I am Belle de Jour

Actually, sorry to dissapoint, but I'm not. And shall I tell you why? Because the infamous blog about a prostitute who loves her work, is a made up fantasy, by, I should hazard a guess, a middle aged Fleet Street hack with a rather active fantasy life, who probably has quite a varied experience in the arena of prostitution, i.e. in paying for it. Yes, believe it or not, there are actually men out there who believe that when prostitutes say: "Ooh, yeah, that feels so good!" that they actually mean it. Yes, I know it's incredible, but there you are.

The story that 'Belle de Jour' peddles is a little silly, at best. She says she left college, and, unable to get a good job, became a prostitute. I'm not sure why she didn't become a secretarial temp or get a job in telesales like every other graduate, but I'm sure Belle had her reasons. What happened was, she had always been able to compartmentalize and she also liked to have sex with strangers. Voila! A great idea dawned in her mind. She would become a prostitute! Now she could have the fun of having sex with strangers and make a packet out of it. What a gas! And soon she was writing a blog about all the fun she was having and publishing books and making a TV series about her true life sexploits. She was a little dissapointed when the buck toothed Billie Piper got the role as her, but what the heck, the money was rolling in.


Well, Ms. Robinson has said it in her blog today, that it is stupid to glamourize prostitution, and pure male fantasy. But what isn't fantasy is that I did dabble in the prostitution game for a bit at a dominatrixes. And before some of you judge me as a dirty minx, may I say for the record that I never touched any of these punters. I was mainly a voyeur, or 'the maid'. Well read all about it below. And if Ms. R finds that it glamorizes prostitution, well, Ms. R, I will take your punishment however you wish to dole it out, with whip or paddle, as you prefer.

Switch Bitch

My husband tells me he has a dry sense of humor, but sometimes it’s so dry I can barely tell it’s there at all.

Like today, somehow it came up in the conversation (don’t ask me to remember exactly how), that I said, “Do you ever think of divorcing me?”

And he, with a totally straight face, replied, “Yes, I think of divorcing you.”

“Really?” All I’m thinking is, oh God, he wants to get a divorce, and I’m going to have to get a job, probably somewhere really awful, like a pet grooming parlor, because I’m not really qualified for much else.

“Of course. When would you like to get divorced?”

“You mean it? Like, would I get custody of the children?”

“Of course not. They’d come to live with me.”

“I suppose you’d dig out all the skeletons in my closet so your lawyer could make a good case against me?”

“Divorce is a nasty business, of course I’d bring it all up, especially your stint as a prostitute.”

Gulp. “You’re having me on, right?”

“Of course I am.”

I let out an audible sigh of relief. “So you don’t want a divorce?”

“No, do you?”

“No, and I was never a prostitute. I just answered the phones in a brothel.”

“You still worked in a brothel,” he said, hurrying off, anxious, as usual, to have the last word.

But it got me thinking, however innocuous my job at a brothel, some eight years ago, was, it might look a lot different dressed up with bells and whistles in court.

The way it began was that my friend Mark, who works on an S&M magazine in London, said he had a job for me as a maid at a dominatrix’s parlor, was I interested? I was in between jobs (wasn’t I always?), so I said I’d take a look.

At a flat in Earl’s Court, I had a chat with Madame Giselle, a French woman in her early fifties, with pale waxy skin and dark penetrating eyes. I said I didn’t mind being her maid, as long as I didn’t have to get involved in the nitty gritty of the business. At this point I didn’t know what the nitty gritty involved, and when I did find out that a large part of her job involved sticking dildos up men’s backsides and then leaving them around the place disinfecting in buckets of bleach (the dildos, not the men), I was glad I’d voiced my objections early.

Out of both a sense of curiosity and a desire for easy money, I started working for her. The job entailed cleaning up the three zones: the class room for school/caning fantasies, the dungeon, and the trannie boudoir, where men slipped into boat sized stiletto heels and awful wigs on their transformative journey into womanhood. I also cleaned the bathroom, where men showered before going in to see the Mistress, and took calls from new clients who had found her number on one of the many printed cards that were stuck inside phone boxes. After giving them my most seductive spiel, they would usually book an appointment with the Mistress.

The job had several advantages. The hours were eleven to nine, and suited me down to the ground. No more feeling like a sardine on the subway in the rush hour! And no tax to pay on my income, either.

There was just one tiny problem.

Madame Giselle was nuts.

It turned out she was as new to the game as I was, and about as suited to being a dominatrix as I am to being a heart surgeon. Soon after I started working for her, a good looking middle aged man came to visit, plunging her into a tizzy of excitement. Mark had briefed me that this man was Geoff, a publisher who goes round London with a briefcase full of switches and canes several of his girlfriends in his lunch hour. So when Madame Giselle told me she wanted to be alone with Geoff, I left them to it in the dungeon. After he’d gone, she showed me the red welts on her backside, and said that while she didn’t enjoy being whipped, she deserved it because her ‘Master’ had deemed it necessary.

I know what you’re thinking, a submissive working as a dominatrix. It doesn’t make much sense, does it?

Mark told me that apparently, Madame Giselle had been a problem for Geoff for some time. He liked his girlfriends to know their place, i.e. bent over a stool exposing their naked posteriors. But Madame Giselle had become obsessed with Geoff, and had started hanging around outside his office, looking up at his window with big doleful eyes, for hours at a time. So in order to stop her trailing him, Geoff had convinced Madame Giselle that she’d have a whale of a time working as a dominatrix.

