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The Girl Buffet

As a 24 year-old college graduate holding a series of entry-level office jobs, Diablo Cody moved from Chicago to Minneapolis to live with her new boyfriend, Jonny. In Minneapolis, Cody continues to be bored with her white-collar day job and with her rather commonplace life. She gradually entered the world of the strip clubs and spent about a year working as an "entertainer". In her short memoir, "Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper" (2006), Cody tells her story.

The book gets off to a slow start. The book adopts a clever, punchy writing style that at the outset of the story seems affected. We haven't learned enough about the protagonist to make the writing effective. I thought it strained and felt put-on. I got to like the writing style and the book more as it progressed.

The story begins with Cody deciding, on an impulse, to enter an "amateur night" contest at a working-class club on Hennepin Street. From there, she moves to an evening job as a dancer at a club catering to an executive clientele. Both these clubs serve alcohol. In Minneapolis, clubs that serve alcohol are restricted to topless dancing. Some of the scenes in these clubs are tame compared to what follows in the book Cody is awkward as a dancer and has ambiguous confused feelings about her new life and the money it offers.

Cody becomes a dancer at an all-nude club which doesn't serve alcohol. She then takes a job at a place called "Sex World" in which she dances nude one-on-one in a glass-enclosed booth. She returns briefly to dancing at a club and then, burned out, leaves the life of an entertainer. In the interim, Cody has quit her day job, married Jonny, who has been extraordinarily supportive of her efforts, worked towards becoming a good stepmother to Jonny's young child, and used the proceeds from her work as an entertainer to help buy a house. Only near the end of the book does Cody describe her earlier life raised as a Catholic in a suburb of Chicago. Cody is more surprised than the reader that someone with her upbringing found herself a sex worker for a time. Her surprise struck me as due to youth and inexperience.

The book offers convincing descriptions of the clubs and their environs as seen from Cody's standpoint. Cody gives substantial attention to act of the dance - the stages and the music - themselves. In particular, she discusses pole dancing - where the entertainer slides up and down doing gymnastics upon a long metal pole. Cody portrays the exploitative, driven nature of the clubs as the dancers are required to hustle customers incessantly for various types of "private dances" and sometimes end an evening owing the club money. There are interesting portrayals of Cody's relationships with other dancers and with her male clientele. The sleaziness increases as Cody gets deeper into the industry. The most effective scenes in the book are the tawdriest -- those at Déjà vu, the nude club, and at Sex World.

As the book goes on, Cody discusses what the customers get out of the clubs and the nature of her attraction to a business she finds increasingly hard to take. She doesn't have much beyond contempt for her customers. But in a scene near the end of the book, she and Jonny go to a club and an entertainer dances for them. For a moment, this allows Cody to see from the customer's point of view. Cody also comes to characterize the life of the clubs as a "girl buffet" where "girls that could halt midday traffic at Nicollet Mall were rejected by fat guys wearing Zubaz." (p.196) Cody concludes: "I hated the girl buffet. I deserve better presentation, I thought. We all did". (Id.)

Cody has written a good tough-minded book on her experience in the sex industry which left her both fascinated and repelled. I had the same reaction to her portrayal of "the girl buffet".

Robin Friedman