Once in a while, some girl friends and I have what I like to call “lost weekends,” when we just hole ourselves in a room full of DVDs and food and talk about random stuff. This weekend was another one of those.
We usually stay at the house of one of the girls in our group, but it wasn’t free this weekend so we opted to do a fondue night in a hotel room instead of the all-night baking/eating event that often characterizes our weekends. Armed with melted cheese and chocolate, chips, fresh fruit (Driscol strawberries are made of pure awesome) and several bottles of champagne, we popped in the “Secret Diary of a Call Girl” and got ready for a night of gorging and viewing.
Belle/Hannah Baxter and the real-life "Belle du Jour," Brooke Magnanti
The series, by the way, is not for the faint of heart. There’s a whole lot of sex and semi-nudity (it is, after all, about a high-class London prostitute), but it manages to be funny and heart-wrenching at times. The show is on its third season—season one is the most interesting so far, because season two is too heavy (literally and figuratively; Billie Piper, who plays the lead, was apparently pregnant when she filmed the second season). We didn’t get to finish season three because we wanted to eat real food so we headed to Little Tokyo for katsudon and takoyaki balls.
However, curiosity got the best of me and I did a quick search on Google on the book/TV series and consequently, their real-life inspiration. Brooke Magnanti was apparently completing her doctoral studies in macrobioninformatics when she became a £300-an-hour prostitute. (On a side note, that part about her resorting to sex work to get through post-graduate studies in London is Not. Encouraging. At. All.)
Her books (The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl) detail her days as a prostitute. I haven’t read them yet, and I heard that the TV series is heavily fictionalized, but I just found it interesting how Magnanti was able to compartmentalize her life as a willing sex worker and as a science researcher. Magnanti is apparently a research associate in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology at Bristol University’s Centre for Nanoscience and Quantum Information; I mean really, that isn’t anywhere near the concept of sex workers in the Philippines (a.k.a., Quezon Avenue standbys).
I’m still having a hard time reconciling the image of a sex worker with a nerdy doctor. But then again, a friend told me that during the time he worked in New York as a maître d’, he had a co-worker who was a dominatrix when she wasn’t working as a waitress. Another told me that he had a classmate in university who worked as a GRO by night. I guess it’s not as abnormal as we all think it is; also, who are we to judge other people, anyway?
On a lighter note, Billie Piper was a teenage pop star who came out with a single, “Because We Want To.” I remember being really irritated by the song back in grade school. Funny how she’s doing much better as an actress—and by playing a sex worker, no less (bet she didn’t expect that back in her bubblegum pop days).
Because We Want To!
(Day 10, 30-Day Blog Challenge. I didn’t post yesterday because I had zero Internet access, so I’m letting myself off the hook for that one. But I’m posting two for today).
