Brooke Magnanti: Call Girl, Blogger . . . and PhD

Mia wrote a thoughtful post Thursday reminding us that -- whatever else she may have done -- Rachel Uchitel (aka Mistress #1 in Tigergate) also lost her fiancé in 9/11. Donna chimed in by helpfully reminding us that not all "skanks" are created equal.

So let me join this humanizing trend on Woman Up and put in a word on behalf of the latest "woman of dubious provenance" to cross my path: the prostitute turned PhD, Belle de Jour.


Haven't heard of her? It's an amazing story. "Belle de Jour" is the nom de plume for one Brooke Magnanti, a one-time sex worker-turned-anonymous-blogger whose blog -- Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl -- led to a TV series as well as several spin-off books. From 2003 to late 2004, Magnanti worked as a prostitute in London for an an up-market escort agency. Shortly after she started working as a prostitute, she also started blogging as Belle de Jour, a name she took from the film by Luis Buñuel starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she's bored. (Haven't seen it? It's a must.)

Under pressure from an old boyfriend who was going to leak her identity to the British tabloids, Magnanti finally went public in the Times of London last month. And here's the kicker -- guess what she does for a living these days? Wait for it . . . she's a cancer researcher. Yup, that's right. She's now Dr. Brooke Magnanti. She's currently working on a project for the European Union that looks at the evidence for pesticide exposures causing neuro-developmental disorders.

And that's precisely why she started turning tricks during one 14-month period of her life. She was broke, needed money to finance her graduate education and found that high-end escort work was actually quite lucrative. How lucrative? She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which £200 was hers to take home and keep her afloat while she studied for a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. The average appointment lasted two hours, and she saw clients two or three times a week, the Times reports. You do the math. (A pound is currently worth about 1.6 dollars.)

Needless to say, Magnanti's "outing" has been the subject of numerous articles, blogs, talk shows, twitterfeeds -- you name it. And what makes her story so compelling are not just the "facts on the ground" about her life then and now, but the way she expresses herself. She's intelligent, poised, articulate, honest, funny . . . in short, not your average call girl. Check her out here, talking about her old job:


Before you go on to say "Yes, but . . . " please don't. There have been zillions of criticisms thrown her way for glamorizing prostitution and all the rest. Magnanti herself readily admits that she was "lucky" never to have been hurt while working as a prostitute and to have gotten out before it became "the bulk of her lifestyle." She recognizes -- as we all do -- that prostitution often brings rape, drugs, sexual abuse, human trafficking in its wake, and a host of other social ills.

But what Magnanti brings to the table is another, equally valid truth about prostitution, and it's a far less comfortable one: that for some (even highly educated) people, it's just . . . a job. And she's not alone in being the proverbial "girl next door" turning tricks for a living. Sex workers come in all manner of shapes, sizes and educational backgrounds. As Catherine Stephens, an activist for the International Union of Sex Workers who was a sex worker herself for 10 years, commented: "In the brothel I worked in, I think I was the only one not doing a PhD."

Sure, Magnanti she could have waited tables or worked at a bar or done any number of other things to earn her keep. But as she herself explains, she didn't have a lot of time. She had a thesis to write! (Having written one myself, I can sympathize.) And she needed a job that would pay well, keep her out of debt, allow her to pursue her studies and not require any training. Bingo.

I'm not here to defend prostitution. But I am here to say -- like Donna -- that I welcome it when a person or a story forces me to challenge my own assumptions and biases. Loath as we are to admit it, prostitution is -- among other things -- a market which operates with its own incentives and rules. In their new book "Superfreakonomics," Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner devote a whole chapter to the topic. Here's Levitt talking about why prostitutes turn more tricks in Chicago on the Fourth of July. (Answer: tourism.) And here's a link to his co-author on that research, Sudhir Venkatesh, talking about the economics of prostitution.

Having said all that, far and away the most compelling analysis of Belle de Jour's predicament that I've read came from The Guardian's film critic, Peter Bradshaw. Bradshaw compared the real life Belle to the Belle in the Buñuel film, and found Brooke Magnanti's story wanting. According to him, the film was so much richer precisely because "it isn't just about the phenomenon of an outwardly respectable woman secretly becoming a prostitute, but the phenomenon of outwardly respectable men secretly using prostitutes. You can't have one without the other: yet it seems only to be the first phenomenon which causes agony among the media commentariat." In other words, the film looked critically at the other half of the transaction: men.

Which brings us -- inevitably, and as everything must these days -- to Tiger. Yes, it's fun to heap scorn on the hair styles and skin tones of the Jaime/es of the world. And I'm not saying that Tiger has gotten off scot free.

But I'd like, if I may, to change the tenor our collective conversation away from the so-called "skanks" and toward . . . how to put it, Mary . . ."men of dubious provenance?" . . . and what motivates them.

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