Annabel became an escort three years ago, in between working full time as a
session musician. I meet her in the lobby bar of a plush hotel in Mayfair,
Central London. Blonde, slim and pretty, she looks not unlike Dr Brooke
Magnanti, the Bristol research scientist who recently outed herself as the
call girl Belle de Jour.
Annabel, 25, worked as a call girl for a year, earning a similar hourly rate
to the £300 charged by 34-year-old Magnanti. She stopped when her music
career picked up and now helps to run an independent escort agency in London.
“I consider myself to be from a similar background to ‘Belle’,” she says. “I
went to a private school and come from a wellbalanced family. I was curious
about the industry so I started to look online. Then I met two lovely ladies
from one site and the money sounded agreeable.”
Annabel is elegant in a well-fitting, tailored dress. Everything about her
appearance is neat and considered. “I certainly had student debts to clear
but it wasn’t destitution that led me there. I was fascinated by the
industry,” she says, her voice soft and educated. “I meet many potential
recruits now with similar reasons for starting. If curiosity is their
motivation, then of course they are going to look at the high end first. If
you go into this work out of desperation, you will go straight in at the low
end. You can’t work up the ladder. I was curious about the story of Belle de
Jour and I imagine there are many others like that.”
Zara, 28, works for a London escort agency considered to be in the same price
league as Magnanti’s former employers. Zara left her job as a sales
executive because she felt that it offered her limited opportunities. She
tried escorting in between jobs and liked the work. “I had credit card debts
and it seemed the quickest and easiest way to get rid of them. I tried the
‘companion agencies’ first but I soon learnt that the sort of work where
everything is above board and non-physical didn’t really exist, so I thought
I’d try an escort agency where you get paid better. I’ve loved it. I’m
treated well and I don’t want to stop.”
Annabel and Zara are working names. Despite their declaration of dedication to
their second careers, neither is comfortable enough to reveal her identity.
Zara refuses to tell me where she is from or even the full title of her
“arts-based” degree. All she will reveal about her past is that she comes
from a “comfortable family background” and went to university.
When Belle de Jour outed herself last weekend after more than four years of
literary mystery — was she fact or fiction? Male or female? — she claimed to
be far from alone in being a professional, middle-class woman with a secret
double life. “I’m not the only person walking around who’s an ex-call-girl,
believe me,” she said.
By revealing that Belle was real all along, Magnanti dealt a blow to the
critics who claimed that her happy life of five-star hotels and luxury
lingerie was surely fictitious. “I am really pleased Belle identified
herself,” says Zara. “People who have never used an escort or don’t know
what that world is about make an uninformed judgment. If someone like her
comes out, it shows it in a different light and can only educate people. But
the stigma and people’s judgments are so set, it would take more than one
person to come forward and talk about it.”
On the one hand, Annabel and Zara are keen to portray their profession in a
good light, citing their ability to fund a certain lifestyle and to work to
a flexible schedule; yet on the other they are fastidious about protecting
their secret from family, friends and colleagues. They may profess to feel
empowered by their chosen profession but they still appear to feel the
stigma of it deeply.Last month the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu,
attacked the television adaption, Secret Diary of a Call Girl,
starring Billie Piper, claiming that it misled people about the stark
realities of the sex trade.
But some in the industry disagree. James runs one of the more expensive London
escort agencies. He, too, wishes his full name to be withheld.
“I don’t think the scenes in Belle’s books and the TV series were inaccurate,”
he says. “Lots of people who feel uncomfortable about the industry probably
wanted to believe it was made up but there are lots of girls exactly like
Belle — in fact, I think she is typical. We have had lots of PhD students on
our books. We have had doctors, nurses, City bankers, a musician who played
at the Royal Albert Hall, people who work in property.
“The TV series did glamorise it, though," says James. "Whether that is good or
bad I won’t say but I noticed that after it was shown, our younger girls —
the ones aged 18 to 21 — started to think that what they did was cool. I
call it the ‘Belle de Jour phenomenon’. They used to want to hide it but
recently I hear they have come clean to friends — boyfriends, even. Not only
has it become acceptable to them but some even aspire to it.”
