The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle de Jour Page B

appointment, it wasn’t an anniversary. Just because he wanted to. Because he thought I’d like it. I smiled, and he smiled, and that to him was worth more than the expense of my time and the price of a bauble.
    That’s the benefit. That, and the agency doesn’t take a cut on gifts.
    mercredi, le 27 octobre
    Phone call from the sexy neighbour at lunchtime. ‘Can’t talk, terribly busy,’ he says, as if I was the one who rang him. ‘But would you like to meet for coffee or something this weekend?’
    ‘Love to,’ I say. ‘Not free Saturday, though.’ Afternoon appointment with a client, booked before I made my decision to quit, someone who’s paid for extra hours on the spot before. I planned to wear my hottest scanties and leave the whole day free, just in case.
    ‘Sunday. I’ll call you and we’ll arrange something.’
    ‘Lunchtime-ish?’
    ‘Roger roger. Talk to you then.’
    ‘I look forward to it.’ When I hang up, Mira and Erin are giggling like I’ve come to school in my pants and nothing else. If that’s what female friendship is like, I’m glad to have mostly opted out.
    jeudi, le 28 octobre
    A major criticism of pornography is that anyone viewing large amounts of perversion cannot help but become used to it, then jaded by it, and then (so the argument goes) so removed from the people involved that inflicting harm on random strangers seems like a good idea. In short, that Page Three girls are the thin end of a wedge leading to secret rooms in Belgian flats.
    I don’t buy it. I’ve watched loads of porn, seen about every flavour of wank mag out there. The problem is not that exposure to large amounts of raunchy imagery encourages the viewer to objectify sex; it’s that porn by its very nature is objectified. Porn is reductive. All sexual imagery is shorthand for the total experience, be it a marble nude or the sticky pages of Hustler Taboo. The proliferation of imagery in modern media doesn’t make perverts where there were none before, it simply makes Gary Glitter’s collection electronically portable.
    ‘There are basically only a handful of porn plots out there,’ I said to N.
    ‘True. Your basic vaginal penetration, anal, oral, foreign objects, animals.’
    ‘I’d consider animals the same as objects – the point is someone’s getting reamed by something that is not human genitalia. Fisting, as well.’
    ‘Fair enough. Then pain, rape, and restraint.’
    ‘Often all three at once,’ I point out.
    ‘Yes, but not always, so they count as different types.’ That was true – plenty of people who enjoy rape fantasies can’t stomach pain; loads of people are into tying each other up on a purely consensual basis.
    ‘Bodily fluids – should there be a breakdown within that category, or is it okay to consider bukakke and scat the same thing?’ In my experience, I’ve found that men who like urine fall into two almost equal categories, the pissing-on and the pissed-upon. But by far they’d rather be receiving than giving in the poo department. There’s a dichotomy some enterprising academic could probably turn into a thesis.
    ‘Same thing, different levels of extreme. Someone gets covered in yuck.’
    ‘By that criterion I don’t think vaginal and anal genital insertion are technically much different,’ I said.
    ‘Maybe not, but you’d risk offending too many people by saying so.’
    ‘Non-genital-focused kink,’ I said. ‘Catch-all category for men watching women squash insects, smoking fetishists, things like that.’
    ‘What’s the point if someone doesn’t get done?’
    ‘Who knows?’ I counted up the list. ‘Eight in total? That’s not bad. After all, they say there are only five basic plots for stories. Does that mean porn is the richer cultural tradition?’
    ‘If so, I’m a connoisseur of fine art.’
    vendredi, le 29 octobre
    The phone rang. I was tired. I sort of forgot that I had promised myself not to do this again, and said yes to the manager