Show and Sell : Trends: Bikini-clad women are competing for a few hundred dollars and bringing in a whole new crowd for Orange County restaurants that once catered only to the family. That’s ‘mentertainment.’

IRVINE — Psssttt. Psssstttt. Hair and body spray drizzle down on three nearly naked women crowded in front of the restroom mirror as they squeeze their bodies into sequined and florescent bikinis barely big enough to satisfy local ordinances against indecent exposure.

This is bikini contest night at Baxter’s family restaurant, where waitresses keep a stash of crayons for children and diners usually come for barbecue chicken and ribs. But late on Tuesday nights, the mostly male crowd is there for something else: to hoot and holler while young women strip from street clothes to bikinis.

Throughout Southern California at restaurants more typically host to after-work cocktails and post-church brunches, it has become increasingly popular to use scantily clad women to attract a 20-something crowd looking for a few minutes of low-cost titillation, with none of the stigma attached to frequenting sleazy strip joints.

The growth in bikini contests in the last few years is part of a boom in what has been called “mentertainment,” a fast-growing industry that uses women as sex objects to sell everything from alcohol to lingerie and housecleaning services.

Never before has the selling of male adolescent fantasies been so widespread or overt, psychologists and sociologists say. They attribute it to an ever-intensifying competition to entertain a desensitized generation of consumers.

That the industry’s growth coincides with a downturn in the economy and a recent cultural backlash against feminism is no coincidence, says Todd Gitlin, UC Berkeley sociology professor. “The rewards of going into the regular job market are less for (women).”

Many of the women who compete in bikini contests work a circuit, driving several times a week to different restaurants in hopes of winning anywhere from $50 to $150. The losers, though, get nothing. “Stripping down to nothing and getting nothing,” says Michele Thompson, 26, a nursery school assistant, as she glues herself into her bikini to prevent slippage. “That’s the worst feeling.”

Bikini contests are unique to Southern California and Florida, says Rob Abner, publisher of Stripper Magazine, which tracks the strip-club industry. Across the country, though, more than 300 bars and restaurants catering to professional men have opened featuring strippers and topless dancers, he says.

A decade ago, “there were none. Just the real sleazy places,” he says.

Baxter’s disc jockey Buddy Davis stands behind a blinking console and flips through an inch-high stack of florescent pink and lime green bikini contest entry applications. “This is why I continue to do contests,” he says. “I’ve been doing them for six years and the industry has really gained momentum.”

Seasonal contests have stretched year-round, often sponsored by local rock radio stations. The contests help business, says Hal Combs, general manager of Baxter’s in Irvine. “Our clients enjoy it. We’ll continue promoting bikini contests as long as they’re tasteful and respectable. It encourages people to hang around (the restaurant) longer.”

Adds Davis: “It gets people in. And keeps them drinking until closing.”

Wendee Hagen, 21, often drives from Riverside to compete in Orange County restaurants. She usually arrives at contests dressed as though she were going to work in a downtown office. On nights when she anticipates tougher than usual competition, she spends the first hour working the bar. Holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, her blond hair falling loosely over her shoulders, she wanders from table to table, chatting with young men.

The men leer at Hagen as though she were a Ferrari someone had told them they could test drive for a few minutes. She exchanges small talk, tosses her head and moves to the next table.

“I was a total nerd in high school,” Hagen says, “bone-thin with acne. Then after high school, I started to bloom. I was so determined to show everyone, ‘Hey, I’m not a nerd.’ So I entered my first contest and won.

“After I won, guys from high school started asking me out. I said, ‘No way.’ After the way they treated me in high school, it felt so good to snub them.

“After that first win, it’s not ego anymore. It’s money. A hundred and fifty dollars for five minutes’ work is good money. I fell right into it. And here I am.”

Hagen’s friend, Robin Arcuri, another Baxter’s contestant, agreed.

