belle de jour and other blogs

Years ago, I got hooked on a salon.com series called Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Callgirl. It was a fictionalized account of a working girl's life, based on the experiences of the author (Tracy Quan-- a writer/activist who actually WAS a sex worker at one time.) I used to check everyday to see if something new had been put up. It was a pretty regular thing until Tracy Quan decided to turn the series into a book-- which I have yet to read.

Last week at a publisher's panel, they brought up the subject of this book called Belle de Jour which was (drumroll...) the diary of a callgirl in London. What was intriguing about it though, was that this book started out as a blog (you can still check it out: http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/). And when I checked it out, i found a string of links to other 'callgirl blogs', sex escapade blogs, sex worker blogs... I kept clicking and clicking from one link to the next. I shouldn't have been so surprised-- with all the porn on the net and the compulsive confessional nature of blogs, it makes sense that people would share their sex lives on the net. And it makes sense that there would be intense curiosity about the lives of women who choose to earn a living on sex when they are neither destitute nor hooked on drugs. My friends and I like to read about geishas and courtesans. Are these contemporary counterparts or crude modern day wannabe's?

What I find equally interesting is that the woman who wrote belle de jour may not be a call girl but an aspiring writer. There's all this fuss from people who feel that they've been duped. I love it. She may not be a real puta-- but in spirit.