300 to buy your body.
And for me, the worst aspect of this whole sorry story is that such an intelligent woman (currently involved in research on 'environmental toxin exposure and child health'), with all the privileges of a good background and education, should make such a low-down, straightforwardly bad choice.
The 'tart with a heart of gold' is a staple of fiction and movies - a modern-day Cinderella who has to shed a lot more than a glass slipper but who still has a lucrative time in posh hotels, courtesy of rich men who look like Richard Gere and who treat her good.
Do you remember that scene in the film Shirley Valentine when the Joanna Lumley character (Shirley's goody-goody former schoolmate who Shirley thinks is now an air hostess) corrects her, in those seductive tones, with: 'I'm a hooker, darling,'
It's a very funny moment, just as Pretty Woman is a very enjoyable film.
No doubt Brooke Magnanti was well aware of the whole Pretty Woman myth when, as a hard-up postgraduate student in 2003, she looked helplessly at her pile of bills and decided to sell sex to pay them off.
In a newspaper interview she offered a particularly tasteless explanation for this bizarre impulse: 'I have a pathological aversion to being in debt. My mother's family are Jewish; there's this hoarding thing, saving, being prepared - if you're in debt, somebody could come and knock on your door and take it all away tomorrow.'
Leaving the stereotypical reference to Jewish people aside, it is outrageous by implication to liken herself - an educated woman waiting to get her PhD - to the kind of pitifully poverty-stricken and powerless female who, the world over, becomes a prostitute because of need.
Dr Magnati makes it sound like she rattled her piggy bank, and because there weren't enough coins to buy a bottle of Chardonnay and a packet of organic chicken breasts, she signed up with an escort agency and smilingly agreed to some pretty nasty sexual practices. Just like that.
But last night a more troubling picture began to emerge - of a woman who knew that her own father used prostitutes.
It may be that this made her wish to emulate those all-too-human women, or that in some obscure way she sought revenge on her father.
Whatever the truth, Dr Magnanti has just added to an unfortunately widespread illusion that sex workers are free-wheeling women who make an empowered choice. (Yes, and that the pimp is a legitimate businessman.)
She makes being a call girl sound like a reasonable career choice for any student, and the fact that her pictures show her to be extremely attractive can only serve to make her influence the more pernicious.
Her complacency makes me deeply queasy. 'Look, of course trafficking occurs. It's awful. Awful. Desperate,' she trills, as if she had any knowledge at all of the terrible, dark world of sexual exploitation endured by thousands of women, who were often prostituted in childhood.
In the UK alone, 75 per cent of prostitutes started when still under-age. On one campaigning website, a girl called Jo says that she was 13 when she began - but not one punter ever complained or stopped because of her age.
It is a startling fact that 70 per cent of all British prostitutes were in care, and nearly half have suffered sexual abuse, with far more than that having endured physical abuse within their families.
Yet, still, the 'happy hooker' myth persists, and teenage girls fall for its seductive grasp.
That's not to say that it lures them directly into prostitution, but it does encourage them to behave in ways that are foolish, demeaning and potentially very dangerous.
Every day naive adolescents post web pictures of themselves in semi-pornographic poses, encouraging boys (and older men, of course) to regard them as nothing more than pieces of meat.
In primary school playgrounds, boys routinely make shockingly sexual suggestions to girls who are pressured to look knowing - and even comply. Now, that's what I call an 'environmental toxic exposure' damaging to child health.
Today, we live in an unpleasant world where pornography is considered cool and censorship is a dirty world among the liberal elite who haven't a clue about what really goes on to create hardcore porn.
From fashion advertisements to children's clothing (which encourages small girls to dress like hookers), the 'pornogrification' of our society is complete, and anybody who decries it is accused of 'moral panic'.
Lap-dancing clubs? Just harmless entertainment, so the liberalisers argue. Let's license more, even in residential areas. Porn on the internet? Well, censorship would be the real sin. And so on.
Yet all of this rests on women's bodies being exploited for cash. That is not sexy, fashionable and exciting, it is sleazy, dark and corrupting.
Since she is so easy-going about prostitution, I suggest that Dr Magnanti does some more of the research she's clearly so good at.
A good start would be the website demandchange.org.uk. This is a coalition between Object, the human rights organisation set up to challenge the increased sexualisation of women in the media and popular culture, and Eaves, a charity working with vulnerable women.
The site neatly dispels any of the Belle de Jour deceit about prostitution as a glamorous choice. The Demand Change! campaign calls for the buying of sex to be criminalisedin order to tackle the issue.
I'm glad to say the pressure group is gaining ground. In a momentous leap forward in policy on tackling prostitution, peers have just agreed to Clause 14 ( formerly Clause 13) of the Policing and Crime Bill.
This criminalises those who buy sexual services from anyone who is pimped, trafficked or otherwise 'controlled for gain'.
Yes, the Bill may have its flaws (some argue that it will force prostitutes out of residential brothels and on to the streets).
But in a dramatic debate, Labour peers took a strong stance in tackling moves by opposers who sought to weaken the clause to such an extent that it would have been thrown out altogether.
I, for one, hope this is a sign that we are seeing a backlash against the 'anything goes' attitude of the past few decades.
According to OBJECT, nine out of ten prostitutes want to leave the trade but don't know how.
Make no mistake, prostitution is not about a man enjoying a thrillingly transgressive sexual encounter with a willing woman who looks like Brooke Magnanti, or Julia Roberts; it is about exploitation, violence and abuse.
Of course, the top-end call girls such as Brooke/Belle command high prices, but the majority of so-called 'working girls' are abject, wrecked people. More than half have been raped or seriously sexually assaulted at the hands of pimps and punters, and up to 95 per cent are drug users.
These are the realities. And any educated woman who defends prostitution, or its close cousin pornography, should be ashamed - ashamed of betraying her fellow women who do not have the indulgence of choice.
