It’s the same the whole world over
Zenga Longmore
LOVE FOR SALE: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF PROSTITUTION by Nils Ringdal Atlantic, £17.99, pp. 435, ISBN 1843543141 ✆ £15.99(plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 THE INTIMATE ADVENTURES OF A LONDON CALL GIRL by Belle de Jour Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 294, ISBN 0297847821 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Reviewing these books has provided me with a shameless opportunity of revealing my own murky past. I have, on two occasions, shared lodgings with both a lord and a lady of the night. Lady Night was an exquisite brownskinned, green-eyed Barbadian. The reason for her overnight absences, she explained, was a job as a night nurse in a private London hospital. This was true. However, I soon discovered (by means of odd phone calls and menacing kerbcrawlers) that her earnings were boosted not by tending her patients but their male relatives. Lady Night had been forced into her profession at the age of 14 by a Baron of the Night who had threatened to plunge her hand into a chip-fryer if she did not submit to his demands. Whenever she described the debasing requirements of her clients, she would weep. Every few months she fell helplessly in love with a ghastly man whose sole aim was to relieve her of her earnings. I was at a loss to fathom why she continued to practise her profession when pimpless. Her sole companion was me, who has never, so far as I can remember, attempted to deep-fry anyone’s hands.
Lord Night, with whom I shared a flat a year later, was a different kettle of fishnets. A Chinese transvestite, he was also most pleasing to the eye. He gloried in his profession, describing his antics with relish to my wide-eyed friends. At one time I half considered exposing his list of eminent regulars to a Sunday tabloid, but with fortunate timing I recollected my discreet, prudent disposition. Lord Night revelled in money and sex. Lady Night was fearful of both. The money she received for the sex she loathed was tossed to the nearest lover with hasty abandon. I made no attempt to penetrate the complex psyche of either of my flatmates. Even at the best of times, sex is fraught with barmy passions — unreasoned love, unreasoned hate, and all that — so how is anyone to make sense of sex that is sold?
Recently, two books have attempted to do so. Nils Ringdal’s heroic Love for Sale undertakes a global history of the world’s oldest profession (which, judging by the amount of age-old literature on the subject, must surely be writing about prostitution). The subtitle is slightly misleading, for the tune of this book is not a fanfare of strumpets, but rather a magical glide through the world of mythology, history and literature. Taken gently by the hand, we are introduced afresh to characters as diverse as Mary Magdalene, Nana and the beautiful Yu Hsuan-chi, a Chinese goddess of love. Sex-selling is neither universal nor found in all societies. Harlotry was thin on the ground in ancient Egypt before the seedy influences of Greece and Mesopotamia took hold. Herodotus claims that a Greek prostitute called Rhopopis was so successful in Egypt that she managed to build a pyramid from her earnings. Meanwhile, in Mesopotamia we run into temple prostitutes, tavern prostitutes, aristocratic prostitutes, high priestess prostitutes, royal prostitutes and goddess prostitutes. Mesopotamia appears to have been a country of disgruntled husbands and raddled women. By the time we meet the myriad sex-sellers of orgiastic ancient Rome, we are all but swooning with exhaustion and begging for mercy. Unrelenting, Ringdal leads us south to sub-Saharan Africa; we discover local chiefs offering their wives’ sexual services to 17th-century Dutch travellers in exchange for cash. On the whole, western-style prostitution was never a part of African tradition until the continent became colonised. Ringdal lays Africa’s moral decline on the influence of missionaries, claiming, ‘As a result of their campaign against polygamy, the number of socially superfluous women increased drastically. What were they to do?’ Well, in 1874, a handful of socially superfluous sinners in Dahomey earned a living in a brothel owned by a Wesleyan missionary named Pastor Peter Bernasko. Bernasko fathered 12 daughters with local women, the oldest of whom were set to work in their Holy Father’s bawdy-house. Ringdal hints that little more could be expected from the Church. In 14th-century Europe the Church’s double standards regarding prostitution created the foundation for a new source of ecclesiastical income:
In 1309, Bishop Johann of Strasbourg himself built a brothel. It yielded double profits: first from the sale of sex, and thereafter in fines levied upon the guilty. All the clergy in Strasbourg enjoyed the new and modern bordello — some openly, as clients, others in the course of their moral inspections — while the profits were shared.
In India, it was the Brahmin priests who received the proceeds from the work of the Hindu temple prostitutes. Parents were known to offer their firstborn girl to a temple in a bid to please the fertility goddess who might send them a boy the next time around. Temple prostitution is still in full blossom in southern India, as are selfcastrated eunuchs. Self-castrated! Oh horror! There is quite a bit of oh-horroring throughout this journey into whoredom as we encounter Korean sex slaves in Japan during the second world war, the white slave trade, and the cruelty of the modern American police force towards streetwalkers. But then we are whisked away to Nanaland where we are privileged to revisit whores in books such as Fanny Hill and Tom Jones.
Love for Sale is simply written and simply fascinating. What Ringdal is unable to explain to us, however, is how prostitutes feel about their bodies being violated by anyone who is willing to pay. This is where Belle de Jour should come in handy. Belle de Jour has created quite a name for herself — or rather she hasn’t because she refuses to reveal her true identity. Purporting to be a middle-class, bookish call girl, she has written a diary chronicling her exploits. The problem is that, from the very first sentence it dawns on us that her book is just as deluded as the fantasies of her imaginary clientèle. Call me a sceptic if you will, but I suspect Ms de Jour to be a secret, obscure chick-lit author who is using anonymity as a bait to secure recognition. If only her adventures were as robust as Tom Jones’s, we would eagerly swallow any amount of hoodwinkery, but her diary meanders in a plotless wasteland.
The parts where she is not call-girling are obviously authentic — only real life can be that dull. She has a collection of male friends known only by their initials, N, A1, A2 and A3; lifeless phantoms who blend into one another in a confused blur. The reader is required to wade through dense descriptions of summer frocks, stiletto heels and lipstick shades before arriving at the saucy episodes, only to find them gate-crashed by unwelcome intellectual affectations. For example:
The client stood, trousers off. I sat in a chair in front of him. My shirt (white, as requested) was half unbuttoned. ‘I want to write my name in come all over you,’ he said.
I smirked. ‘You can’t fool me, you nicked that line from London Fields.’
He looked at me strangely. Oh no, I thought. Better watch my mouth.
‘Amis fan?’ he said idly....
‘He’s not bad,’ I said, reaching into my shirt to pull my breasts free of the bra.
‘Time’s Arrow was pretty tricksy though.’ And so is Belle. We are invited to gawp at her antics involving men, women and various man-made objects, but we are prohibited from gleaning an insight into how she feels about her clients. Does she possess the burning shame of Dostoevsky’s Sonya? Or does she glory, Nanaesque, in her power?
Belle makes no attempt to convey the convoluted emotions a genuine call girl would feel. Like the Happy Hooker, who also turned out to be a hoax, Belle’s whoring is a jolly lark. I simply refuse to believe that prostitution can be performed in a spirit of bland joviality. Whoredom should not mean boredom, not in books, anyway. Fictional scarlet women have a duty to arouse and excite their readers. After all, we’re paying for their services.
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