eyeing up a silver-haired old charmer. The bawds, the rogues, the villains and the beauties weave their eternal dance through London as they always did. These days, the Mother Needhams greet the trains at St Pancras; calculating pimps size up the trusting Scottish boys who arrive at Euston and are drawn, mothlike, to the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus; and resilient young women decide that lap-dancing or two years in a brothel represent a better way to fund their PhDs than yet another bank loan.
Such is the case of âBelle de Jourâ, whose lucrative but short career in the oldest profession was made possible by that most recent phenomenon, the internet. With the advent of cyberspace, pornography took on a radical, electronic form, and proved impossible to control, eroding conventional methods of censorship. Prostitutes and writers of erotica were quick to seize on its potential and none more so than âBelle de Jourâ, who first came to public attention in 2003 when she began to post her âDiary of a London Call Girlâ. With a pseudonym derived from Luis Buñuelâs 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve as a bourgeois housewife who works in a brothel to relieve her ennui , âBelleâ soon built up an enormous fanbase.
Subsequently issued in book form and inspiring a television series, Diary of a London Call Girl represented a development in the history of sex, a collision between the worldâs oldest profession and the latest technology. But the result was familiar enough, an attractive young woman confiding her exploits just as Fanny Hill had breathlessly narrated her adventures two centuries earlier. âBelleâ inspired a slew of imitators, a new genre of popular erotica untroubled by the harsh censorship which had plagued writers such as D. H. Lawrence; it is a sign of the times that one can purchase books with titles such as Confessions of a New York Call Girl at the supermarket alongside the weekly grocery shop. Many attempts were made to unmask âBelleâ, and she had been variously suspected of being the author Toby Young, Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review and chick-lit writer Isabel Wolff. Finally, in November 2009, threatened with exposure by the Daily Mail , the real âBelle de Jourâ stepped forward in the glamorous form of research scientist Brooke Magnanti. Just as Cleland had written Fanny Hill to get out of debt, so Magnanti had worked as a high-class prostitute to subsidize her PhD in forensic pathology. Given the choice of £200 an hour on the game or a fraction of that wage working in a bookshop, Magnanti had chosen the more lucrative option; she also maintained that she had paid her taxes, so was not guilty of tax evasion. Magnantiâs employers took an enlightened attitude: while such a revelation might once have been a sacking offence, the University of Bristol stood by her, arguing that her past was not an issue.
Magnantiâs experience of the sex trade seems to have been a positive one; she has benefited and has moved on, just like Sarah Tanner, the Victorian prostitute interviewed by Arthur Munby in the 1850s who went into streetwalking as a professional venture, quit while she was ahead and opened a coffee shop out of the proceeds. Magnantiâs experiences seem to bear out the words of a young woman interviewed by Mayhew, who told him pertly that she wasnât at all worried about what would become of her, and could marry tomorrow if she liked. Perhaps Dr Acton, the Victorian reformer, had been correct when he wrote that âonce a harlot always a harlotâ was a myth.
But many commentators believe that there are also victims among the hard-working working girls, the twenty-first-century equivalents of the Roman sex slaves. Just a month before the unmasking of âBelle de Jourâ dominated the headlines, a moral panic broke out over sex trafficking. When government minister Denis MacShane appeared