The Most Famous Courtesans of All Time: Belle de Jour

In The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, Dr. Brooke Magnanti first starts off by introducing herself as a “whore”, but not in a metaphorical sense, she explains – she is literally a “whore”. Between the summer of 2003 and the autumn of 2004, Magnanti, also known under the pseudonym of Belle de Jour, kept a blog-journal of her day-to-day activities as an escort.  She then adapted and published this web series as a book, which became a resounding success.

Her style of narrative as well as her candour in writing the journal quickly gained Magnanti thousands of fans. Following the first book, which was released in 2005, she went one to write The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl. Her volumes were even adapted for television in the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

Magnanti did all this anonymously, under the call name Belle de Jour, a pun on the French belle de nuit, which translates into “lady of the night”. However, in 2009, fearing that her identity was going to be revealed, she decided to come out on her own. Magnanti not only revealed her real name, but the fact that she was a child health scientist.

Belle de Jour's work colleagues had only been informed a month prior. Her publishers had been out of the loop as well until a week before The Sunday Times gave away the author's real name in an interview, Magnanti being 34 years old at the time. Even her parents only found out that weekend. Paul Gallagher from The Guardian described it as “the new millennium’s equivalent of the 1980’s search for the golden hare.” Very few people knew about her real identity before 2009, only her accountant and agent knew for sure, so speculations multiplied over the years, and Magnanti easily became one of the decade’s most well kept secrets.

Belle de Jour claims to have worked as an escort for a little over a year at a £300 per hour rate, for one of London’s escort agencies. She made her debut in the industry for financial reasons, after submitting her PhD thesis. And if there’s ever any doubt in your mind that escorts can be hot and smart, then just take a look at Magnanti’s thesis title: Macrobioinformatics: the application of informatics methods to records of human remains. Now that’s a mouthful!

Brooke Magnanti is living proof that sex workers are gravely misunderstood in our day and age. She started working in the industry out of necessity, it’s true, but she felt no pang of remorse or guilt for it. She did it consciously, openly, and even transformed it into a source of creativity and a research topic. She went on to publish The Sex Myth in 2012, a nonfiction popular science volume on the sociology of sexuality, which covered the fabrication of sex myths and sexual politics.

Escorts just became a lot more fascinating, haven’t they?