“You can really make good money doing this, really good money compared to a day job,” says Arcuri, an aspiring model who lost her 1988 Miss Whittier crown because she refused to stop entering contests. She once made $10,000 working three nights a week, two hours a night for a year in the same restaurant, she says.

A few competitors, such as Arcuri, are students at local community colleges. Andrea Haug, 23, and Donna Fleagle, 24, met in a history of rock ‘n’ roll class at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

Haug’s circuit career nearly ended when she, Fleagle and Hagen were arrested in a police raid of a “Scanty Panty” contest at Santa Ana’s Red Onion two years ago. Charges were later dropped, and the three are suing the restaurant and the police for damages.

The majority of the “circuit girls,” as they call themselves, are not college students, though. Most are high school graduates or dropouts; some reluctantly admit to having been sexually or physically abused in their pasts.

At the Club Metro in Riverside County recently, nearly 1,000 patrons stood in line around the block on Hot Legs contest night, where competitors included a teen-ager with braces, fresh from a breast implant, and a mother on welfare who had just delivered twins but needed the money to pay off her Mervyn’s credit card. That night, Club Metro degenerated into groups of men simulating sex acts while yelling obscene, hostile comments at the contestants. “You get used to that,” says Hagen. “It’s part of it.”

Sometimes the contests get out of control.

During a Huntington Beach OP Pro Surfing Championship and bikini contest in 1983, a scuffle broke out as spectators tried to rip off the contestants’ swimsuits. Three years later, on the same beach, a riot ensued after onlookers reportedly tried to force several women to disrobe once again.

When contests turn ugly it becomes “just rape socialization,” says Nancy Felipe Russo, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at Arizona State University.

“Mentertainment” trains men to behave disrespectfully toward all women. And it trains women not only to accept humiliation and degradation, Russo says, but “to reinforce the myth that they like it.”

Men wanting to look at beautiful women “is not a horrible thing,” Russo continues. “But when it becomes a mob acting out hostility time after time, not just a once-a-year Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and if it’s everywhere in the media, then it sends a very powerful message: That it’s OK that women are sex objects.”

Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition became so successful that it spawned a new television genre: HBO broadcast a cable swimsuit contest this year; Entertainment Tonight, ESPN, Fox and NBC have all aired bikini contest specials, including a bikini-intensive “Beverly Hills 90210” summer beach episode; Pay Per View has everything from bikini contests to shows featuring MTV’s “rock video girls.”

This season, mentertainment came to the shopping mall. On March 14, for example, the tony Westside Pavilion sponsored an “All Men’s Fashion Show” featuring Playboy Playmates. (Raffle winners dine with the Playmate of their choice.) Throughout Los Angeles, maids in heels and G-strings will spend 90 minutes cleaning homes for $125, no touching allowed. In recent months, a number of lingerie shops have begun specializing in private modeling for male customers.

Three weeks ago, in fact, a Brea lingerie store promised to stop the fashion shows after police charged owners with providing adult entertainment.

Meanwhile, competition on the bikini contest circuit is intensifying, resulting in contestant in-fighting and bawdier performances. Contestant Hagen maintains standards, though. She wears nothing smaller than thong bikinis and refuses to enter wet T-shirt contests. She will not have plastic surgery and spends as much as her modest means allow on gym membership, clothes, make-up and tanning, she says.

“Sometimes (the crowd) doesn’t react so well to Wendee and that’s really hard on her,” says her husband, Stephen Fernandez. “She’ll come home and stand in front of the mirror and say stuff like, ‘Oh, I’m fat, I didn’t tan enough or work hard enough.’ The next day she’s back in the gym working twice as hard.”

At a recent contest with a $2,000 prize, “the girls were lining up with beach chairs and RVs the night before,” says contestant Thompson. “It was like a one-day sale.” Though Thompson describes her act as tasteful, she says some contestants will do just about anything to win. “Skin wins,” Thompson says. “Raunchy wins.”

Four years ago, when Thompson first started competing, she adopted the stage name Brigette. “I go into character,” she says. “Michele doesn’t go out there. Brigette does, her evil twin. If I went by Michele, I’d think, Oh my God! What am I doing?”

