A few months ago I read Belle du Jour and posted a review about it. I thought that it was a lot of fabrication, but enjoyed the memoir. Now Belle du Jour has revealed herself as Dr. Brooke Magnanti. I'm sure there will be a harried effort of fact checking with her coming forward, but now that she has, I no longer carry the weight of doubt I previously had regarding this memoir. This blog is not about that. This blog is in response to the many commenters who criticized her decision of going into sex work.
There was never so succinct a response to the age old question of: "Why did you choose to go into sex work?" as featured in $pread magazine: "It's the money, stupid."
By her own admission Dr. Magnanti decided to go into sex work because she ran out of money while working on her Ph.D. And what, we're surprised that academics are underpaid? This is not a problem isolated to British academics, by UCLA's own admission, they do not pay their graduate students enough to feasibly live in Los Angeles. When you cannot support yourself, you have three choices: you live off of savings, someone supports you or you get another job.
Yet everyone criticizes this obviously intelligent, educated woman's decision to get a job in the sex industry. Why? Is this really about a moral judgement? Belle is sleeping with someone else's husband or boyfriend and admonished for it, but she's simply providing the service, not purposely seeking out attached men. People are criticizing her for not finding a straight job, which she says she could not do because she was unable to find something in her field. She could not devote enough time to the low paying job she would have had to take in order to cover her expenses as she was working on her thesis. Are they saying we should keep highly educated and intelligent people in low-skilled jobs that they are not suited for, prolonging their process for finally being able to work in their chosen and dedicated field? Or she could have asked her parents for money, what if they didn't have it or didn't want to give it to her? She could have gotten loans, what if she didn't qualify for them? What if she didn't want to be in debt? Nice, middle-class white girls can't be prostitutes during a brief time of need? Aren't you the classist, racist, genderist and asshole. (Apologies to my English professors for lack of parallelism.)
For those who would like to eradicate sex work because it is so-called demeaning, psychologically damaging, and morally debased, allow me to offer the following suggestions:
*create a mandatory living wage for every person 18 or older who is able bodied to work
*create viable retirement options for people no longer able to work
*create adequate disability benefits
*create reliable and excellent child care options
*stop undervaluing education and pro-social jobs
*create a top limit for all salaries
*create true gender equality
*crack down on sex and human trafficking
I'm going to pause for a moment to just entertain what it would be like if these things came true . . . They never will, so that moment was very short-lived. So long as these condition exist in our modern world, so will sex workers. It is called the world's oldest profession because it is-it embodies the first basic trade of commodities. I have--you want. I need--you have. Today, we still have those needs and wants.
But it does not even matter if we could create a Utopian society where these suggestions were realities because people are still going to choose to go into sex work for a variety of other reasons that have nothing to do with a better society. However, it would greatly reduce the amount of people who are sex slaves which seems more demeaning, psychologically damaging, morally debased,(and always illegal) more so than one woman's choice to be a high end escort for a year while working toward a Ph.D. in her field.
Please separate out forced and coerced sex work from those who make a conscious choice; there is a difference. Let's work to stop sex slavery and leave the intelligent, educated sex workers who love and blog about their jobs the hell alone.
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