Kate suggested on Facebook that I blog about Belle du Jour, the recently outed Scottish scientific researcher who claims she worked as a prostitute in London to fund her studies and who wrote a popular book most of which I have read. Read in the hope that it would provide a believable female perspective on prostitution. It didn’t.
There are many layers and levels on which this topic could and should be discussed, though I don’t have much time, so I only wanted to note that a short time after reading it, I considered the book to be a fake. Whether the woman in question actually worked as a prostitute is irrelevant, the text she wrote is a lie.
But there is no truth in this post-modern world of ours! No truth but climate change and evolution! Heresy! How could you say such a thing? For a book to be un-true, truth must also exist. Ah, my petit singe, you are correct, you are correct, I err.
And yet I feel that a book which represents an individual’s experience can be true or a lie. And this book was a lie, by which I mean that it did not correspond to any individual’s experience. No one had those experiences. No one real, no one fictional. Even if every incident took place in most of its particulars, still the book did not relate the subjective experience of the participants with any accuracy whatsoever. It was a lie.
But how can you know this, you fool? You are not that woman. You are not those men. You are not cold grey diesel smelling London at four in the morning, mid-summer, lightening. You cannot know.
Sometimes one knows things, and one’s instinct is sharper than logic, and I know.
Fah!
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November 18th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
This Guardian article is interesting, (though of course not as erudite as your musings!) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/17/belle-de-jour-tanya-gold
November 19th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Ah J! I have missed your blogs! Having skimmed through it at your house, I agree that the book seemed like total bollocks. Maybe she was a hooker, maybe some of it was based on real incidents, but most of it felt totally fake, It’s hard to find people talking sensibly/honestly about prostitution. its either this belle crap, or rabid feminist man-hating all sex is rape nonsense. the truth must be darker, more complicated, more interest, and somewhere in between those two poles.
November 20th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
I left a fabulous comment yesterday that does not appear! anyway, I’m interested in your musings J. I agree I don’t believe her, I think she was making it up. I also think it’s pretty sad that a woman has to turn hooker to fund a phd.
November 20th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
I got your comment back, and I like it.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:53 am
I’m not really sure what you’re saying here; your statement itself seems to be, ironically, a non-statement.
That being said, I would like to bring up Tim O’Brien’s perspective on truth per “The Things They Carried,” which I think bears some similarity to what you’re saying. In one of his stories, he wrote about how a lie can be truer than the truth, and visa versa. O’Brien gave an example in which he describes the type of story that sometimes came out of Vietnam (he is a Vietnam vet and all his writings are based on or around that experience). He talks about the story of how a soldier threw himself on a grenade and absorbed the blast, giving his own life to save the life of his comrades. This sort of thing did factually happen, but, to O’Brien’s point, to tell that as a Vietnam story is a lie because it didn’t represent the truth of the Vietnam experience.
O’Brien then gives an alternative story in which a soldier throws himself on a grenade to save his comrades but the grenade ends up killing everyone anyway. And as all the soldiers lay on the ground dying, one of them turns to the one who threw himself on the grenade and says, “That was pointless.” Even though this story is a lie, it is truer than the story that actually happened.
Actually, now I think I understand what you were saying in your original post; I was just so excited to write down the Tim O’Brien bit that I didn’t think about what you wrote.
November 27th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
If there’s anything about hookers you want to know, just ask. But, whores are a tough lot who, for a wide variety of reasons, have made a certain moral compromise that allows them to go to an out of body state to fulfill their part of a carnal bargain. It’s why a prostitute never kisses. It’s too intimate. (The reason the John doesn’t want to has more to do with hygiene - you never know where that mouth has been.) They run the gamut socially, financially, emotionally and intellectually. And every one of them wants to be an actress - the ultimate escape, becoming (at least for a while) someone else.
December 13th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
I’m with you, brother! Last Sunday afternoon, I caught Pretty Woman on the tv. After watching it, I had the same gnawing feeling that it just wasn’t possible. No one has that experience. no one.