blog of the day

[NB some of the passages quoted here are no longer on the ‘real’ BdJ blog, which doesn’t go back very far – older entries get deleted. But links to the archived stuff are on her page. All text within quotes is exactly as on BdJ, with the exception of a few asides of my own within square brackets]

Ok yeah, good stuff but some bits made me go hmm, even before I knew about the controversy as to its authenticity. This stuff is a bit like reading something by Clive Cussler and having fun picking holes in the plot and dialogue - try this:-

[17th March ‘04]
“To the critics 'working' in sex-related industries who feign righteous indignation. You red-lipsticked girl-powah assistants at nice, clean, hoovered sex shops? Who market for people whose only foray into sex is dilettantism” etc etc…

Why this sudden blast of wrath against people who are merely selling the tools of her trade, ‘working’ rather longer hours than she does, when normally she doesn’t seem to give a shit what people (eg her neighbours) think of what she does? This jars very badly with her usual outlook. Additionally, the “nice, clean, hoovered” bit seems to imply an air of “whilst I live in shit”, which is clearly not the case. And I bet she wears lipstick too, lots of ladies do..

This next bit is even worse:-

[19th March ‘04]
“vendredi 19 mars
Woke up to a storm, both outside and in my email.

Think I'll stay indoors today. N came back from Belgium [nice place] with a vertiable metric tonne [ie lots] of porn to sift through,” etc...

She does do the odd mis-spelling, eg of ‘veritable’ above. The real problem here is with the last bit. I live in Kent (the part of England next to the narrowest part of the English Channel and nearest to Europe), and yes it’s true that back when ‘decent’ porno was hard to get here, a lot of it was smuggled in from Europe – frequently by the crews of cross-Channel ferries. But that was 15-20 years back & yet ‘vendredi 19 mars’ was only a matter of weeks ago! No-one needs to bother smuggling porno to the UK nowadays – they can pick up the phone, mail a coupon or order online (It still comes in of course – but openly & by the truckload..). I think the writer is showing their age badly here by even being aware that porn-smuggling happened – and they obviously haven’t been 28 for a long while… She mentions elsewhere that ‘N’ is something of a porno fiend – if so he would have learned that much sooner that he didn’t need to cross the Channel to indulge in his hobby.

Next we have:-

[24th March ‘03]
“If she [BdJ’s manager] hasn't heard from me within 15 minutes of the agreed end of the appointment, she rings the client[why not call BdJ herself first?], then the hotel, then her security, then the police. I know, because once I forgot to ring her.”

She is implying in the final sentence here that as result of her forgetting to call, all hell was let loose. Yet in the entry for 10th February ’04, BdJ describes when she did forget to call, and all that happens is that the manager calls BdJ while she is in the taxi – not exactly mayhem after all. And so how does this event lead to her knowing about the other calls the manager would have made if unable to contact her?

Or how about:-

[24th November ‘03]
“I discover the relationship between fingernail length and typing efficiency.”

This entry is dated 24th November 2003. OK so (all of this is supposedly) she is 28, she did a humanities-related degree (ie lots of essays to tap in), and for the past 6-7 or so years has either been doing office work (lots more typing), or screwing for cash & typing a blog about it. So how come it took her so long to realise long nails can make typing awkward?

Then there’s:-

[4th November ‘03]
“A first-time submissive is usually easy to handle and eager to please. It takes months before they start becoming devious, manipulative bottoms. This one was no different” etc…

Her statement here reads as though it is made as a result of long experience, and yet the entry is dated 4th November 2003 – just a week after the first account of her meeting a client, in late October! She’s hardly that experienced yet at this point. Her only previous experience was as a stripper when at university. This has to be made up, or if true is surely the result of research rather than experience.

A second thought. Earlier in this same entry, she tells her client that domination was “…how I started in this business.” Yet all she has told us both online and in the press makes no mention at all of this, and this is what makes the ‘knowledgeable’ quote about submissives such a clanger. But I wonder if maybe both she really did in fact know this, and that what she told her client was in fact true. Could it be that here we are getting the merest glimpse of the real person who is producing BdJ? The remark “A stranger photo sesh I've never had.” (28th October ’03) may I think also be such a glimpse – she has never given a hint of any other photographic/modelling work.

Her first account of meeting a client also reads very strangely:-

[28th October ‘03]
“He'd booked two hours which either means they want something odd or they want conversation.”

Now how did she know that if this really were her first job? As with the entry above, she sounds much more experienced than she could realistically claim to be, so soon after starting. This first client might as well be her 101st going by the way she writes about him. Why is there no sign of any kind of trepidation or nervousness, as you might have expected? I’d have thought the ‘first client’ event would be singled out as a Big Thing for the blog, but it is described as though he were just another client - she doesn’t even say he was the first. And if he wasn’t the first then she hasn’t even mentioned the first one at all! Both here and during the whole of her ‘recruitment’ process she doesn’t even once express any sort of unease or disquiet about what she is doing, even for a moment – surely someone would for real, even if only briefly.

Next up:-

[10th November ‘03]
“…I ended up at Charing Cross station at sunrise, blowing soapy scraps of bubble-juice diluted [why dilute it anyway?] with manky [= yecch] Thames [river] water onto the first commuters of the day.“

OK so yes there are places where the water’s edge of the Thames is accessible without getting covered with mud. This entry was dated Monday 10th November 2003, and (according to archived online tide tables) the water would probably have been taken from the river roughly 1.5 – 2 hours before low tide (Low tide at nearby London Bridge was at 08:57am that day, she left her clients’ hotel at 7am). This means that to get to the water’s edge would have meant stepping on unstable and/or slippery surfaces just uncovered by receding water (she couldn’t have just leaned over a railing), which I personally wouldn’t fancy & I doubt she would, dressed for work as she still was. In any case though, if she’s at a rail station, they have washrooms with clean water available. So why bother getting it from the Thames? Yes, Charing Cross is right beside the river, but the reference to it reads like a clumsy attempt to add authenticity, which basically falls flat on its face - if you know that there are washrooms where you are going then you are not going to bother stopping to take water from a river even if you could do so fairly easily. The whole of this entry reads really oddly to me in a way that’s hard for me to pin down. But in any case this is a particular howler as it flies in the face of stuff which is verifiable.

