Long a subject of much conversation and opining on this coast (and others) as to whether legendary and longtime blogger Belle de Jour was real or not — and many of us excitedly read Belle’s blog from the very first post — it seems that she’s now revealed herself.
(Image via TechCrunch.)
The whole thing is curious; many of us didn’t believe that everything she wrote was real, and in the formative (and ongoing days) of Fleshbot we doubted whether Belle was female, male, or anything claimed by the persona behind the writing. Though privately, while our conversations went back and forth about “real or fake” — in the past, I’ve exchanged emails with Belle on many occasions. I would always say over drinks when the topic came up that I’m not sure who it is, or what is going on, but she’s cool to me in emails, and seems to be (to me) what she says. Of course, I had no tangible proof, but whatever. I know that anonymity is cheap and a fine fetish. I am friends with Abby Lee, Girl With A One Track Mind, who was outed against all her wishes after a Belle-style book deal, at the cost of her job and great pain to her family.
That said… Breaking: TechCrunch (and a poignant post by Paul Carr) tells us NSFW: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Success – Belle de Jour and the Impossibility of Anonymous Blogging — here are some choice snips but you should read the whole thing. I don’t know Paul and I don’t think he particularly likes me*, but this post is a high point in depth and contemplation for both his work and for those of us who have championed ‘best practices’ in blogging. Regardless, it will be interesting to see how this all pans out. Here ya go:
So Belle de Jour was real after all. The Internet’s most famous anonymous sex blogger – turned best-selling author – turned internationally successful TV series – has finally outed herself in the UK’s Sunday Times. And it turns out she’s a character straight from the pages of XKCD.
From her interview with the Times’ India Knight, we learn that Belle is in fact Dr Brooke Magnanti a specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology who ran out of money during the final stages of her PhD thesis and decided to become an escort to make ends meet. So to speak. Add in the fact that Magnanti was already a reasonably well known science blogger and ‘The Secret Diary of a London Call Girl‘ was born.
Despite Belle’s growing fame, and the determined efforts of journalists around the world to out her, Belle’s anonymity remained intact – mainly thanks to a complex series of agents and shell companies that allowed her to receive payment for her work without compromising her identity. Even her agent didn’t know her real name until this week when Belle herself chose to out herself, granting an interview to Knight, one of her harshest critics.
A better example of someone operating on her own terms it’s hard to imagine. Anonymous bloggers everywhere can read Belle’s story and take heart in the fact that it really is possible to be both successful and anonymous in the Internet age.
There’s just one problem: it isn’t.
Let’s give Belle and the Sunday Times the benefit of the doubt and assume that Magnanti really did approach them, and not the other way around. There’s no reason to doubt Magnanti’s version of events, but it’s worth remembering that the Sunday Times has a particularly grubby history when it comes to anonymous bloggers.
As readers of my Emmy-award-winning book will know, back in 2006 my friend Zoe Margolis opened the door of her London home at an ungodly hour of the morning to accept a flower delivery from an anonymous admirer. What she didn’t know was that the delivery man had actually been sent by the Sunday Times who had positioned a photographer across the road ready to snap her when she came to the door. Two days later she learned the horrible truth: an email arrived from the paper’s ‘acting news editor’; a scumbag called Nicholas Hellen. In the email, Hellen announced that the paper was preparing to out Zoe as the author of the anonymous sex blog ‘Girl With A One Track Mind‘, which – like Belle de Jour’s blog – had just been turned into a book.
Hellen proposed a deal: either Zoe could agree to give her story to the Times, illustrated with a photoshoot in “glamourous evening wear” taken by their resident fashion photographer – or the paper would run its own hit-job expose, written by fellow-scum-bag Anna Mikhailova and complete with the (in Hellen’s words) “not particularly flattering” paparazzi shot.
Zoe told the Times to go fuck themselves, and the rest is a painful outing, a hideously uncomfortable conversation with her parents and a week of press-camped-out-on-her-doorstep hell (stories she tells in a follow-up book to be published in March 2010)
But, despite the fact that the print version of Magnanti’s Times’ interview is illustrated with a photograph of her wearing glamourous evening-wear, let’s assume this was an entirely consensual encounter.
(…) The only way to absolutely guarantee that no-one can out you, then, is to tell absolutely no-one about your secret. Trust no close friends, take no lovers – and keep your signature a million miles away from a book deal. And yet that’s where we bump into the biggest irony of all: the fewer people who are in a position to out your secret identity, the more fierce the compulsion to out yourself. You see, the only thing worse than enjoying huge success with a blog and only being able to tell close friends and lovers, is enjoying huge success with a blog and not being able to tell anyone.
At the risk of hopping back on an old hobby horse, blogging is is, by nature, an egotistical activity. If Belle didn’t have an ego, she would simply fuck people for money, rather than feeling the need to put herself at risk by writing about her adventures. Sure enough, in the Sunday Times interview, Magnanti admits her frustration about not being able to attend her own book launch parties or to otherwise fully enjoy the rewards that success brings. (…read more, techcrunch.com)
See also: Much much foreshadowing in my Google Tech Talk — Sex on the Internet, the Realities of Porn, Sexual Privacy and How Search Affects Them All (YouTube.com, no embed allowed).
* My misunderstanding: Paul emailed me to say, hey, not true! Him and I are indeed friendly and there is like between us. :)
What frightens me is the level of vitriol in the comments on most articles discussing Belle’s outing – lots of variations on “how dare she sell her body”, “how dare she do something illegal” (and that’s a grey area in Britain, anyway), and a lot of comments about how they struggled with money as students but they didn’t stoop to prostitution. They all boil down to, “how dare she do something I wouldn’t do.” Frankly, as an anonymous whoreblogger, it scares the crap out of me how nasty and vindictive many of the comments are – yes, I did know that most people at least publicly disapprove of prostitution, but there’s a real sense of hatred and self-aggrieved injustice that is a bit shocking. I hope to God these are only the people who care enough to sit down and type, that most people are just not that interested.
I’ve struggled with anonymity myself, as a blogger and podcaster on topics sexual/sensual, and I know a few of the others out there, too, mostly women. As my podcast has grown in popularity, I’ve gotten some strange emails. There are a lot of obsessive people out there, and a lot of judgmental ones, too, and I’m pretty careful about who I reveal myself to as ‘Silkenvoice’. We’ve come a long way, women have, but the fact they we’re still targets who worry about our safety and our privacy in ways that men who do the exact same things do not — well, it speaks volumes as to how far society must go in order to catch up with us. When it first occurred to me to wonder what I would do when a client or a colleague said “Hey, your voice sounds familiar, are you…” I chose to tackle it head-on. I outted myself to my colleagues, my closest friends and lovers, and my family years ago in order to head off the sort of headaches that Belle and Abby have experienced. The information was surprisingly well-received, even by the Born-Again Christian members of the family with minimal backlash. Go-Figure :)