Speaker Profile – ‘Belle de Jour’ – Dr Brooke Magnanti
August 15, 2014 Blog Comments Off
“After leaving university, I applied for a number of jobs that I never got and watched my savings steadily dwindle. So when a friend gave me the phone number of a madam, I decided to become a call girl.” – extract from ‘The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl’
Belle de Jour, the infamous call girl working in London revealed her identity in 2009 as Dr Brooke Magnanti, a respected scientist, working in the fields of developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.
In 2003, Brooke was an American student in London, working on the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis. With London rent to pay, she was limited in the number of hours she could work on her overseas student visa, so when a friend gave her the number of a Madam, Brooke became ‘Belle’ – a £300 an hour call girl.
She anonymously diarised her call girl work, and its inevitable overlap with her personal life, in the blog, ‘Belle de Jour: Diary of a London Call Girl.’ Her candid portrayal of her call girl work scooped up a massive following of avid readers so it’s not surprising that just two years later, Belle came to the attention of a publisher. In 2005, ‘The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl’ was released and became a UK top 10 best seller, closely followed in 2006 by the ‘The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl.’ Belle climbed even further to fame in 2007, when played by Billie Piper in the TV programme ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’ which ran to four seasons.
At the height of Belle’s fame in 2009, Dr Magnanti went to The Sunday Times to break her anonymity after an ex-boyfriend placed a snide exposé in a tabloid newspaper claiming that she’d lied about working as a call girl. He presented his evidence, that she couldn’t have been an escort as she didn’t own nice enough clothes; When she found out a a journalist had trying to break into her office, Brooke took matters into her own hands, revealing her own identity and snatching away their headline grabbing expose.
Does she regret losing her anonymity? While she had protected her career as a scientist by separating Dr Magnanti from Belle she wrote this about anonymity for the BBC:
“Losing anonymity, if you’re alive when it happens, can be a double-edged sword for a writer. The risks a writer took when they chose anonymity don’t go away when they’re named. But it does expose them to the people who gave their words an audience.
… this has meant not only can I connect with like-minded folks, but I’m now also able to answer those critics who sneered I couldn’t possibly be real. That hasn’t put them off continuing to criticise, of course, but it’s great fun finally to be able to answer back.”
Brooke published her latest book as herself, not Belle, in a marvellous meeting of two worlds, which Belle is rather uniquely placed to do; she draws on her experience in the sex industry, examined analytically and rationally, as a doctor of science. She deconstructs the way hysteria and moral panic has lead to attitudes about sex that are factually baseless and lead to damaging moralistic judgements being heaped upon sex workers in ‘The Sex Myth: Why Everything We’re Told is Wrong.’
“Magnanti exposes the weak, even non-existent, evidence base for periodic moral panics surrounding sex. She dissects the factoid evidence on the new “disease” of sex addiction, the sexualisation of children, the way pornography humiliates women, the dangers of porn on the internet, the evils of prostitution and trafficking.” – Catherine Hakim, The Guardian
Dr Brooke Magnanti will be speaking at TEDxSalford 2014, on Sunday, October 5th, at the Lowry Theatre, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester. Make sure to register your attendance on our ticketing page.
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Rebecca River Forbes
For economy tokens I'm a UX consultant. The rest of the time I'm a writer (stories, blogs and a novel), bendy slinky yoga-ist, feminist, devourer of books, comfortable minimalist, raider of lost charity shops, creator of vegan food things, and travelling hobo.