Episode 60 -
Secret Diary Of A Call Girl

Diary Of A Call Girl (2007) 

www.imdb.com/title/tt1000734/ - Internet Movie Data Base
www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/secret-diary-of-a-call-girl- Where To Stream
https://amzn.to/4oMABKo - Amazon 

I don't know how this fucking show got on my list.  Remember my comment during my review for 2 In The Bush, where I said how desperate the poly community is to see ourselves in pop culture?  Yeah, the idea that this show had anything even resembling polyamory in it is a symptom of that desperation.

Alright, look, I loved the show Sex And The City, with all its flaws and unlikeable characters and really really bonkers decisions that the characters made.  I disagreed with the characters more often than not, but I felt that each episode addressed a concept that I rarely ever saw get represented - the plight of single women, especially single women who liked sex and single women who were not, as Carrie said in an early episode, treating marriage like a sorority we were desperately hoping to pledge someday.

I had been wanting to watch Secret Diary of a Call Girl since it came out and just never got around to it.  And I think I would have liked it had I just sat down to watch it.  It had a lot of the same feel, for me, as Sex And The City.  We got to see a side of sex work that never gets screen representation - that of someone who chooses the job for herself, not because she is desperate for cash, she's not a drug addict, she didn't come from a "broken home", she just likes sex and she's really good at reading people and pulling out their desires from their hidden places, so she likes her job.

But I finally sat down to watch this because it was supposed to have poly content in it, and it most certainly did not.  So now I'm irritated at having sat through 4 fucking seasons of this show for no payoff, when I probably would have enjoyed it otherwise.  Those damn expectations that nobody asked to have put on them can be a bitch, can't they?

Hannah is a very high priced call girl known as Belle, although she uses the terms "call girl", "prostitute", and "escort" interchangeably.  The show is fairly predictable, the character goes through the stages of high end sex work that you'd expect her to go through, and we see some pretty good examples of what's called the "whorearchy", including the snobbery of how the self-imposed hierarchy of sex work affects people on different rungs of the ladder.  If you're interested in more on the whorearchy, check out my other podcast, The Skeptical Pervert, in our multi-part episode on sex work.

Hannah goes through a series of romantic relationships that she continuously fucks up because she doesn't know how to be both a "girlfriend" and a prostitute, and she keeps choosing the prostitute.  Several other characters maintain long-term romantic relationships, so I get the feeling that the writers of the show are not saying that sex work and relationships are incompatible, just that Hannah lacks even basic relationship skills, which she repeatedly tells us when she breaks the 4th wall.

But all of Hannah's relationships are, for all intents and purposes, monogamous.  I mean, you can count cheating as a form of non-monogamy if you want, but I'd say that cheating happens under monogamy, as when monogamy goes wrong, just like abuse happens under monogamy when it goes wrong. Hannah gets into romantic relationships with people who *think* that they are in a monogamous relationship with Hannah because they are unaware of Belle.  Until they find out, and then they break up with her.

Eventually, she does get into a relationship with a man who knows about Belle and her sex work and accepts it as part of the relationship agreement.  I suspected from the beginning that this would be the scenario that prompted some people to recommend this show as poly-ish, but I strongly disagree.

The woman who coined the term polyamory, Morning Glory Zell (we can argue over whether it's her or Jennifer Wesp another time, but the first time we see the term in print is with Morning Glory so that's the source I'm using here), Morning Glory has been quoted as defining the term polyamory as such:

The two essential ingredients of the concept of "polyamory" are "more than one" and "loving." That is, it is expected that the people in such relationships have a loving emotional bond, are involved in each other's lives multi-dimensionally, and care for each other. This term is not intended to apply to merely casual recreational sex, anonymous orgies, one-night stands, pick-ups, prostitution, "cheating", serial monogamy, or the popular definition of swinging as "mate-swapping" parties.

Morning Glory very specifically excluded prostitution in her definition, and given the way that Bell does sex work where it is a fairly stereotypical version of the sex worker having sex purely for money and there are no emotional connections involved except perhaps some fondness for her regulars, but certainly no "interdimensional" lives, I think that this exclusion is fair to apply here.

This doesn't mean that a person can't be both polyamorous and a sex worker, just like some people can be both poly and a swinger or both poly and have casual sex.  There are a lot of things that are independent of other things so that it's possible for one person to be both things. 

I, for instance, am both a feminist and an atheist.  My feminism informs my atheism and my atheism informs my feminism, but they are distinct, independent identites.  My lack of belief in any deities is not feminism and my very strong belief in equality for all is absolutely not atheism.  And yet, I am both, and the two parts of me work together.

Point is, some of you listeners out there can absolutely be both poly and "prostitutes".  However, the act of prostitution is not polyamory (even if your version of sex work is informed by your polyamorous ideals), and more specifically, *Belle's* prostitution is most definitely not polyamory.  

As I explained to a partner recently when going over what counts as the "ish" in "poly-ish", I am far more likely to declare a movie to be poly-ISH if it shows multiple loving but platonic relationships like in his favorite poly movie - Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid - than if it shows a whole lot of sex happening but no loving connections, like in Sex Monster.  Banging a bunch of people does not make it a poly film, and I say that as a poly person who occasionally likes banging a bunch of people.

If you enjoy seeing shows that feature strong yet flawed female protagonists, that are sex-positive, that address social issues of sexuality, class structure, and misogyny, that treat the topics of sex with both grace and humor, and especially if you enjoyed Sex And The City (the original series from the '90s), you might like this show.

But let's be honest here, Hannah isn't even sure she's capable of loving one person, let alone multiple people, and she lacks even basic relationship skills that most of us learned in high school.  This is a sex-positive show about sex work, casual sex, and fucking up monogamy, not even remotely about polyamory.