MEGO: Brooke Magnanti, We Hardly Knew Ye

[purejuice]

Since she outed herself, Belle de Jour has become a bore. She used to write about her private life, whether as callgirl or anon with a kind of deadpan humor. Now she doesn't. She writes about boring things without deadpan humor, but with her curious Story of O-ish acedia? Clinical detachment? It's the perfect tone for writing about going to bed with strangers for money, and noticing the hairbrush, with his wife's hair in it, in the dog's bathroom. But that was long ago, and in another country, and the wench is dead. Now she promotes, like the level-headed little businesswoman she always has been, her gigs elsewhere, writing in her famous blog, completely without the sort of compelling detail she was willing to bogart from her clients.

The latest is she wrote something, along the lines of her almost deadly romance advice, for one of those humor venues that they find hilarious and which leaves the rest of us just gaping. Adventures in Menstruation is the title of the zineish thing. Are you laughing yet?

I think it's a ripoff of some kind of bayish zineish Seal Press endeavor of 15 years ago, when menstruating was hip? Are you laughing? Are you shocked and all giggly to the very toes of your Doc Martens?

I was brought up by women who made no big deal out of it. It doesn't hurt. And if it does, you need to learn to play while injured. You don't get bitch privileges once a month. You must take gym, go swimming, go to work, behave decently, whatevs. You don't get to pussywhip people from the age of 45 to 55 -- or at least not on account of your hormones. Are you laughing? Are you shocked to the very toes of your Doc Martens? Are you willing to give up your schlocky pelvic politics, in the immortal words of Florence King? I think the idea that it's funny is based on the privilege of menstrual exceptionalism. You think it's funny if they taught you it was something nasty you could goldbrick with and evade your conjugals or at least punish hubs with. Are you laughing yet?

My. eyes. glaze. over.

I say this as a person who has been rendered helpless with laughter, gasping on the floor of a movie house 20 minutes after everybody else has stopped laughing, by a fart joke. It's not a matter of sophistication.

Adventures in Menstruation, my ass. Get a job, bitches. Every day of the month. Bwahahahahahaha!

Comments

[violetisblue.livejournal.com]

It's a bodily function just like any other. Though sometimes people yell at me when I say that. And I never understood the Belle de Jour mystique then or now, considering how many well-written sex worker blogs there are all over the Internet, but whatever.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i think so. and, the british tabloids were all over trying to find out who she was. that made her a star.