Why do so many modern women think being a sex object is cool?
by ROSIE BOYCOTT – More by this author » Last updated at 21:33pm on 25th September 2007
Comments (4)
My street in West London used to be run-down, in an area which would definitely have once been described as dodgy.The boom of recent years has seen my street move up the property ladder, the rough pub on the corner has been replaced by a faintly fashionable restaurant and the corner shop is now a distinctly upmarket pet emporium, selling dog collars which cost around £100.
But one thing hasn’t changed: at the end of the street, any hour of the day or night, there’s generally a hooker or two, plying their dangerous trade on the corner, waiting for men to pull up in their expensive cars, in need of ‘relief’ in the form of quick, casual sex.
Scroll down for more…
Billie Piper in The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl
Even if the women are still young, their faces are lined, their complexions pasty through too many cigarettes and – I’m sure – through heavy drug use. They all, without exception, look sad and defeated by life.
Just the other day, I was standing in the kitchen with my 24-year-old daughter, when she suddenly pointed across the street at a house, which is being refurbished and thus covered in scaffolding.
One of the street prostitutes had just walked through the rusty gate and descended the steps into the small basement yard, followed by a young man. Ten minutes or so elapsed and they re-appeared. He went one way, she walked off back to her position on the corner of the big road. Business had swiftly been concluded. It makes me shudder to think of it.
It is impossible to imagine that any one of these women entered ‘the game’ out of free choice. Yet according to Belle, the heroine of the new eight-part ITV series, The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, which starts on Thursday, she loves sex and money and so prostitution was a natural career choice.
The series is based on the life of ‘Belle de Jour’ – the pseudonym of a high-class prostitute – who launched an internet blog in 2003, detailing her daily adventures with men who paid her for sex.
So successful was the blog that two books were subsequently published, both best-sellers.
Controversy always followed Belle: was this in fact total fantasy (possibly even written by a man) or was this the real thing? Belle claimed to be a young woman in her early twenties, a university graduate who had failed to find a job which satisfied her need for entertainment and sufficient funds to meet her love of clothes, jewels, smart apartments and bling.
The series opens with Belle – played by Billie Piper, who to me looks young enough to still be going to school – explaining some of the tricks of her trade. “Why do I do it? I love sex and money. I enjoy the sex. I’m lazy. I’m my own boss. I love the anonymity. I’m the expensively dressed woman you see gliding across the hotel lobby – fabulous but forgettable.”
As Belle explains at greater length in her book, “granted I’m meant to f*** them regardless of whether they’re covered in hairy moles or have a grand total of three teeth … but it’s better than watching the clock until the next scheduled tea break in a dismal staff room.”
And as the series goes on, the truth of Belle’s words is seemingly borne out. She spends her life visiting men in flash hotels or entertaining them on her opulent bed, strewn with silks and satins.
The men she meets aren’t even that hairy (some are extremely good looking, in fact the type any girl would be happy to date). They are all pleasant to Belle.
The first one, a farmer, wants her to talk dirty about horses and stables while they have sex, the second wants oral sex, the third – a Russian billionaire – wants to take her to a kinky party where she’ll be fancied by other men because it turns him on to be in possession of a coveted woman.
It’s all clothes, easy sex, sexy underwear and lots of shots of Billie Piper getting dressed and undressed, lying on her bed and looking out of the window clad only in her lacy knickers. At the end of each day, she has a pleasing stash of bank notes to pay into her account. So, a carefree life. Heavens – if I didn’t know better I might find myself suggesting to my own (newly graduated and still unemployed) daughter that she gives up the tiring and painful process of sending out her CV to prospective employers and goes on the game.
If you were to believe the world of Belle, it’s one of the best career moves for a young girl with her heart set on making money in an easy way. There’s just one problem with all this: it’s nonsense – insidiously dangerous nonsense that should shame the TV makers and publishers behind the Belle phenomenon.
On set: Billie in costume as a prostitute
Just last year, the country was rocked by the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich. They were all young – about Belle’s age – and the grim picture that emerged then of life on the street is, in reality, a lot closer to what prostitution means.
There are an estimated 80,000 people involved in selling themselves through prostitution in the UK. Five thousand of them, at any one time, are children. Three out of four are women.
Some 75 per cent of the women started selling themselves for sex when they were under 18 and most of the teenage prostitutes work on the streets – on their own, without any protection – and their lives are said to be ten times more dangerous than girls who work from houses and flats.
Many of these young girls have run away from home, found themselves on the streets and turned to selling themselves as the only way to earn a few quid and, in many cases, to support drug habits.
In a survey entitled Uncovering Women’s Inequality In The UK, issued earlier this year from the Women’s Resource Centre, 74 pc of the women cited poverty, the need to pay household expenses and support children as the main reason they became sex workers.
A career choice? A pleasant way to make a living? Hardly. Of all the women, 95 per cent have drug or alcohol problems. Of 100 women who were arrested in London’s King’s Cross in 2001 – a notorious red light district – 53 used heroin and 73 used crack cocaine. Almost half of these women were either homeless or living in temporary accommodation.
Of 115 prostitutes questioned in one study, 81 per cent had experienced some sort of violence, half had been slapped, punched or kicked, 37 per cent had been robbed, 28 per cent had suffered attempted rape and 22 per cent had actually been raped. In London, prostitutes are 12 times more likely to be killed than ordinary women.
That is the reality of this unhappy business in modern Britain, but you won’t find it in the world of Belle de Jour. Three minutes into the new series, the camera pans across what, to me, is a very familiar landscape.