Turns out he was wrong. You’d think that earning ₤120 an hour for her services would have put a smile on her face. But all she was really interested in was waiting for the next time Geoff popped round with his briefcase full of switches.

Another problem with Madame Giselle was that she couldn’t see a thing without her glasses. Now, I’m not going to be prejudiced and say a blind person shouldn’t be working with whips and nipple clamps and hot wax in a near dark environment. All I’m saying is that I can’t imagine it was easy, and that it probably added an unnecessary level of strain to her already perilous sense of sanity. Plus, her not being able to see was a nuisance when weird old men turned up with scripts typed on old fashioned typewriters that they wanted acted out, like:

‘ALAN: I am a worm, a stinking greasy worm. Tread me under your heel, dear Mistress, and make me squirm. Oh Mistress, I am bad, treat me meanly. I deserve it!

MISTRESS: Shut up you miserable worm, until I tell you to open your mouth.’

It meant I had to read these scripts really quickly to her before she went in to deal with their worm fantasies, and frequently she’d forget the script and change the wording, which they didn’t like, not one bit.

Then there was the question of common sense. As in, Madame Giselle didn’t have any. Okay fine, if you want to lead a naked man around the flat on a dog leash and have me pet his head and tell him he’s a lovely dog, fine. But don’t take him into the garden (surrounded by numerous blocks of flats) in the depths of winter.

I don’t know if she actually knew that prostitution is illegal, but even I know that taking naked men for walkies in the garden might attract the attention of the local constabulary.

Another problem was that she kept wanting me to get more involved with the clients. Lots of the men wanted the maid to watch, and were prepared to pay extra for it, but after observing a few torture sessions in the dungeon, coupled with the cloying scent of rubber and scented candles, I’d always end up feeling queasy, so I stuck to helping out in the class room instead. This involved dressing in school uniform, pretending to be a prefect and telling the headmistress stuff like, “I found little Gary smoking behind the bike shed, and I think he definitely needs a sound caning.” Then I’d have to stand there while she reprimanded a grown man dressed in shorts and a school cap, without dying of laughter. And if you think that’s easy, you should try it sometime.

But the main thing that bothered me about Madame Giselle, is how, if she wasn’t with a client, she’d hang around in the doorway of my office. I’d be on the phone, trotting out the usual crap to a new client, like, “The Mistress is curvy but slim, five foot four, French, and likes to wear stockings and high heels. What kind of fantasy are you interested in?” Then whatever they answered, I’d give them a bit of spiel about how Mistress loves to transform you into a woman, drip hot wax on your privates, etc.

Every day her schedule was booked solid, but she’d always criticize my phone manner.

“Don’t say curvy but slim. It makes me sound fat! Say slim but curvy.”

“You talk too fast. They can’t understand a word you’re saying!”

“Your voice is too low/breathy/high pitched.”

It drove me absolutely crazy. So after a few months, I quit. She begged me to come back, and said she'd moved to new premises, only five minutes from where I lived. Seduced by the convenience of working such a short hop from my flat, I went back. She drove me insane, but the money was good, until the straw turned up that finally broke the camel’s back.

The straw was actually the card boy. Madame Giselle paid this man, Phil, a criminal looking type with a broken nose, to put up her advertisement cards in the phone boxes, which are regularly cleaned by British Telecom, so need to be replenished several times a day.

There were problems at the new location. Madame Giselle had unwittingly moved into a rival dominatrix’s patch, and now the other woman, Madame Celine, had started making threatening phone calls to Madame Giselle telling her to close her parlor or else. Add to the mix the fact that Phil had started dating Madame Celine, and I began to realize we might have a problem on our hands.

The block of flats where Madame Giselle worked was very swish, full of psychiatric and doctors' offices, there was even some sort of obscure church operating in the flat beside ours. One day as I entered the lobby, I noticed Phil was there, tossing hundreds of Madame Giselle’s advertising cards, complete with a picture of a woman in a corset and high heels, all over the place. He started shouting that he was not going to deliver Madame Giselle’s cards ever again and ran off. I picked up the cards, feeling decidedly perturbed.

A few days later, after Madame Giselle had got a new card boy, I saw Phil ripping some of Madame Giselle’s cards out of a phone box. I made the mistake of asking him what he was doing, and he started frothing at the mouth and telling me that I should get Madame Giselle to move her parlor somewhere else. And that if I didn’t do as he said, he’d make sure that I never worked in this business again.

He looked surprised when I didn’t react by getting down on my hands and knees and saying, “Oh, please spare me. All my life, I've dreamt of working as a maid to a dominatrix, and now that I’ve achieved my dream, I can’t bear for you to take it away from me.”

Instead I told him to piss off. A big mistake, as it turned out, because it just made him put his face close to mine and hiss that if I didn't do as he said, he’d come after me, which was actually really, really scary. Phil looked totally deranged, and I had no problems imagining that he’d carry out his threat.

And so, it was with some regret (heck, the job had almost been money for nothing), that I bid Madame Giselle adieu. Call me work shy, but I didn’t think it was worth having my face rearranged by Phil, just to keep my job with a whinging, blind dominatrix.

So the moral of this story, if there is one, is that if you ever see your neighbor leading a naked man about on a leash, don’t call the cops. It might just be a blind dominatrix trying to earn an honest crust.