One of the assistant managers at our local video store is a young woman who seems to have been born to command. She's brisk, efficient, knowledgeable, helpful, friendly and usually very chatty. She likes to talk about the movies you're renting and the movies she's seen and she enjoys explaining things, like the differences between BlueRay and regular DVDs, what game platforms have what features and why people prefer this one or that one, the best kind of popcorn to eat while watching your DVD---Kettle Corn---and how to pop it. Sometimes she gets personal and tells you about her day and how her classes are going and the ways her landlord is making her life difficult and where she and her boyfriend will be going out to dinner when he comes to visit on the weekend. She talks very fast and a little loud so it's hard to get a word of your own in, but she chatters on breezily as if you're taking part in the conservation, as if she knows what you'd like to say if only she'd pause for breath and let you, and in fact she does seem to know. Makes the three or four minutes you're at the counter pass pleasantly if sometimes a little confusingly as you risk mental whiplash trying to follow the abrupt twists and turns in her train of thought.
There's a note in everything she says though. A bossy note. I suspect that most of her explanations are actually instructions. She's telling customers the right way to do things, which is of course her way. The thing is that her way probably is the right way and if you don't do it her way, the right way, you're headed for trouble. She just has an air of confidence and competence based on experience well beyond her age, which is twenty-one as of this past weekend, as I know for a fact because the last time I was in there, Monday night, I heard all about her birthday party and what a good time was had by all. I have a feeling that if I was in a position where I had to take instructions---orders---from her I would snap to it, without question. Kind of makes me wonder, sympathetically, what life is like for her boyfriend, though.
Another quality that adds to my sense that she is SHE who must be obeyed is her almost military bearing. She's very short but she stands very straight. Excellent posture. Chin up, shoulders back, chest out.
It's that last bit I'm really writing about.
They're spectacular.
Naturally, pure-minded, gentlemanly, fatherly type that I am, I try not to notice. I would make a point of looking her right in the eyes, but as I said, she's short. Five-one and a half. She's mentioned it. Looking her in the eye means looking down and when I do they rise up to meet my gaze. So when she's working I spend my time at the counter finding other things to look at. Signs advertising recent releases and coming attractions. Candy displays. The backs of my own hands. Dust on the register. If she notices or thinks about it she probably has me pegged as "that shifty-eyed geezer who's always in here renting old movies and buying the wrong kind of popcorn."
I'm sure she knows she's pretty and has a good figure. She a very practical sort and has probably sized herself up and come to some useful decisions about how best to deal with certain facts. I'd guess she has judged her assets to be assets but thinks of them as some of her assets among many and, as a clear-eyed, pragmatic, putting up with no bullshit from anybody including herself type, knows there are women with similar and even better assets so she can't rely on them and wouldn't anyway because she's prouder of her brains and her competence. What I'm saying is that she strikes me as neither a show-off nor a shrinking violet.
At work.
This is a smallish town and in the course of things you run into people you know wherever you go. So I've seen her many times out and about. In the store she wears a "uniform," dark polo shirt and khakis. But outside work she dresses as you'd expect a pretty young college woman to dress. She's been working at the store for a while now---two years and four months (She told me this in the course of telling me about her birthday party)---which means this is the second summer I've had the pleasure of knowing her, the second summer in which I've run into her when she's dressed for summer, in very short skirts and tight tops with very low necklines. And what I've noticed whenever I've seen her in her civvies is not that they're spectacular, but that she puts away her excellent posture with her polo shirts and khakis, and more or less tries to hide their spectacularity.
Around town she hunches her shoulders, walks with her head down, keeps her arms folded across her chest, and hurries along as if afraid of bumping into anyone she knows and getting caught in a conversation. And she's never smiling. She looks sullen and withdrawn, wrapped up in thoughts that aren't making her happy. I should mention that I have never talked to her outside the store. I usually see her in passing and at a distance. She'll be on the other side of the street or at a far table in the restaurant or down at the other end of the aisle of the grocery store and I have a feeling that she doesn't see me. Middle-aged duffers like me are generally invisible to young women her age and my guess is that even if I do pop into view she pretends I haven't because she doesn't want to deal with customers outside of work. She's never alone though. She's always with a crowd that's usually all male. I shouldn't say with. I should say leading. They're always a few paces behind her doing their best to keep up.
So here's what we have. An attractive young women with spectacular breasts who is apparently quite confident and uninhibited when she's on the job and dressed relatively demurely but who looks shy, timid, and terribly insecure off the job and who when she's dressed in a way that would naturally attract the admiration of the young men accompanying her acts as if she's been caught out in public in her underwear and would be relieved and grateful if everybody would just pretend not to notice.
There's no real point to this. There's a reason I file posts like this as "sketches." I'm not trying to make anything out of her. I don't know what to make of her. Based on what I see of her at the store I expect her to be running her division at whatever company she goes to work for after graduation by the time she's thirty. Based on what I've seen of her around town I can't help thinking she's looking forward to a career as an archivist working in the basement of the library at an all-girls Catholic college.
I wonder which is the real her, the she who must be obeyed or the she who would rather not be noticed, or if there's actually any contradiction.
I suspect that there isn't a contradiction, but rather that what you're observing is a particularly vivid example of the different personas women have to manage in their lives. We get very different messages about what we "need" to do as women to be likeable and popular and what we "need" to do in order to be taken seriously as professionals. I'd guess, myself, that the demands on this woman in terms of clothing expectations for the young are ones that she feels uncomfortable in, both physically and mentally, but the less revealing ones she wears at work are viewed as inappropriate for non-work activities.
