To secretly rather admire "Belle de Jour"?

[Vallhala]

We all know who she is now and why she did what she did. One part of me, the bit that's still so much the result of a religious-based education and Victorian-style parental influence despite the passing of the years, is shaking my head and tut-tutting.

The other side is full of secret admiration that she made it through relatively unscathed and has the PhD she dreamed of.

AIBU?

I don't hold anything against her for having sex with men in exchange for money. She decided to do it and was obviously fairly smart (or lucky) in the way she did it, because she didn't have any awful experiences. To be honest, there's always going to be that gap in the market for prostitution, and I'm glad it paid off for her.

I'm less convinced that she was right to write about it in the way she did, where it was inevitable that it was going to be glamourised. It made people go 'See! Not all prostitutes are druggies/desperate/abused/trafficked' and I think this was a bit misleading. I think a lot of men fool themselves that it's OK to go to prostitutes because 'they (the women) enjoy it' or 'it's no harm to them' when that is very often far from the truth.

But I haven't actually read her book, just saw the TV thing.