A new book, Between the Sheetsdescribes a woman's voluntary entry into Ireland's sex industry. It depicts a murky world, but the romantic fiction writer DAISY CUMMINScan't help admiring its author
SCARLETT O'KELLY is a whore. No, it's grand, honestly. She calls herself one on page 2 of the prologue to Between the Sheets,much the same way as Belle de Jour calls herself a whore on the first page of her book, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl.
Scarlett O’Kelly (a pseudonym) chose, as a result of economic hardship, to make money by becoming an “escort” and has written a book detailing her experiences over the course of a year.
It’s a very particular genre: women writing about their real sex lives. Its exponents include Abby Lee, the Girl with a One Track Mind blogger, who doesn’t get paid for sex but is unashamed about wanting and enjoying it.
I write contemporary romances for Mills & Boon. So while their stories are real and mine are fictional, essentially we all write about relationships and sex, and are all in the business of escapism and fantasy. Readers of both genres live vicariously through the characters.
My books are read mainly by women. The heroines are women to whom readers can relate on some level: girls next door who get swept up in rich fantasies. In her book, O’Kelly provides men with a physical fantasy through selling sex, an admittedly much more extreme version of escapism. She allowed them to forget their problems and indulge in the kind of fantasies their wives might not permit. She made it a rule, for security and secrecy, that she would see only attached men, who would have as much to lose as she if the encounters were revealed.
O’Kelly’s account is a quick and easy read, well written if a little repetitive at times. She has a warm and personable voice, and it’s easy to imagine how men might have found themselves at ease with her. She was impressively organised in setting up her “business”, and her book could even serve as an inadvertent how-to guide to women seeking to enter the escort industry. By the end I found myself liking O’Kelly and admiring her entrepreneurial spirit.
The book has been controversial, of course. Prostitution is a dark world, and as an RTÉ Prime Timeshowed this week, most of the women working as prostitutes do not have the same control over their situations that O'Kelly had.
Her book is explicit, but I found it curiously unerotic. It was difficult not to think of the Irish mammy working in the sex industry to make ends meet.
O’Kelly’s account tells us little we don’t already know about the intimate lives of Irish couples. We know that economic stresses strain relationships, including in the bedroom. It’s not new that men seek sex with strangers because they don’t have fulfilling sexual lives.
O'Kelly is terrified of her real identity being exposed, and with good reason: she is a mother of young children. So, one might ask, why write a book that threatens to do exactly that? Her story is illuminating but not just for what it proclaims on the back jacket: Between the Sheetsis not only a startling and challenging read but also an intriguing portrait of Irish life at its most intimate. The appeal is in O'Kelly's endearing warmth, personality and chutzpah and in her portrait of a new Ireland in flux and crisis, where people are alienated and isolated in their own little worlds. She had an unconventional view into this because of what she did.
By the end she is depicting an Ireland that is more sexually aware than ever, where men habitually pay for sex. This is the worrying part: the growing demand for a seamy trade, a world away from the carefully controlled and independent environment O’Kelly worked in.
I hope Scarlett O'Kelly doesn't get hunted down and exposed by the media, although I fear she will. It's a tempting story for some newspapers. I remember seeing Brooke Magnanti, the real Belle de Jour, being interviewed on television after she was outed, and it made me think of the end of The Wizard of Oz,when the curtain falls away to reveal that the great wizard is just an old man and an illusion.
