Memoirs of Happy Hooker

6 Oct

Does anyone recall the phrase “happy hooker”?

The concept that underpinned it was all the rage in the noughties, the decade in which liberal sex work politics were most effectively cemented. Lots of new(ish) ideas about escorts and other lay-for-pay gals (porn stars, glamour models, general strumpets) filtered into the mainstream. Stuff about sex worker’s rights and breaking stigmas around promiscuous and/or transactional female sexuality and so forth. And a prolific array of films, books, journalism, memoirs, and other medias, which portrayed us casual concubines, somewhat over-earnestly in many cases, as a charismatic, effervescent people, unworthy of the loathing and disgust that had hitherto came our way.

Indeed, though much of the pink-poodling about high class escorts and modern day courtesans was motivated by the same individualistic urban consumerism that was just en vogue in the ‘sex and the city’ zeitgeist. And it could be argued, though it all seems somewhat passé now, to have helped counter a long swell of fairly troubling historical attitudes to women who stepped outside of presumed acceptable sexual and social bounds.

For example, as I am currently in Yorkshire…1970s Yorkshire proved a bleak period for sex workers, as the frankly heart rendering attitudes towards ‘unruly’ women came on full display during the femicidalism of Peter Sutcliffe. The police and the media participated in vindicating his violence, because his victims were women who were, outrageously, ‘out and about’. And that isn’t just a euphemism for sex worker; some of the women killed by Sutcliffe were literally, just ‘out and about’. Having a glass of wine. Without their husband. Heaven forfend. That was enough to cast them in shame and to, if not justify, but ‘mitigate’ the barbarism that ended their life. Many will remember the particularly dispiriting pronouncement by the police officer Jim Hobson, after Sutcliffe killed a middle class, teenage girl: “he has made it clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people do. We, as a police force, will continue to arrest prostitutes. But the Ripper is now killing innocent girls.”

That word. Innocent. It’s so wrongfully loaded. To bring home the point, I recall some moons back, an article in The Guardian about police attitudes to women in the sex industry who were murdered, and one officer quote always resonates in the darker recesses of my memory; “They are shit, killed by shit, who gives a shit”.

So. There is that.

I daresay the vilifying idea that women whose business is sex are a tawdry bunch, probably still lurks about, although less routinely and unabashedly. It is also possibly true - far be it from me to make grand anthropological statements without proper study - that the archetypes ‘happy hooker’, or her less glamorous sister, ‘the hooker with the heart’ that got their nose into popular culture - have been serviceable in this regard. It was humanising, to a degree, but also somewhat cloying. There was time, in the late noughties, when you couldn’t move for workaday memoirs of escorts and bordello bad girls, lining the £1 bins of The Works or WhSmiths, and other such dignified literary outlets. These were knock offs of the very successful and critically lauded The Intimate Adventures of A London Call Girl by Brooke Magnanti and her Manhattan predecessor, Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, themselves riffing on an old history of whorish pulp, like the original ghost written Happy Hooker, Madame Xaviera Hollander’s classic in the prostitute canon.

Indeed, the prostitute/courtesan memoir is an old tradition - I myself am currently trying to peel through my namesake, Cora Pearl’s diary (she being the English darling of the 19th century demimonde, a French culture of women of dubious morality) though am finding it delightfully/frustratingly, and no doubt unintentionally, ‘postmodern’ in its casual attitude towards characterisation and narrative structure. To give you an idea, if Quentin Tarantino was a Victorian courtesan and he wrote a memoir, it would’ve read like Cora’s.

But though women of ill-repute have often found themselves popularised to the novel/memoir, in the noughties and early parts of the 2010s, this writerly jive seemed to go into full production, with the same three stories being told repetitiously, with varying degrees of literacy…1. the glamorous, snarky, middle-class girl who plays hooker for a few years, because she loves sex and handbags, before becoming an academic/scientist/journalist/lawyer/wife of a bigwig…2. the rags to riches story about the counsel estate mudlark who makes it good through whoredom, only, as a consequence of drugs and pimps and general excess, makes it back to rags again…3. the tragicore memoir, the story of someone trapped in a cycle of relentless abuse and hopeful escape.

Brooke Magnanti & Billie Piper, actress in the SDOC adaptation

I’ll be candid; I’ve never really enjoyed any of the ones I’ve picked up. The conjecturable truth is…just because someone has a sort-of interesting life does not de facto mean they will write an interesting book. And I know this to my cost because I’ve had a go myself, and it was utter horseradish. And I’m ok with words and stuff, but memoirs are a tricky beast to tame, in the writer realm. The Intimate Adventures of A London Call Girl is by far the strongest of the modern iterations I’ve put my nose to. Its sharp, structured, observant, and oddly moorish, but the main character (presumably some version of Ms BM herself) is somewhat difficult for me to get along with; self-absorbed, oscillating between arrogance and entitled insecurity, rude to other women and oddly sterile and unfeeling in her attitude to life and sex, despite protestations to the opposite. And if it were more obviously fictionalising, there might be a knowingness to this; her ‘character’ could be drawn as some anti-heroine, like Plath in The Bell Jar, whose suicidal protagonist is wilfully tricky to like.

But Magnanti seems blithe to her own character flaws, which make it an ultimately strangely discordant read, especially because in the moment it’s so easy to get through. Which is why, in the end, it qualifies as junk. Fun, clever, sharp junk. Things that are fun but ultimately ephemeral, are junk, by definition. And I can’t help feeling that the ovations from the literati about it at the time was an over exertion bought on by the lazy prejudice that hookers wouldn’t be able to string a sentence between them, let alone write a competent beach read. Indeed, there was a period when Magnani’s name had yet to come out of anonymity, that the pundits were sure! she was actually a middle-class man. Martin Amos perhaps.

In any case. I wasn’t fond of the image of an independent escort the book bought around, the whole hating other women, seeing yourself as ineffably cool and ‘one of the boys’, never sat well with me. But there again, that wasn’t a malady suffered only by escorts writing frothy books, it was a product of its time. Think how loved SATC’s Carrie Bradshaw was once upon a time and how disliked she is now. Pre-recession Anglo society was marked by ‘main character syndrome’ and its just not stood the test of time. It doesn’t come off so well in the more cynical, wordly, ‘we are all in this together’ 2020s. Maybe it was a necessary stage of something; in order to get society to be more mindful about the fact that sex workers are real people, needed a touch of the Thatcher style of feminine ego to get it in the presses. And all things considered, these happy hooker books probably offered some kind of service against the dehumanisations on show in the Sutcliffe affair. Even the tragedy versions of the prostitute memoir make the more distressing iteration of the sex industry - sex slavery and trafficking - less of a question of bad women, than bad situations.

And so, I’ll not likely go back to reading any of the ones I have collected, gathering dust, and won’t harm myself (and others) by writing one (this blog post is harm enough). But I guess I should graciously thank them.