And there’s more:-

[12th November ‘03]
“7. The Boyfriend and I have known each other years but only dated since January. He's a great lad, funny, smart, kind, sexy and the goofiest dancer I've ever met. How he controls his feelings over what I do is a mystery to me. Maybe he likes it.”

Erm, well, if he’s her boyfriend I’m surprised she doesn’t feel able to ask! I’d have thought that partners genuinely in this situation would be careful to have everything out in the open to keep any bad feelings from festering. That said, the fact that he doesn’t live with her & so his face doesn’t get rubbed in it daily would certainly help, as she implicitly admits elsewhere.

The entry for “lundi 19 janvier” (Monday 19th January 2004) describing how she split up with her boyfriend, has her making a Tube trip to London Bridge, even though she says earlier that it is he, not she, who wants to go there. She is supposed to be just going into town to meet friends, but she stays on the train even after London Bridge, ie heading back out of town the other side. What happened to the friends that she was supposed to be meeting? Part of the entry reads:-

“A Northern Line tube arrived. The carriages near our end were empty. I jogged up and hopped on a less crowded one.“

Wouldn’t this make more sense if the carriages had been ‘full’?

[28th November ‘03]
Finally there is the “THAT WOMAN” incident. I don’t think that even many women, let alone a man, would either hold such an opinion (or pretend to, as BdJ alleges), or expect anyone to believe they did, or, by expressing it in such an obnoxious way, behave so incredibly rudely towards their housemate & his girlfriend. C’mon, how many guys dare say a bad word about their friends’ other halves? They’d probably have a vacancy for a housemate pretty soon. Maybe it would just be believable if the ‘housemate’ was say an 80-year-old woman, but not a young, highly sexed guy. The whole episode simply reeks of being a fake.

Here is a passage written by Sarah Champion as part of the introduction to a book (Disco 2000) which she also edited. Even though this is prose rather than the more chopped-up style of most of BdJ, it still seems to me very similar to her - but see what you think (Acknowledgements to www.nickbarlow.com for this section):-

“It's weird how dates stick in your mind. To use telephone banking you have to give a string of passwords including 'memorable time and place'. Mine is 11 May 1985, Moss Side, Manchester (though I'll have to change it now). That was the night I had my first experience of pre-millenial tension...
At the age of fourteen, my school friend invited me to a concert at her church. I found myself the only white person in a black Pentecostal church, witnessing five hours of apocalyptic passion - end-is-nigh gospel interspersed by hell 'n' brimstone sermons with hysterical, elderly Jamaican women running down the aisle in tears, giving ten pound notes to the Pastor.
Afterwards, already spooked, I had to wait for a lift on a dodgy street corner, watching shadowy figures disappearing up a staircase above a chippy, to buy 'draw'. Then there was a siren. A burglar alarm? It couldn't be as the sound was coming from all directions. It was the siren made famous in Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 'Two Tribes' - the four minute nuclear warning. It sounded for twenty minutes. The streets were empty: there was no panic. Where was it being broadcast from? The street lamps? The telephone junction boxes?
Except for a tiny report in a local paper, no one commented. Sometimes, I wonder if it ever happened at all. But that night in Moss Side something changed for me. Ever since, I've lived with the eerie feeling that these really were the 'last days' - strange times that had to be lived to the full.”

I think if this especially doesn’t convince you then nothing will - for me this was the clincher because SC’s writing style is very similar to that of BdJ and it seems totally obvious to me at least that they are by the same author. This may not by itself be conclusive evidence, but once added to everything else about BdJ which just doesn’t gel, I am in very little doubt personally that BdJ is in fact made up, probably by Sarah Champion. It’s not just the identical style but the fact that if you read the intro excerpt after reading BdJ then (for me) you feel that the same person is communicating with you – and if it were on BdJ it would fit in perfectly.

In any case, the scenario of the original movie “Belle de Jour” [respectable married woman works in whorehouse while husband’s at work] is not what is being described in BdJ. In other words, the name has been picked not for its aptness but in order to ensure maximum publicity. The writer knew that people would put “Belle de Jour” into search engines, find her blog in amongst all the stuff about the movie, and spread the word. But as more and more people read BdJ it would increase the chance of someone thinking “hey that’s me she’s writing about” and she’d be certain to be outed before long if she was for real.

Another oddity (also noted by others) is the amount of US-style dialogue (“Look out your window” instead of “out of etc”, “Come live off me” not “Come and etc”). This style is also used when quoting other characters. Then again it’s true that British people might talk similarly, at least at times. US spelling is also used many times, eg “the draft in the kitchen” caused by her freezer not shutting properly, should be “draught” in UK English (but pronounced the same), or “license” instead of “licence”, which admittedly could be just a mistake. There’s plenty more of this if you look for it. All this doesn’t necessarily cast doubt on her authenticity, but it does seem odd that a Briton should write this way. All I can think of is that the site is written slightly in American so they will understand it more easily, while not making it incomprehensible to the British.

It’s all very entertaining but I think I’ll give the book a miss – and that would go for if I were the publisher too…