The Anonymous Widower

Belle de Jour Comes Clean

I first came across Belle de Jour‘s blog in about 2005, when I was writing a book about the Internet.  I found it well-written, amusing and above all true.  But it is not something that I read regularly, as quite frankly I prefer real and proper relationships with women.  To me these are all about doing so many things together; seeing a film, enjoying a meal, having a walk on a beach, sorting out your mutual troubles, exploring interesting places and sharing a bed with all that entails.

Now she has decided to come clean in the Sunday Times.

She is a research scientist by the name of Dr. Brooke Magnanti.  In some ways this alone will upset the literary establishment, as scientists aren’t supposed to be able to write.  I’m a scientist/engineer and I was told at school that my writing was abysmal in every way.

In my life, I’d have three brushes with prostitution.  I should say that it was all on a purely non-sexual basis, as quite frankly, I want a proper relationship with a woman and I had one of those for more than forty years.  So if I have another relationship hopefully it’ll last an equally long time.  If I could achieve that it would take me past my century and I would love to do that!

I was in Boston in perhaps 1980 and I needed to take a taxi back to my hotel.  I got in one door and a very attractive lady a few years younger than me got in the other.  I said sorry and made to get out, but she stopped me and asked where I was going.  I said I was going to the Copley Plaza Hotel  and she said that would do her.  As we drove along, she was nothing less than honest and said that she was a hooker and would I like to enjoy her body.  I said no, but I was a stranger in the city and would she have a drink and perhaps lunch and show me the sights, as I had about four hours before a meeting.  It was the days before mobile phones and she said that she would have the lunch, but she’d have to phone her agency afterwards to see if she had any work.  I had a pleasant lunch and for perhaps an hour she showed me around the shops by the waterfront.  I did hear a lot of her life history and felt that with a bit of luck and without a rather nasty boy-friend, she’d have done well.  Perhaps she did sort herself out.  I hope she did. 

A few years ago, I needed financial advice and went to see a very eminent accountant.  He told me how he helped prostitutes do proper accounts, so that they could buy houses and eventually set themselves up securely.  I’ve mentioned this several times to other accountants and I’ve got a few knowing smiles, so perhaps this is not as rare as you think.  It’s certainly a better way to remove some of the worst aspects of prostitution.

But perhaps the most interesting brush happened a few months before I sold my first major company in 1985.  I was travelling to London on the train from Ipswich and I was sitting having breakfast in First.  Opposite me was a very well-dressed lady in perhaps her late forties.  You’d have said she was a lawyer or perhaps a secretary to the Chairman of a major company.  From about Manningtree she quizzed me about what I did and I told her how the company I had started with three others, had developed world-beating project-management software.  I said how we sold in about fifty companies world-wide and were very big in Norway, Australia, the United States, and the Far and Middle East.  It was about Chelmsford that she told me what she did.  She was a madam and fitted up companies with beautiful, intelligent girls to ease the pain of getting contracts agreed and signed.  Who’d have thought it?

So when people say that prostitution should be banned, there is absolutely no way, that the desired outcome will happen.  It is just too ingrained in society, business and life.

Dr. Magnanti has also proved that if you want to blog and be anonymous you can do it.  A little bit of scandal and sexual tittle-tattle may be one thing, but we’ll see blogs written from the inside of politics and other sensitive areas in the near future.  And the great and good, will be unable to stop or even censure them.

November 15, 2009 Posted by AnonW | News | Books, Prostitution | Leave a comment