You suggest that she acts as if "she's caught in her underwear" - and I'd guess that's probably true. In the accepted uniform of the young these days, women's bodies are on display to a startling degree (while their male counterparts are well-covered in baggy t-shirts and large shorts) and often that's your only option if you don't want to look like a frump or shop in the stores aimed at older women or suffer in the heat. So she's probably in that unhappy situation where the only "acceptable" clothes are those that attract too much unwanted attention from people interested only in ogling and leering and so on. You suggest that she'd attract "admiration" if she behaved as confidently as she does at work; my bet is that such "admiration" in her experience includes catcalls and harassment by skeevy dudes and other such unwanted attention. I'd walk hunched and sullen and timid in such circumstances, too.
Posted by: Rana | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 01:07 PM
What she said. At work, she can be at least reasonably confident that someone talking to her actually wants to talk to her, if only to transact business, and she has some sort of authority. In public, if she discourages people from talking to her, she's spared the discomfort of people she doesn't know sharing their reactions to her body with her.
Posted by: julia | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 04:01 PM
I'm a guy, so I can't speak to the whole body-consciousness issue. But here in my middle age I have suddenly found myself adding a retail-sector job to my regular professional job for the usual reasons.
It's my first experience behind a cash register. Growing up I always worked in restaurants, but back in the kitchen. So this whole dealing with the public thing is a huge, nasty shock.
And not a shock the way you might think -- that retail customers are rude and hard to handle. In fact, most people are extremely nice, or at least neutral. They just want their groceries with the minimum hassle.
No, the shock is mainly inside me, and this is the only (tenuous) connection I might have to the young lady you describe. See, I'm just not naturally a friendly guy, to people I don't know. I'm a private person. So it's excruciating for me to be on display and under orders to be "nice" and to act like I'd like nothing better than to take the wadded-up Kleenex out of your hand (that you just finished using to wipe your kid's snotty nose) and throw it away.
What I'm saying is, there's work and there's work. The visible aspect of my work is to manipulate your items and get the right price and handle the finacial transaction. The invisible part of my work is to somehow manage to repress my honest emotions and reactions and keep that smile plastered on my face for 5 or 7 hours. Maybe that doesn't sound hard to you, but it is for me.
But here's the tricky part: one way I compensate for the unnaturallness of the setting is to act as if I'm having a really good time. I joke with the customers, make funny faces at the kids (especially babies), issue odd pronoucements and in general carry on as if I'm having a high old time.
Totally fake; totally a coping mechanism; but I doubt anyone who doesn't know me would know the difference.
I offer this as one angle on your perception of this girl's behaviour: it's quite likely that one of the girls you see is putting on an act. Maybe it's the girl in the video store, or, maybe as Rana suggests, it's the girl on the street.
Posted by: Steve | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 04:04 PM
o/~ Young teacher, the subject of schoolgirl fantasy....o/~
Posted by: actor212 | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 07:42 PM
Her spectacular breasts, if you haven't actually seen them sans clothing, might be your run-of-the-mill everyday humanoid mammary glands, but augmented/enhanced by padded and/or underwire bras. She's unlikely to be going bra-less at work. Maybe that's why her titties are less rapturously lyrical on the street - she shed the work-bra.
And the problem with dressing to attract attention is that you want to attract the attention of hot guys - but alas, non-hot guys have eyes too. And often obnoxious opinions that they are too happy to share with you, whether you ask for their opinion or not.
Posted by: Nancy | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 11:15 PM
You basically gave her birthdate, either August 1 or 2, 1988. The astrologer's POV:
* She does not feel like she is loved, feels there's a huge hole in that area, but can feel more comfortable with people older than her, especially in a structured situation. (Venus-Saturn...and Venus in Gemini, she likes to talk)
* She also has a come-closer, come-closer, stay-there, go-back, come-closer ping-pong attitude toward relationships, drawing boys closer and pushing them away and drawing them in again (Venus-Uranus)
* She feels a need to be independent of structure, at the same time she greatly needs structure (Saturn-Uranus)
* She is happiest when she can control others, when the look up to her (Sun in Leo, Pluto)
Just some notes.
Posted by: Dave the H. | Wednesday, August 05, 2009 at 11:17 PM
The fashionable clothing available to young women (and older) today is based on Britney Spears and her ilk. They are supposed to look SEXXX-AYYY. Whether they want to or not. Whether they welcome the ogling and catcalls of strangers, or would prefer to look sexy only to their actual boyfriend. The Male Gaze rules in our society.
This is one young woman who is grateful for a polo shirt uniform and will be relieved to reach her 30s and have some of the pressure taken off -- except that now all women between 25 and, what, 65, 75? are supposed to be MILFs and Cougars. The pressure is NEVER off, unless you adopt the nun/prairiemuffin look early on.
Posted by: stinger | Friday, August 07, 2009 at 03:15 PM
If you haven't read it already, I'd recommend Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" (Wiki page here). It's an old (1959) treatment of "all the world's a stage", but it's a hoot, partly because of Goffman's style but primarily because of the examples, e.g. the college girls who act less intelligently in the company of boys, or the Scottish crofters who hover at the front gate to their neighbours garden so they've got time to be noticed in order for their neighbour to get the best china out before they knock at the door.
Posted by: Simstim | Saturday, August 08, 2009 at 02:23 PM