The New Yorker: Secret Diary of a Call Girl

Image of the gorgeous, and very real, sexy geeklet Valerie Lewis.

In the sex blogging scene, the blog — rather, mostly the author behind it — Belle de Jour has been a subject of debate, controversy and occasionally envy. It’s one of the longer-running sex blogs, anonymously typed by someone who identities as a female sex worker in the UK. She got a book deal based on her stories and adventures (Belle de Jour: Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl), and then a TV series. People still debate Belle’s existence, gender, authenticity and motivations, but that doesn’t take away from her very interesting stories. Personally, I’ve had good communication with her in the distant past, though only as sex blog colleagues, and I can’t vouch for any facts about her except that she’s polite in her emails. She’s sex positive and a vocal advocate for positive perceptions of the sex work industry and women fully owning their own bodies as sexual beings. I can only hope these sentiments eeked their way out into the TV series… Recently, the series based on Belle de Jour, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, became watchable for free on Showtime (online). This week, The New Yorker reviewed the series in Working Girl: A British take on the world’s oldest profession (found via sweet Viviane). It’s prudish, and the author’s queasiness with the subject of sex work clouds her judgment, but still interesting. Snip:

As befits a show about a woman of the night, “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” an eight-episode blast of summer heat from Showtime that started last week, arrived with something of a reputation. The series was produced in England, and was originally shown there last year. It was based on a book called “The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl,” which was written by a high-end prostitute and was itself an outgrowth of a blog, called “Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl,” whose success then engendered a newspaper series in the Telegraph, called “Belle de Jour’s Naughty Notebook,” and led to another book, called “The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl.” The TV series is now shooting its second season over in England, and has already been renewed for a third. All this enterprise, which is almost Disneyesque in terms of the length of its chain of monetization—the only thing missing is a theme park with kinky rides that cost five hundred dollars an hour—is the product of someone whose identity is open to question. There’s been speculation in the British press that Belle, who has never revealed her real name and is now retired, is an impostor—that is, that she was never a prostitute, and may even be a he.

The authority of the diaries is something worth pondering, especially at a time when a number of high-profile memoirs have turned out to be, to some degree or in their entirety, not what they professed to be. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them in the Ho section of my local Barnes & Noble (the subtitle of the American edition, earnest and accurate, is “Diary of an Unlikely Call Girl”), so I’ve seen only the Telegraph columns and short passages from the books. The writing I have come across seems not just fictional but false; there’s a lazy archness to the tone, a superficial intelligence, and a mere pose of thoughtfulness—all of which may be intentional, part of the joke. (…read more.)