Ho-time: Cable Channel Hard-Sells Belle du Bore
Everybody’s simply fascinated with young, sexy prostitutes! But a new series imported from Britain makes the job seem … rather humdrum
When news broke that Eliot Spitzer had been patronizing a high-class prostitute, one thing everyone seemed to want to know was what, exactly, he’d asked his call girl to do. It was “unsafe,” in the words of “Kristen,” a.k.a. Ashley Alexandra Dupre—but could that have been an excuse she fabricated in hopes of unloading an undesirable client? Speculation was all over the map, from unprotected sex to anal to dangerous S&M to wearing socks in bed (not unsafe, sure, but certainly annoying). For a few days there, as we marveled over the amount of money earned by the girls at Emperors Club VIP and wondered over their wealthy clients and envied Ms. Dupre’s Flatiron apartment, hookers were on the brain. Are their lives better or worse than ours? At the top end, at least, their jobs actually sounded more like dating than whoring.
And here’s the problem with Showtime’s auspiciously timed new series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl. As it follows Belle, a high-class London hooker who professes to “love sex” and therefore love her job, the show sanitizes hooking so much that a young woman might wonder why she even bothers trying to have another career. For Belle, whose real name is Hannah, being a prostitute means having tons of free time; a fabulous flat; a salary over 100,000 pounds (!!!); and entree to the luscious clubs and bars of London reserved only for the fabulously wealthy. Sure, she is required to have sex with her clients, or at least come close to it (more on that shortly), but please: This is 2008. Sleeping together on the first date? Not so scandalous. Belle is a professional fake-dater more than she is a whore.