14
Sex in the twenty-first century
As I wandered around the West End retracing the footsteps of the Victorian ‘Cyprians’ in Burlington Arcade, Megan’s rallying cry rang in my ears. She was not going anywhere. Or at least she was not intending to go far from her present flat in Mayfair. And neither were thousands like her. There would always be prostitution in London, just as there would be many other expressions of sexuality, and it seems reasonable that the girls get the protection and support they need from the authorities, rather than having to rely on pimps; they obviously provide a much needed service and deserve better conditions than those poor wretches we met at the beginning of the book, shivering on the Bankside in their chains.
One thing that our sexual odyssey of London over the past two millennia has proved to me is that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they remain the same. As we emerge, blinking, into the sunlit uplands of the twenty-first century it is tempting to believe that we have progressed. Away with sexual guilt, priggish repression and Victorian Puritanism! With the advent of Sigmund Freud, Marie Stopes and the torrent of sex manuals which their disciples unleashed upon the world, from Married Love to the unintentionally hilarious Joy of Sex, and the sexual licence unleashed by two world wars, it might be reasonable to think that our secret sins and peculiar vices have disappeared in favour of briskly clinical couplings. Mercifully, nothing could be further from the case. London continues to yield its own rich crop of secret affairs, obscenity trials and sex scandals, every bit as byzantine as those of the preceding years. There will always be a boy in Piccadilly, leg hooked up on the wall behind him, indicating availability; there will always be a comely matron, prowling the Arcade, with a welcoming smile for the right man; or a slender brunette eyeing up a silver-haired old charmer. The bawds, the rogues, the villains and the beauties weave their eternal dance through London as they always did. These days, the Mother Needhams greet the trains at St Pancras; calculating pimps size up the trusting Scottish boys who arrive at Euston and are drawn, mothlike, to the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus; and resilient young women decide that lap-dancing or two years in a brothel represent a better way to fund their PhDs than yet another bank loan.
Such is the case of ‘Belle de Jour’, whose lucrative but short career in the oldest profession was made possible by that most recent phenomenon, the internet. With the advent of cyberspace, pornography took on a radical, electronic form, and proved impossible to control, eroding conventional methods of censorship. Prostitutes and writers of erotica were quick to seize on its potential and none more so than ‘Belle de Jour’, who first came to public attention in 2003 when she began to post her ‘Diary of a London Call Girl’. With a pseudonym derived from Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve as a bourgeois housewife who works in a brothel to relieve her ennui, ‘Belle’ soon built up an enormous fanbase.
Subsequently issued in book form and inspiring a television series, Diary of a London Call Girl represented a development in the history of sex, a collision between the world’s oldest profession and the latest technology. But the result was familiar enough, an attractive young woman confiding her exploits just as Fanny Hill had breathlessly narrated her adventures two centuries earlier. ‘Belle’ inspired a slew of imitators, a new genre of popular erotica untroubled by the harsh censorship which had plagued writers such as D. H. Lawrence; it is a sign of the times that one can purchase books with titles such as Confessions of a New York Call Girl at the supermarket alongside the weekly grocery shop. Many attempts were made to unmask ‘Belle’, and she had been variously suspected of being the author Toby Young, Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review and chick-lit writer Isabel Wolff. Finally, in November 2009, threatened with exposure by the Daily Mail, the real ‘Belle de Jour’ stepped forward in the glamorous form of research scientist Brooke Magnanti. Just as Cleland had written Fanny Hill to get out of debt, so Magnanti had worked as a high-class prostitute to subsidize her PhD in forensic pathology. Given the choice of £200 an hour on the game or a fraction of that wage working in a bookshop, Magnanti had chosen the more lucrative option; she also maintained that she had paid her taxes, so was not guilty of tax evasion. Magnanti’s employers took an enlightened attitude: while such a revelation might once have been a sacking offence, the University of Bristol stood by her, arguing that her past was not an issue.
Magnanti’s experience of the sex trade seems to have been a positive one; she has benefited and has moved on, just like Sarah Tanner, the Victorian prostitute interviewed by Arthur Munby in the 1850s who went into streetwalking as a professional venture, quit while she was ahead and opened a coffee shop out of the proceeds. Magnanti’s experiences seem to bear out the words of a young woman interviewed by Mayhew, who told him pertly that she wasn’t at all worried about what would become of her, and could marry tomorrow if she liked. Perhaps Dr Acton, the Victorian reformer, had been correct when he wrote that ‘once a harlot always a harlot’ was a myth.
But many commentators believe that there are also victims among the hard-working working girls, the twenty-first-century equivalents of the Roman sex slaves. Just a month before the unmasking of ‘Belle de Jour’ dominated the headlines, a moral panic broke out over sex trafficking. When government minister Denis MacShane appeared on Newsnight arguing that the new Policing and Crime Bill was necessary to prevent trafficking, fellow guest Niki Adams, of the English Collective of Prostitutes, challenged MacShane to produce one shred of evidence that women from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Far East were being brought into the United Kingdom to work as prostitutes. Adams’s scepticism at MacShane’s claims prompted an investigation by theGuardiannewspaper which concluded that not one single trafficker had been arrested during a six-month investigation into the sex trade and that trafficking had been overstated as one of the reasons women entered prostitution. Campaigners such as Niki Adams responded that the investigations into sex trafficking served no purpose and merely added to the demonization of young women, many of whom were mothers, and who had gone into prostitution because they had no other means of earning a living.1 For these women, prostitution was business as usual, ‘the oldest business in the world’, in the words of Megan from Shepherd Market.
And then there are the rest of us, the amateurs, seeking affirmation in the form of fast love, cruising, cottaging, passionate sex with a complete stranger, longing for the love of women, the love of men, searching for similarity and comfort and the satisfaction of physical and emotional needs. Sexual desire is the most basic of human impulses, the desire for the ‘little death’ (‘la petite mort’, or orgasm) which will distract us from the inevitable event, the hour of death that lies in store for every one of us. In the words of Andrew Marvell in his ‘Ode to His Coy Mistress’, it is our way of defying the tomb:
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.