While the cases of Belle, Annabel, Zara and the women on the books of James’s
agency seem to imply that happy hookerdom does exist, others would reject
this. “There is a problem with a story like Belle de Jour’s,” says Anna
Bowden of the women’s support network Eaves, which runs the
anti-prostitution pressure group The Poppy Project. “The only ones who are
able to talk about their experiences of the sex industry are those who
operate from a position of privilege and have the opportunity to speak out.
We see many women who can’t put themselves forward to talk because they are
too traumatised. We have to tell their story for them.
“The glamorising of prostitution is not the fault of people like Belle de Jour
but of the media. It either portrays it as chick-lit or goes to the other
end of the scale and exposes the dirty, gritty side where women are raped
and beaten. The reality is somewhere in the middle.”
Writing about the sex industry frequently as a journalist, I have come across
many so-called middle-class prostitutes: well-educated girls who see no
moral boundaries. They approach prostitution not as a necessity but more as
a lifestyle enhancer.
In the past 12 months I have gone undercover for two “interviews” at escort
agencies, tested the demand for Craigslist adult services by advertising for
sex online and, for this newspaper, experimented with negotiating a
so-called sugar daddy relationship based on a monthly compensation package.
From my experience I would definitely not consider it glamorous. One of my
burly male “interviewers” greeted me in an upmarket Sloane Square bar with a
purple, freshly swollen eye. A female “interviewer” smelt strongly of
alcohol when she turned up, flustered and late, because she had “come
straight from seeing a client”.
The unwelcome image that this frank remark conjured in my mind hammered one
point home: those entering this sort of “work” must have specific
non-emotive character traits to be able to handle the psychological strain.
While there are many call girls prepared to give positive feedback on their
profession, for others it can be a hugely damaging experience.
Commentators have been keen to delve for clues to some trauma that may have
propelled Magnanti into prostitution. Some have highlighted that she is
estranged from her father. Yet it seems that the reason is far simpler.
Belle/Brooke was not on the poverty line but she needed help to pay the rent.
“The sex industry is what women turn to when the chips are down — and in her
case, to do something else: to fund her thesis. It is about survival and in
a good many cases women enter it out of need to support their children,”
says Cari Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the English Collective of Prostitutes,
which campaigns for full legalisation of prostitution.
Whatever their motivation, soon prostitutes of every description will find it
harder to work within the confines of the “Barbarella-style” agencies that
Dr Magnanti used and which, she admits, helped to protect her from danger.
Last week the House of Lords approved clause 14 of the Policing and Crime
Bill, toughening the laws on prostitution. The changes will make it an
offence for a man to have sex with a woman who is “controlled for gain”,
even without his knowledge.
The new laws are aimed at clamping down on the trafficking of women for sex,
not at the Belles and Zaras of the high-class escort world, but critics say
that they will drive all forms of prostitution underground, rather than
targeting only the vulnerable. The legal definition of “controlled for gain”
means that a man can be prosecuted simply for paying for a woman who works
with an accomplice. Legalisation campaigners say that this gives women an
incentive to work alone and would encourage high-end escorts to ditch the
apparent safety net of their agencies.
The truth is that, for all the light-hearted talk of clearing credit-card
debt, the fear of danger is always present. Rape, coercion, mental anguish,
social stigma and physical health risks exist in all areas of the sex
industry, as many so-called happy hookers will attest. Perhaps those, such
as Magnanti, who argue otherwise were just very good at their job.
In February this year a French student, Laura D, published a book entitled Scandalous
about working as a prostitute to fund her studies. “It’s the male fantasy,
isn’t it? That women adore being prostitutes,” she has said. “There are so
many clichés. I’m sure many men saw me as a sort of Lolita. It’s the
ultimate fantasy for some men — to find yourself a student prostitute.”
Laura D’s tale is a stark contrast to Belle de Jour’s: “I admit that at one
point I was developing an addiction to money but never to prostitution,”
said Laura. “Every time was horrible.”
However content Magnanti was with her call girl double life, and for all the
evidence of other bankers, lawyers, doctors and students following suit, the
middle-class hooker is still a shadowy figure in a seedy netherworld — and
one who cherishes her anonymity.
“Even though Belle has come out into the open, the industry will never be free
of social stigma because of the physical side of it and the fact that there
is a health risk,” says Zara. “We all risk damaging our professional and
social life.”
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