Transaction Failed

A few weeks ago I was forced to have this strange conversation with my mother about sex. She’s the type of parent that always comes right out and asks if you’re sleeping with someone. These conversations always lead to a ruined lunch and her looking at me like I’ve become some bizarre unreasonable species that she can’t believe she somehow hatched. 

She comes at sex from the point of view that it’s a sort of transaction and that each time you sleep with a new person you’re compromising your value. Given my recent track record I often feel like she’s was suggesting that my own personal dowry is sitting somewhere around the price of a pack of cigarettes. Becoming an adult is strange. You go from thinking, “Well my mother thinks I’m beautiful,” in your teen years, to, “Well my mother seems to think I’m a tramp,” in adulthood. It’s the kind of thing that can make you unreasonably glad they’re not going to last until you’re in your twilight years.

While I understand that my mother is coming at this as someone with a religious point of view (where women are still often viewed as a sort of chattel) I still find it upsetting. It’s a protection thing for her and she intends for me to sustain as little emotional trauma as I can, which to me looks a whole lot like marrying somebody from the church who may just use you like a human napkin anyway (unfortunately abstinence only education doesn’t exactly offer a whole lot of guidance).

Yet I think that as women, whether we’re raised by religious mentors or guardians or not, we can tend to have very skewed ideas of ourselves, of what we deserve and the sort of respect we can ask for, which is never a simple thing.

For me there was always a certain level of trade about my body, about the things I felt and allowed others to do to me. It took me a lot of years to feel okay enough with myself to get angry at someone for grabbing at me, and to even say that I was angry, because I was so unsure of myself and of whether I was worth standing up for my own skin. It was many years of going home after not saying anything and then feeling like shit for just choosing to carry that frustration, spending the night playing the scenario over and over in my mind.

Growing into adulthood and gaining a healthy amount of self awareness doesn’t always mix with the waitressing profession, and it’s not just the sometimes overtly sexual nature of the expectations of the job that are to blame. I remember a time I was interacting with a group of customers and the woman at the table behind us suddenly decided that she needed another drink. So she pulled my hair. And rather than throw her bill at her and tell she was a stain on the face of womanhood I said nothing. Though this was years ago I still find myself thinking of her and hoping that she has long since walked in front of a bus.

Yet it seems that I’ve come to a certain breaking point in my career because a few months ago I finally got angry. I could hear a regular customer talking behind me to his friends and saying some rather shocking things about the type of girl I was. I don’t know why some people think it’s acceptable to talk about your anatomy in public, to them it is as if the first moment you donned an apron you ceased to be human. 

So for some reason I took off my shoe and walloped him in the back of the head with it. As he sat rubbing the spot, his eyes bulging and frog-like, he'd sputtered, “Just what the hell was that?”

“Well, I’d have thrown the thing at you, but you’d have probably kept it and built a shrine around it.” And a few days later when he came in again I actually got an apology. 

And that’s how it should be. If a new boss comes right out and tells you in the interview that you should get implants for the love of god don’t take the job. I had a position like that when I was nineteen. There’s nothing good about working for a place that sends you home if your skirt isn’t short enough, if your makeup isn’t heavy enough and if, when the heat gives out and the oysters freeze to the buffet table and you throw a customer’s jersey over your mini dress to hide your goose bumps, the boss tells you to pack it in for the night because you aren’t following the dress code.  

Now when I watch the new girls try and navigate this I often see myself, that un-readiness to rock the boat and the frustration of it all, it’s the unfortunate part of working for tips I suppose, you feel you need to please because what you take home at the end of the night is dependent on how well you did with the customers. Now I don’t feel it’s worth it, fuck the five bucks if it makes you feel worse about yourself.  Even strippers don't have to put up with that.

Though we as women may get to dictate what happens to our bodies a bit more as time goes on, it’s still sometimes hard to speak up, to get angry, and ask for what we deserve though we should never had to ask in the first place. My thinking is that if you feel threatened or cheapened by someone’s comments or actions, sit down in a chair for a moment and remove your shoe slowly. Count to thirty. If you’re still upset and know this is just going to blossom into something so much worse later, then go ahead and hit someone.