The B Girls

The first time I sat down at a bikini bar was the summer of 2019. Though the U.S. was still neck-deep in Donald Trump’s first go-around as President, the country seemed more or less stable. More importantly, my girlfriend was cruising through a solid analyst’s job at Caltrans, our two cats were healthy, and I was finally enjoying a comfortable staff writing job at OC Weekly, the paper where I’d begun my journalism career twenty years prior.

A colorful advertisement in the pages of the Weekly had first alerted me to their existence. Keep in mind I’d recently returned to Southern California following a dozen years in Hawaii and Sacramento, and though I had heard of bikini bars, I had no inkling that so many existed in Orange County, or that more than a few were plugged into Beach Boulevard as it snaked from La Habra to Huntington Beach.

This should not have surprised me. After all, I had walked the entire length of Beach Boulevard in one day for an OC Weekly story back in 1999, yet even having done so, the existence of so many bikini bars on Highway 39 was unknown to me.

In North Orange County, Duffy’s is on Imperial just a few blocks from Beach. It’s a tiny dive loaded with marvelously intricate woodwork inside, but on my first visit I walked in the men’s room and saw that some guy had defecated in the urinal. After telling the bartender — who loudly shamed the rest of the customers — I paid my bill and left, never to return.

Further south, Keg Sluggers was just off Beach in Westminster but it closed recently. About a mile away is the Green Girl Saloon, which takes only cash. Near the 405 freeway is Beach Girls, which closed during the COVID-19 pandemic but recently reopened under new ownership. Distractions and Max’s are all down Beach in Huntington Beach, the former a divey type place and the later a decent sports bar with a full kitchen.

It’s important to note that though all bikini bars are similar in that they employ young women to tend bar and serve drinks while wearing swimsuits or lingerie, one bar can be wildly different from the rest in other respects. While many OC bikini bars look like classic dives or sports bars, Green Girl has so many paintings on the walls it looks like a vintage lounge straight from a 1964 edition of Esquire.

Most take credit cards; a few are strictly cash-only. Some employ mostly white women; others are more racially eclectic. At least one greets customers with a variety of rules; the rest just try to keep things chill.

The bars typically open around 11 a.m. or noon, while others prop open the front door at dawn. At least one placed mirrors behind the bar so customers could get a view of the bartender’s front and backside at all times, but most don’t go in for that.

Security is also key at most, with one bar owner going so far as to sit in the back and watch the front of the house from a variety of closed-circuit cameras. While this does afford a certain degree of protection for the women on the floor, it also allows him to time his bartenders as they chat with customers, to ensure no one is taking up too much of their attention.

And that is the one thing all bikini bars everywhere, throughout OC and the wider world, share: they exist to make men happy. It’s their entire reason for existence, and the reason I started visiting them. My MO was the same, no matter where I went: tip well but not excessively and just listen to the women working there. Chatting with young, beautiful, scantily clad women was fun, but the anecdotes and drama I began hearing, all because I was just sitting there and listening without judgment, quickly became a torrent.

OC bikini bartenders range in age from very early 20s to late 30s. Their education is all over the map. Some graduated high school and either went straight to work or were working their way through college. Some already had bachelor’s degrees, in psychology, sociology, law, biology and even journalism. Others had trade degrees, working as estheticians, cosmetologists, or hair stylists. Some went in for beauty pageants, while others trained for bodybuilding and fitness competitions. One bartender I knew went to grad school during the bad times of the COVID-19 pandemic, earning a master’s degree, but returned to the bar when everything began reopening.

Side jobs are largely fine, though some bars prohibit their bartenders from working for other bikini bars. Same with OnlyFans accounts: some bars are fine with them, while others refuse to hire women who maintain them. Most bartenders live in Orange County, though not all. A few live in Long Beach, with others way out in the Inland Empire.

Ideologically, the bartenders are all over the political spectrum. They were largely raised in OC, after all. While most don’t vote or pay attention to the news and openly cringe when anyone in the bar would break the cardinal tavern law prohibiting the discussion of politics, more than one I met were actual Trump voters, denouncing masks and COVID-19 and even Beyonce singing country music (“She needs to stay in her lane,” I heard one bartender, a white woman, say.).

Others are far more left-wing, rationalizing their working at the bar by saying they are simply extracting money directly from the patriarchy. Another bartender, who is not a white woman, proudly told me she had splintered her book club into factions when she asked the members to read Kate Manne’s Down Girl, one of the premiere feminist books to come out in the last decade, which postulated that misogyny is not a general hatred of women, but the act of policing women who refuse to adhere to rigid patriarchal rules. “It’s okay, they were bitches,” she said of those opposed to the book, laughing.

I could not take notes fast enough. There was drama, of course, about customers damaging the men’s rooms in weird ways, bartenders secretly stealing tips from each other, multiple women dating the same customer and everyone drinking far too much for their own good. But I also began hearing other stories, especially about women having panic attacks before work and customers inappropriately touching them at the bar.

Throughout 2024, with Trump looking like he could take over the White House again, I wanted to write about all this. At the same time, though I had gathered my research through journalistic means, a work of nonfiction could be risky. Many of the women I’d talked with had never told their families where they worked. Writing about them with any kind of detail risked causing them significant harm.

Still, their stories and experiences mattered. They were paid to listen to men, but few were actually listening to them. Every week, they were stripping down to a bra and panties and then spending seven-plus hours on their feet, serving drinks and chatting with men who were loudly asking them (in all seriousness) why they couldn’t say the “n-word” in public and why women were calling them toxic. The bartenders were making significant money, sure, but stories about vibe changes and panic attacks kept coming my way.

After much consideration, I decided to keep to the basic truths of what they were telling me but fictionalize everything else. The end result was my novel The B Girls, named for the term from the 1950s for women employed by bars to consume watered-down drinks while chatting with customers.

In my story, a 45-year-old paralegal named Sarah suddenly finds herself out of work and desperate to make rent, so she goes to work at a bikini bar on Beach Boulevard. She adapts with surprising speed but quickly becomes consumed by drama and chaos to the point that significant and direct labor action becomes her only option. Though my story is clearly fiction, the very real, and ultimately depressing, strike at Medieval Times in 2023 — located on good ol’ Beach Boulevard in Buena Park — was definitely on my mind as I wrote the book.

After spending months querying agents with no success, I decided to simply publish it myself as an eBook on Amazon. Giving it to billionaire Jeff Bezos wasn’t my proudest moment, but damn they make it easy to get a book published.

Anyway, The B Girls is available today for the grand sum of 99 cents, roughly one-sixth the price of a bottle of beer at a bikini bar.

You can buy The B Girls here.

Anthony Pignataro is a freelance journalist. He wrote for OC Weekly in its earliest years, and in its final months. He also somehow wrote three trashy detective novels about Maui. He lives in Long Beach with his girlfriend Angie and their cat Gromit.