In the restaurant, the men--mostly college students, military and workers in suits and ties--whoop and drink beer. They rarely tell wives and girlfriends when they frequent contests, says Michael, a salesman at a Santa Ana car dealership who asked that his last name not be published for fear his fiancee might find out where he goes five nights a week.

“We both agreed I wouldn’t go anymore,” he says. If she found out, “she’d yell at me a lot. A lot. A LOT.” Michael, a graduate of Irvine’s Woodbridge High School, went to a strip joint once but prefers Baxter’s. At mainstream restaurants, “you can’t touch. And you don’t want to. You just want to look. The girls at strip joints are pretty sleazy,” he said. Baxter’s contestants “aren’t sleazy at all. They’re professional girls. One’s a teacher.”

The illusion of contestants as college students and professionals keeps men coming back, says psychologist Russo, because it reinforces their belief that all women enjoy being degraded and humiliated. “College girls are pretty and fun; they’re not emaciated, drug-addicted, used-up 60-year-old women (stripping) to eat,” she explains.

Many women work in mainstream mentertainment because they like it.

“I do this because it’s an easy way to make money,” says Orange Coast College student Haug. “Some girls show off more on the beach than I do in a contest, and they’re fat and gross. It’s my right to do what I want with my own body as long as it’s not illegal.”

Haug refuses the label feminist, as do most women who work the circuit. Her attitude about stripping is more a consequence of the sexual revolution than the women’s movement, Russo says.

Twenty years ago, only women on society’s fringes stripped for money. After the sexual revolution, women decided they could do what they wanted with their bodies, even those things previously considered degrading.

“I’m sure these young women think they’re nice girls, even if they are stripping,” Russo says. “But most of the men think, ‘No way, you’re still a (sex object.)’ ”

That’s because the sexual revolution, a movement “about promoting and increasing women’s accessibility to men,” Russo says, failed to change most men’s attitudes about women.

“It’s to the advantage of the propaganda machine to erode the distinction in women’s minds as quickly as possible. Because then young women will participate in bikini contests. There’s a lot of money to be made here.”

Profit motive has long been the reason Madison Avenue uses female flesh to market products. In beer advertisements, for example, women traditionally have been “limited to leaning against a bar in a hot, little Spandex number or frolicking on the beach in some barely there bikini,” according to a recent article in Advertising Age.

After five female workers filed a lawsuit charging that Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini Team ads were degrading and led to sexual harassment in the work place, “a lot of national advertisers cleaned up their act and tried to stop showing women as sex objects,” says Connie Pechmann, an advertising expert with UC Irvine Graduate School of Management.

Instead, flesh campaigns went underground. “(Advertisers) are targeting their ads more carefully,” Pechmann says. By removing sex from national, highly visible campaigns and stepping up sex-oriented local promotions, “they can use sex, which is still very effective, without offending the women who disagree with it. It’s a very clever move.”

Back at Baxter’s, the deejay selects four men to judge the contest. The music starts. Black light slices the room.

Thompson goes first, then Hagen. Both perform an athletic strip tease. The men hoot, grunt and stare.

“How’d I do? How’d I do?” Hagen asks between gasps.

Arcuri takes the stage. She lacks Hagen’s physical strength and Thompson’s ampleness. The crowd reacts tepidly; she compensates by wriggling so violently, she exposes herself for a minute. The crowd goes wild.

Arcuri wins $100, Thompson takes second, Hagen, third. “It’s not fair,” Hagen whispers. “It’s just not fair. She’s supposed to make sure she doesn’t fall out,” Hagen says. “I do.”

The men whoop and holler, surrounding Arcuri with greedy eyes.

Hagen changes clothes. As she says goodby to a friend, she asks, “Do you think it was fair?” The friend’s comforting words do no good. Hagen averts her eyes. “Maybe,” she whispers, “I just wasn’t good enough.”