Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Pussy Peddling: Idealized

I finally caught "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" last night, in between bites of a dark-chocolate-marzipan Ritter bar. Anywayz... The premise of the show: A call girl named Belle de Jour (a reach-around to Buñuel) likes her work because, as she puts it, she likes to fuck and she likes money.

It's like a factory-farm butcher saying he likes his job because he gets to work with animals.

So let's not kid ourselves: The show is a romanticized version of a really fucked-up occupation. The notion that a hooker — one highly palatable Billie Piper — is cool with her career choice is the type of thing that makes us all able to sleep at night.

However, the character Hannah/Belle doesn't sit as cozily with her body-sellin' as the producers would like us to think. She says she loves her job because she likes to screw, but later, elaborates, saying, she loves her job because she doesn't have to be herself. There is a bit of dissociation going on. It isn't even her fucking at all. It's a character doing the sexy. In human parlance, we call this denial.

After a little wiki search, I discovered that Billie Piper has struggled with anorexia. This personal tragedy underscores for me the very public tragedy, and danger, of presenting hooking as something cool. Women disembodying themselves, both onscreen and off, should not be shot in soft focus.

The direct address is also tummy-owee-inducing, as it makes the viewer a complicit participant. No pure artifice here: We are all in this together! Brecht would be wet-dreaming the shit out of this were he alive.

Not to mention, this promo graphic:


Reminds me of this:


Having said all of this, I will probably watch another episode because a) it has some realistic sex scenes and b) the British accents are hella funny.

I never said I was a role model.

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