Lei’s official Weblog

Today, after work I went to Waterstones (a major book store chain in the UK) to look for some books on webdesign. While skimming through a small book called ‘Blogsphere: best of blogs’, I noticed an interesting comment on one of the blogs the book recommends, it goes ‘Sex blogger Belle De Jour tells stories about her life in Britain and her work as a call girl.’ I immediately thought ‘hmm… interesting, now even call girls know how to use internet to raise their profile and promote their services.’ Later after I got back home and did some search online, I was surprised to find out it was actually far more than that. The blog ‘Belle de Jour: diary of a london call girl‘ is in fact quite well known though it’s the first time I learnt about it. The author of the blog is a very talented writer, she writes under the name ‘Belle De Jour’, has even published three books under the name, but very few if any knows her real identity. The few posts I read from the blog are all quite interesting and written in a humorous way, she seems to write candidly about her experience as a working girl and her life in general (at least that’s how I felt when I read her blog posts). After all, it’s called ‘diary of a London call gir’, so a good source of information on the workings of London’s prostitution industry if you are interested in finding out more. What actually amazes me about the story is how she has managed to keep secret of her identity in this celebrity crazy world for over three years since her blog became well known. There has been all kinds of speculations going on over the years, it’s just unbelievable to me that the secret is still undiscovered.

The Belle De Jour blog reminded me the interesting story of another blog. Around the same time Belle De Jour started writing her blog, a girl in China started to write explicitly of her own sexual experience in her blog- ‘Muzimei’s sex diary’. The blog which contained ‘her intimate sexual confessions’ very quickly became popular over the Chinese blogsphere, and subsequently made her the topic of heated discussion and controversy in print media, bulletin boards and Internet chatrooms across China, and was even mentioned in stories in the New York Times and Washington Post and other international media in 2003. She was too a talented writer, and was reputed to have had over one hundred lovers (the number would be much higher now), which only added to the heat at the time. Eventually the blog was banned in China, but the posts of the blog can still be easily traced online. Check out this link if you are interested in reading the English translations of few parts of her diary. Also an interesting video clip of her interview (with English subtitles) from Danwei TV.