Howard Jacobson on the memoirs of what he calls “Prada Prostitutes,” high-class “hookers such as Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl:
You can't mess around with sex, in life or in literature. It is never not serious. When a man denies the significance of an adultery with the line, "It didn't matter to me," and the wronged woman replies, "Then why did you do it?", they both miss the point. Everything in sex matters, including the experience of its not mattering. Isn't that what O pursues, the sensation of nothing mattering, least of all herself? And isn't that why some men visit prostitutes, for the intense experience of abnegation associated with payment, for which next to nothing is given and next to nothing is felt?
[…] We have to be careful, with sex, what we don't believe. Jean Genet never accepted that Story of O was written by a woman. No woman had a sufficient understanding of sexual degeneracy, he thought. The more fool him. And the more fool those who lambast Belle and Bruna, not for being shallow, but for telling lies. "It's a fantasy," wrote Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian when The Secret Diary of a Call Girl was shown on ITV. Rosie Boycott, writing in the Daily Mail, said the same. For both, what made the programme nonsense were the 68 per cent of prostitutes suffering stress disorder equivalent to a combat veteran's that it didn't show—even though that's the street, and Belle de Jour doesn't work the street. But so what? The prostitute might change her place of business but male desire remains forever male desire. What Belle de Jour does, in Bunting's view, is "buttress men's sense of entitlement to use a prostitute." "Use." Not visit, not hire; "use." That is, depersonalise and do violence to her.
[…] If it is inhumane to belittle the miseries of the prostitute, it is no less inhumane to minimise the miseries that make some men their clients. There is at least this to be said about the Prada call girls with their obliging mouths and vaginas—along with the freedoms they insist on for themselves, they grant men the freedom to be creatures of desire. Why, when all is said and done, should a prostitute not be touched by a man's shyness or ineptitude or sadness, or made curious by his turning up in her room looking for he doesn't know what, or excited when on rare occasions what he does want coincides with what she does? Is the battlefield so unforgiving that none of this is conceivable, and that any man who goes out looking for such an eventuality must be treated as a criminal?
Ah, there is so much to say that I don’t know where to begin. I am not sure that I like the idea that sex is such a sacred subject or rather a vital one that it is necessary to be careful with it. The sacralization of sex is a problem not really in literature, but in real life because it reinforces the absurd notion that when people are having sex, they are involved in an activity that is more important than themselves that the readers, others, and more importantly they have to take seriously. The problem nowadays is sex is not only the supreme and the sublime, but that it is what feels the most real to too many people. The memoirs of Prada prostitutes, to use Jacobson’s expression, thus become a hic because they transgress the rule that sex is serious and that it mustn’t be used to bug people by reminding them that sex is both personal and meaningless in itself. Depersonalization, degradation, and violence can therefore be sexual and writing about sex, prostitution, even when one insists that one is telling about one’s experiences doesn’t have to fit a mold. Writing about sex doesn’t have to mean to treat the subject from any other perspective than the one of the writer and with unnecessary and undeserved respect in order to be taken seriously and to affirm the idea that one is dealing with reality.
The refusal to believe sexual tales written by high class hookers is nothing more than the denial to women the power to transgress and to violate willingly the sacred without it being the fruit of a impregnation by a phallus, which at one point or another dominated and conquered them. What bothered Jean Genet was that he couldn’t imagine that a woman could be his equal or the equal of Sade because to him, women followed and didn’t violate the laws of Nature because they were, as Baudelaire stated famously, natural thus abominable. Thus, the question of credibility is purely one of gender, prejudice, and societal norms. People have never really focused on the credibility of Sade’s Justine or Genet’s Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs. The sex within those works although it is transgressive is considered serious because its depravity is sublimated by its masculinity and because the laws of nature which make it possible for sexual male fantasies to be considered serious in themselves, believable, and thus worthy to become part of the readers’ reality.
Because I don’t worship sex and because I don’t believe that it is serious in itself, I am neither obsessed nor bothered by the memoirs of prostitutes whether they are the work of males or females, high class or low class people, or believable or unbelievable. However, what interests me is the realization that I live in a time when both women and men are willing to make sex about morality and something grand when it becomes an instrument used by women and mastered by women writers who don’t give a damn about what others think.