It turns out that, by coincidence, the TV Belle lives right round the corner from where my daughter and I watched that sad prostitute, so desperate to earn her living that she had to clamber down broken steps into a rubble-filled basement to cater to the sexual urges of a stranger in return for a handful of notes.
But in Belle’s world, all is beautiful, the men wouldn’t lay a finger on her and it’s champagne, fast cars and flash restaurants all the way.
Extraordinarily, the series has been written and produced by a team of women. Producer Chrissy Skinns says that it is important that “the writers of the show are all women, talking about prostitution from the female point of view.
“This goes some way in challenging any accusation that it could be titillating. We want people to see Belle in a true, honest light without being apologetic for her. This is a view of womanhood without objectifying it or, on the other hand, being adulatory.”
Their research, she assures us, was extensive: “Yann, the director, and Greg, the designer, visited a fetish festival looking for interesting props. When we came to shoot an episode about S&M, a dominatrix came on set and explained the safety elements, where not to hit a client and how to walk on a man wearing stilettos.” How reassuring to know.
Skinns concludes that The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl reveals a fascinating world which you never see on TV in quite this way – “it’s a long way from murdered hookers in detective shows”.
At least that part of her feeble justification rings true: the reality of prostitution is a million miles from the soft-porn world of Billie Piper, who presents us with precisely the view of prostitution that men have always wanted to believe: that the women enjoy it and are there for their pleasure.
In commercial sex, successful prostitutes must not only perform whatever their clients wish, they’re also there to bolster egos and reassure men about their performance.
Recent research by the London Metropolitan University into the abuse of women found that while men who pay for sex understand that it is just an illusion, the act also shores up their masculinity. Even if women do get rich out of prostitution, it can never represent any form of sexual equality.
Yet, the makers of The Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, and the women who run soft porn mags, or who go pole dancing, all seem to believe that their full-on engagement with raunchy sex is both empowering and in some way liberating. I would beg to differ.
A series like this turns women into sex objects: regardless of whether it is written by women or by men, it perpetuates the myth that women’s prime reason for living is to service the wishes and desires of men.
This isn’t liberation, it’s a new form of enslavement, born, I believe, out of the desire to look trendy in our modern world.
How can anyone believe that imitating a stripper (or a hooker), a woman whose job is to initiate arousal in men, is going to make us either more liberated or more equal? Women today can do everything-a man can do: run for President, serve in the Army, play football at an international level (the fact that we can also be mothers is the greatest added bonus). So why does this new generation seem so enthusiastic about stripping off for the delectation of men?
Because, in the weird world of the battle of the sexes, being raunchy has become the new chic, a way of throwing off the remaining blue-stocking elements that stick to feminism, as though these make a young woman out of touch and old-fashioned.
That’s why we’ve come to this pass with the slick new production of Belle de Jour – in the 21st century it’s cool to be a prostitute.
Forget the amorality, the sad, soulless sexual congress. She makes money and goes to nice bars – and in this day and age that makes her an object of envy.
But the fact is that women doing this to themselves is no sort of triumph. It’s sad, degrading and downright depressing.
But what it made me think was this: when I was 19, I got my first job on an underground newspaper called Frendz.
It was the end of the swinging Sixties and everyone was – literally – having a ball.
People had sex with people they’d just met, often with people they barely knew the name of: to refuse marked you out as stuffy and old fashioned, still a part of the older generation who were not “tuning in and dropping out”.
We went along with it for a while, outwardly pretending that having lots of sex made us trendy and cool, but inwardly nursing our worries: what did sex without love really mean, wasn’t this all just a little sad and lonely?
Then one day, a group of us got together and said: “Enough’s enough. Liberation is only working for the blokes – and we’re just the patsies.”
We started meeting regularly and decided to start a magazine, which reflected all these concerns. We called it Spare Rib. I suspect that history may soon repeat itself.
Sexuality is a wonderful thing, part of being human and in touch, but it is complex and shouldn’t be treated lightly. Women have always deserved better than to be treated as objects of men’s fantasy – today just as much as then.
It’s obvious the Mail has wheeled out Boycot yet again in order to generate a fuss over Diary Of A Call Girl and to whip up outrage from their middle England readers.
Looking at the comments below her article from Mail readers it’s clear they’ve already done that. Here’s one well informed example….
Finally someone has spoken out about the reality! I am shocked to see that programs like this are even allowed on TV! The glorification of the demeaning of women to the point of being objects. Sadly, so many people will only see the fast cars and the money and the ‘gentle’men.
Notice the faking of concern for women’s rights. More like just being pissed off that “this sort of filth” is allowed on TV.
Excactly the kind of reaction the Mail want to provoke from their readers.
Spoken about the reality? Oh so TV only shows prostitution as good and safe does it?
And we don’t reckon this guy’s seen the programme! Just believe what you read in the Daily Mail, that’s right!
As for Boycot we wonder if she’s become the Mail’s official spokesperson on women’s rights.
She’s all for women’s rights and freedom…but not for them to do things she doesn’t approve of. Ie: anything to do with sex.
Lol!
Jacqui Smith wants an end to binge drinking and its ‘glorification’ on TV
Alcohol featured in 18 per cent of scenes in Channel 4’s Hollyoaks, a survey shows – and the Home Secretary thinks it should stop
TV shows such as East Enders should not glorify drunken behaviour, Jacqui Smith has said.jpg)
On Monday 8 October 2007 the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill is to have its Second Reading in the House of Commons. This Bill includes provisions to make the possession of certain categories of extreme pornography illegal. .jpg){kind=small}
PLEASE EMAIL YOUR MP TO MAKE YOUR VIEW KNOWN. IT IS VITAL THAT WE LET MP’S KNOW HOW IMPORTANT THIS ISSUE IS. 
Comments (8)
