Do you want the truth or something Beautiful?
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare
Escorting, whoring, courtesanry is a well told tale. The contemporary iteration? It goes like this: the scene, a TV Channel with it origins it in the late 80s, pilfering low rent claims on reality…snapshots of the life of badly behaved dogs, celebrities from the 80s trying their hand at nude pottery, and the ‘secret’ life of hookers. Or swingers. Foot kissers. Drag ‘artistes’. The plot? Perhaps a middle aged Madame from Wakefield in M&S part-cashmere, performing warped cheeriness to glaze a cold cavity of sociopathy. Perhaps a pretty single mum with three kids and at a lost look in her eyes to match her unwarranted chronic deficit of self confidence, an insecurity she is sure stripping will cure her of. Or a plump, emerald haired student bubbling with ill-advised idealism, draped on an Ikea chaise, seductively sucking on sherry trifle for a wonky webcam.
They are going to delve us into the deep, murky mystery of the elusive sex industry, for the first time ever! Tell the never told story. Bust it right open. Deliver a lightening shock to a Protestant middle England that has been otherwise soothed by Earl Grey tea, Delia’s hard boiled eggs. Elgar. Snoozy Sunday services.
All apart from the fact that middle England has long been up to its testicles in suburban filth, on the secret. So much so that the sexy French call sadomasochism ‘the English disease.’ And in any case, they have seen all these bits dozy dozens of times before. They aren’t saying, “People have sex you say? Sometimes for money? Well butter my crumpets!” Or if they are, it’s only because they suffer from the other British disease, chronic verbal repetition. Saying the same stuff over again because our society is old, the people who run it can’t be bothered to innovate and make new culture and Brits are too polite to make a fuss.
This so-called ‘reality TV’, is an intellectually lazy, emotionally manipulative, follow the money, version of a documentary, which has the double edge of both casting a sterile and dishonest eye on the so-called ‘truth’. And my assumption is that, such as their popularity exists, it is so because some people enjoy laughing, sneering or gossiping at, and about, other people. Sometimes vulnerable people. Sometimes people they assume are invariably beneath them and enjoy having that prejudice proved. Sometimes people they are frightened might be better than them and enjoy seeing them bought to heel.
For a time, British escorting forums would get hit up by TV producers giving us the fantastic opportunity to tell ‘our’ story. Sardonic hookers replied, “again? And will you be paying us this time? No budget? Could it come out of your salary perhaps...?” They got bored eventually, there is only so many times you can claim to be subversive and exposing for telling the same turgid story to the same disaffected audience. Now these forums get regular calls from chirpy humanities students wanting to involve us in their undergraduate dissertation scheme to decriminalise brothels and save us whorebags from purported pearl clutchers. Bless them.
I don’t blame the escorts and other sex industry ladies themselves for getting involved with these megaphoning moments. In their own individual lives the stigma of the sex industry is often keenly felt. Some suffer from isolation, utilisation and undermining. Women who’ll reject us lest we try to seduce their husbands (we won’t). Men who pretend to like us to try and use us for the money we apparently have in piles (we don’t) because such as it is, they think it isn’t justly gained (it is).
Thus, some escorts welcome the pseudo-opportunity to explain their industry or present themselves sympathetically. But TV producers can be sneaksters - shock horror - just like many bottom line, junk food journalists. It’s just never going to go well, and usually I would wager, it has the opposite intended impact.
Indeed, if we are viewed as a lowly being trying to persuade those who think that way, that it is otherwise, will only serve to validate their arrogant belief that their opinions are important, thus, they are important, which consequently validates their idea that you are their lesser. Pleading for acceptance is putting yourself on trial to a self appointed Judge who has no moral right to decide you have committed a crime and no jurisdiction to arbitrate on your sentence. Why give them the satisfaction? Abuse therapists, for much the same reason, often council their clients to not rise to the distortions that their former partner/friend/parent will spread; don’t counter the gossip, don’t try and fend off the smears. Anyone who wants to accept you and trust you are a good person will… anyone who doesn't, that’s their loss, they missed a trick. To grasp for a well squeezed idiom: the best revenge is living well.
But women in particular can often feel the need to gain approval, to be liked, to be accepted. We struggle with non-conformity, we find it hard to know that people see us badly, don’t like us, judge us, believe false things about us. Its hard to not notice that its often single women, promiscuous women, fat women, and other types of women with a challenge posed to their social value, who often plead their case, in the way men of the same genus don’t waste their breath. Quite rightly. Partly because women are often given ‘a harder time for the same crime’. Partly because we are, by nature or nurture, more concerned to ‘get along’ with people than to be happy with ourselves. But all this special pleading against stigmas just risks making us ever more vulnerable to the kangaroo court.
Par example. In an early episode of Sex and the City, sex writer, Ms Carrie Bradshaw is offered the opportunity to participate in a magazine column that she thinks will be called Single and Fabulous! It is set to curb the myth that single women in their 30s (ahem) are sad rejects who could not find one single man who’d by happy to spend his life receiving their darned socks and cooked dinners. Probably because they are weird, ugly and have too strong an attachment to the feline species. But what’s wrong with any of those things anyway? Weird can be interesting, ugly can have character, cats make for calming companions. Even so, this single woman has money, a good sex life, a well stocked wadrobe, friends, freedom. She isn't the stereotype of the 'sad spinster'.
All the same, the column ends up being called Single and Fabulous...? The punctuation mark makes all the difference. As does the unflattering photo that accompanies it that Bradshaw had unwittingly posed for.
