(…) What it took me years to realise is that while I’ve changed a lot since writing these diaries – my life has moved on so much, in part thanks to the things that happened then – Belle will always be a part of me. She doesn’t belong in a little box, but as a fully acknowledged side of a real person. The non-Belle part of my life isn’t the only ‘real’ bit, it’s ALL real.
Belle and the person who wrote her had been apart too long. I had to bring them back together.
So a perfect storm of feelings and circumstances drew me out of hiding. And do you know what? It feels so much better on this side. Not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about. To be able to defend what my experience of sex work is like to all the sceptics and doubters.
Anonymity had a purpose then – it will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on. But for me, it became important to acknowledge that aspect of my life and my personality to the world at large.
I am a woman. I lived in London. I was a call girl.
The people, the places, the actions and feelings are as true now as they were then, and I stand behind every word with pride. Thank you for reading and following my adventures.
Love, Belle
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Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days. This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react. You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots. Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.
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There is a new phenomenon in today’s information society, the anxiety of which becomes pervasive when one realizes the dangers and fragility brought upon by the interconnected Web 2.0 sphere. This is the problem of online oversharing: the tension in finding the right balance of what parts of one’s subjective identity should be put online. This is an anxious search, because, at first, it is understandably hard to realize that the internet is a totally new space with its own novel dynamics; any attempt to categorize it as public or private sphere or any of the classical categories would fail just as miserably as any attempt to introduce old-market commodity dynamics to the remix culture of intellectual property. As such, adapting to the new big Other of the internet becomes even harder.
How much should our online avatar, our novel cyber-embodiment, resemble our stupid, abrupt, physical identity of existence? Of course, we have all the big postmodern theories about how everything is no more than a simulacra, how reality and fantasy becomes blurred, that we live in a state of hyperreality, etc. But I think this idea is a little too naive for today’s society — rather than the blurring of fantasy and reality, is it not more true that the condition of our second embodiment, one I dubbed the monitor phase, calls for an inversion of fantasy? What I mean is quite simple: as our lives are today more and more lived on the other side of the screen, is it not, then, only logical that when the simulation is more real than the reality itself, reality becomes more and more like our fantasies?
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As a woman who has dabbled with bisexuality myself, and written about my sexual adventures both on my blog and in a couple of sexual memoirs, I can empathize with Jefferson. Not so long ago, one of the UK’s biggest mid-market tabloids and self-identified upholder of “family values” — the ultra-conservative Daily Mail — implied I was a bad mother simply because my children had expressed their wish that their friends not find out about my sexual exploits. I regularly receive emails from readers as well — curious, not necessarily accusatory — asking how my behavior has an impact on my children.
Suzanne Portnoy: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Jefferson: A Sex Blogger Fights for Custody of his Kids.
