STONE COLD HAVEN

Folklore has it that only 2 professions in the world can withstand anything thrown at them – whether it’s the mother of all economic recessions, a world war, or a once in a lifetime occurrence of that infamous and elusive force majeur principle – an act of God. Yup! You’ve got it – prostitution and running funeral services.

They’re the only two professions that have withstood the test of time. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the tax authorities can easily be your new found best friend if you register your sole trading vocations as funeral services and sheltered adult entertainment services. It’s the combination that’s a killer – the revenue folks don’t flag up each of them in isolation.

I even remember a story a few years ago in the famous Kondele area of Kisumu City. There was a chap who religiously attended church every Sunday and vociferously prayed to God to bless his business and ensure that there’s always a ready stream of customers. You see, this chap was the most successful coffin maker in the area, and most definitely a believer in the school of thought that unconventional and diversified marketing, if carried out with discipline and without fear, can yield incredible results.

It’s not surprising then, that the oldest profession in the world has caught onto the most popular phenomenon of latter day citizen media – this here blogosphere of ours. I think it’s safe to say that residents of the local stiff house will never take advantage of the wi-fi provision in their guest house facility, though I’d hazard a guess that you’ll find a mortician or two blogging away to pass time while literally doing the graveyard shift. No, no – I’m talking here about prostitution getting the most high profile attention any blog in the world will want.

Until this week, the biggest and most sought after secret of the blogosphere was the identity of Belle du jour, a high class £300 an hour London call girl who anonymously blogged about her exploits in the sex industry. Her blog – The Diary of a London Call Girl – was a witty, matter of fact kind of blog about her experiences with her punters that whilst not necessarily explicit, left very little to the imagination.

From the time her blog (which unsurprisingly has been moved offline was chosen by the Guardian Newspaper as the best blog of 2003, the literary world and the tabloid and mainstream press set out on a mission to identify and flush out the person behind the blog. There were even claims that the blog was a work of fiction by some professional writer, or that it was written by a man.

Belle du jour, eventually unmasked herself to the Sunday Times in fear that an ex-boyfriend was about to cash in on one of the best kept literary secrets of all time. Now known as Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist in cancer and epidemiology at a Top Bristol hospital for children, she admits that she worked as a prostitute for 14 months to pay her way through graduate medical school.

Her exploits as Belle du jour also earned her a neat cushy income with 2 biographical type books based on her blog and work as a prostitute, and a novel classified as fiction, as well as a TV series based on the life and times of Belle – who was played by a famous actress Billy Piper. Until this week, only Billy Piper had met Dr. Magnanti when familiarizing herself with the role before doing the TV show. Even her publishers Orion had no clue who she was.

Flat-backing your way through school is not a new phenomenon (well, maybe writing about it and publishing a couple of books is a bit different), but the truth is that if you look at most if not all the universities around the world, you’ll find a story to tell. It’s like one of them taboo things that folks don’t speak about – but it’s the white elephant in the room. The methods of payment may vary for most students trying to pay their way through school, and these range from favours, to rent payments, to good old fashioned hard currency. In recent times, many have resorted to publicly auctioning their virginity to pay their way through school.

You could always make a moral argument about whether flat-backing is a sign of an industrious and entrepreneurial spirit, or whether it’s just pure ole exploitation of girls who are desperate to change the course of their lives by daring to aim for the best careers. A good friend of mine I went to college with saw it totally different – “Pragmatic mi old chap, pragmatic” she used to say.

While I understood her reasons for doing it, my only gripe with her was that as a Business student, she was short-changing herself. It’s the classic business conundrum of how to build equity by not committing yourself too much. My argument with her was that if she turned tricks herself, her body could only let her work a finite amount of hours. However, if she got a customer willing to pay £100 an hour to tap arse, and gave someone else £70 to do it, she could better spend her time pimping and building equity. If she had 4 girls working in one hour, she’ll break even and some, and she didn’t even need to stare at the ceiling and think of the Queen.

LOL! Stop looking at me like that. The girl simply asked me for my advice. I was just thinking of the quickest way she could pay her way through school and finish paying off her student loans.

But seriously – like with anything in life, there’s a nasty side to the game. For those like Dr. Magnanti, it probably is a happy ever after story and she’s got her PhD and working in a cushy job (with a few bob also from her books and TV show).

For millions of other girls and women, prostitution is a means of survival and will never be a glamorous affair or the stuff of Hollywood. It was only in September that I wrote about the exploitation of children in Mombasa in We’re not going to hell, we already live in it.

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Posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Filed underCall it lifestyle, This thing called society.
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