I imagine a similar thing occurred when two expensive London escorts signed up for a reality programme about their lives, now on Netflix, simply called Escorts. Two vibrant (though somewhat unreconstructed), young women making what seemed like a tidy living, were shot from oblique angles, lit in chiaroscuro and soundtracked by ominous music. For a time, embalmed by film, their life became that same question mark. Perhaps it was true? Maybe their lives were bleak. Maybe the TV producers came with an open mind and found melancholy. For Emily and Cookie at least. But how can one feel confident, when the stylisation was so clearly loaded with a view of placing these women from beneath the eyeline of the viewer? It is an especially moreish tidbit for a braying, narcissistic spectator: the opportunity to witness the dissembling of those social inferiors who have the temerity to hold no obvious self-loathing. Whores must be bought to heel, through laws, slurs, shock-doc agitprop.
None of it is a shock though, of course. Fact, fiction or floss, the story of prostitution has been told - god on stilts - thousands of times, its vintage is no doubt, Sumerian. For myself, I always prefer fictionalised versions of the story of prostitution. Fiction can be a pile of greasy dung, similarly. Or it can be a fantasy landscape that exercises our desires for glittering magpie excitement, vengeance against injustice or hot eroticised adventure.
It can offer a more humanistic insight into a character, how they think, why they do what they do, or did what they did. Psychologists logically propose the idea that, when it comes to ourselves, we see the nuances in our daily lives, the causes of our frailties and misdemeanours…whilst in others, we singularise and simplify. If we do something bad or foolish we say, “I did this because of all these reasons” and if someone else does something similarly inept we say, “They did something bad because they are a bad person”. Fiction has an ability to disarm this tendency, reality TV has a tendency to affirm it. Verisimilitude is when something fictional has the appearance of being real. The upshot of this kind of philosophical take on storytelling, is that things that exist in some surreal landscape can hide profound truths, and things that have the appearance of ‘realness’ can be riven with horse-waste.
Photography, the concentrated chemical underlay of reality television, is itself an oddly slippery witness. When we look at a photograph of someone we don’t know and have never met, we are seeing an unmoving, one/two dimensional image of a dynamic, three dimensional person. Our head walnuts are thus missing key information about what that person looks like, no matter how unfiltered the photograph is. We fill in the gaps intuitively, responsively. We suffer from a misleading sense of intimacy. When we meet the person, even if the photograph was not actively deceitful, we sometimes think, “gosh, you don’t quite look as I was expecting, and I don’t know why”. That is of course before we get to all the android-looking superimposed bunny noses and skeletal cheekbones that find their way on to dating applications. I’ll be honest, if you’re shocked when you show up to Nando's for your first date to find that your new beau was using filters in those pictures…well… you have consumed the lie as brazenly as they have told it.
On the other hand, sometimes a painting by a talented modernist artist can get to a kind of truth of how someone looks, who they are, how they felt at the time, more than populist photography. Even with big smudgy brush strokes, unreal colourscapes, and some random objects (a whistle, a parakeet, a pair of bloomers) floating about in the hither and yon.
Fantasy has its own veracity. Those silly bodice rippers about aging high-end dollymops suffering from impossible to satiate lusts for poor, rippled lotharioa. Those streetwalkers engaging in meet-cutes with dashing wealthy men who escape them from the hustle. Or those Renaissance courtesans manipulating their way around male aristocracies and theological orders… they can say more about what it means to be a human, a man, a woman, a whore, than any crud Channel 4 could shit out. Unreal fantasies can expose real feelings, yearnings, memories, dreams or the politics of our erotic lives and social classes, in the same way that the high drama of Greek tragedy, Italian Opera or Shakespearean farce will tell us more about humanity than some bit of !Shock Horror! in the tabloid presses.
Don’t get me wrong, kitchen sink dramas can be robust in how they detail the tone, aesthetic, dynamics of daily life and as such, can tell sharp, lucid tales about people, particularly people who otherwise seldom get a proper hearing. But they can’t get at the richness of human consciousness - the primordial soup, the lizard brain, the id, the ego, the animal, the child - that persists in us, that often motivates our ambitions, desires. ‘Real’ fictionalised dramas, often about poverty, crime, violence, are more compelling and authentic than ‘reality TV’, but all the same, they tend to treat human life as though we are only motivated from the without, not the within.
But reality TV doesn’t even get to the conscious level, it just voyeuristically glosses over the top. The emotional petrol that fuels the popularity of the sex industry is seldom exposed through underlit expositions of women in lacy bloomers telling their tale of wonder/woe, cross-cut with awkward male bodies with blurred out faces, sullenly extolling the vices of the bachelor life, any more than desire is revealed through over-glossed porn shoots. Pretty Woman, taken at face value, is utter fluff, but it knows that the lust to be a main character in an intense but improbable affair, which elevates both lover’s spiritual state …sustains many people daunted by life’s persistent tendency to disappoint. Secret Diary of a Call Girl skirts over many of the pitfalls of being a high class escort, but it gives a liturgy for the dream many young women have of living comfortably, autonomously and possibly within the bowels of the big city. One of my personal indulgences, Cheri (based on Collette’s novels about courtesans) is a clunky, but sumptuously shot elegy to the bitter sweetness of aging beauty. There is that earworm modern lullaby, “do you want the truth or something beautiful?” I’m not convinced those things are as mutually exclusive as they might seem.
