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was it the money or the attention?
Honestly, I never made that much money compared
with the people I worked with. So for me I think it was
about the attention, but also sort of an external thing.
I found it to be cathartic, a very weird, twisted form
of self-expression. I think I got addicted to just how
subversive and how fun it was compared to my every
day life.
And you didn’t derive any particular satisfaction
from, say, when you got a promotion at the advertising
agency where you worked.
Right, I didn’t at all, and it surprised me, because if
I got 20 toy shows at Sex World [the porn emporium
where Cody worked as one of the ‘dolls’ who are displayed
and selected for peep show performances] in a
night I would feel proud.
Is this something mainstream feminism has still
failed to sufficiently acknowledge, how satisfying it
can be to wield one’s sexual power in this way?
It can. I think it’s something that third-wave feminism
has recognized. On the other hand the one thing people
have failed to recognize is just how unsatisfying and
unfulfilling the corporate world can still be for women.
Because no matter how much we’ve progressed, the
glass ceiling is still so much in place. And I honestly
felt kind of degraded in my day-to-day life, at the whitecollar
jobs, because I was always being undersold.
Whereas in the sex industry it was so straightforward.
BUY Diablo Cody books online from and
But which would you say is the more exploited
group in a strip club: The girls who work, or the
men who hand over the money?
Some of the needier customers, the men who were
looking for an emotionally connection, were really
preyed upon. They were definitely manipulated and victims
in that way. But most of the time, the women were
disenfranchised. It’s the societal model for a woman to
be revered and worshipped as a thing of beauty, and
in a strip club, it’s actually the complete opposite. You
have a roomful of beautiful women, trying desperately
to woo these men.
Competing with each other.
Exactly. And it really turns the men into little emperors
and the women into these sad, grovelling creatures.
So that was the one aspect that disturbed the heck out
of me. You know, I always thought that strip clubs
would be the kind of places that celebrated beauty and
femininity and it’s really not the case.
How much do the men kid themselves that it’s
anything other than a financial transaction?
Funnily enough, a lot of them sexualize the financial
aspect of it and find it a turn-on to be paying for a lap
dance or for female companionship. There were others
who were obviously in massive denial and seriously
wanted to believe, “oh, this girl really cares about me,
she told me her real name,” not knowing that the same
girl was mocking them in the dressing room and had
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