Box Girl (30 page)

Things Even I Am Unwilling to Do

           
Box Girls—
¹¹

           
I need a show of hands who is available and willing to work on NYE.

           
The shift is from 7PM-2AM and pays $200.

           
You will be provided with a gold bikini and will be painted all gold . . .
¹²

           
The theme of the night is “Gold '09”

           
You will be wearing a gold bathing suit and will be hanging out by the pool . . . swimming . . . hanging out . . .
¹³
Bathing suits and robes will be provided, as will a special table for all three of you, drinks, along with a heating lamp. I'm pretty sure it will be OK to invite a friend to come along and
hang out at the table, but I will double-check . . . The pool will be heated and no guests will be allowed in the pool. It's just for the three of you to use and look pretty in.
¹⁴
:)

           
If you are interested, could you please forward me a recent photo of yourself along with your measurements . . . and don't forget to include your height and weight!
¹⁵

11
An actual email from management.

12
Oh, like how that secretary was murdered in
Goldfinger
.

13
You already said “hanging out.”

14
I'm thinking that wet and cold and painted all gold we wont look so much “pretty” as “freakish.” But thanks for the smiley face, it's somewhat reassuring.

15
No.

Clare

I couldn't get the man's words out of my head. “Is she for
sale?” I decided to talk to Clare about this, because not only had Clare been a Box Girl, but she went on to work for The Standard in the design department.

We met at a party hosted by
Flaunt
. It was at a new clothing boutique on Melrose Avenue and was sponsored by a vodka company, so the signature drink, complete with floating cranberries, was free. Clare and I stood in the corner by the bar and rested our free drinks on top of a garbage can.

We looked around the room while we talked. There were lots of guys with beards and long hair—“Stillwaters,” I used to call them, because they look like they could be in that band from
Almost Famous
. I went through a stage in my single days when I loved Stillwater-types. Now my husband, Peter—tall, blonde, all-American boy—looks nothing like the Stillwaters. I sometimes find myself watching these men, wondering what they would look like without the hair, the mustache, the beard, the mask? Would they still look “cool?” Would they still
be
“cool?” How much of their identity is tangled up in all that hair?

Clare and I decided to take a lap. We saw Luis, still the editor of
Flaunt
, holding court on the sidewalk outside of the shop. His arms were flailing and his philosophizing was rapid and unrelenting—
how we've got to help each other out, how that's what it's all about, how in this business, in this economy, we've got to look out for each other, you know what I mean?

We saw the old assistant to the publisher, who speaks with that flirty Hispanic inflection, that quick, quick, quick clip and then the slow, burning finish—the last word dragged out and flipped up at the end, as if everything is said with a touch of attitude.

We saw a former intern at
Flaunt
, who was also a model, and wanted you to know it, but was also quick to amend that admission with, “And I went to Berkeley.”

When Clare and I returned to our corner by the garbage can, I was finally able to ask her about the box.

She immediately launched into hotel design–speak.

“You go to a hotel and you can be whoever you want to be,” she said. “So people walk into The Standard, and the first thing they see is this girl, doing whatever she wants to do, being whoever she wants to be.”

From the neck up—Nordic-blonde, blue eyes, Popsicle pink lips even without lipstick—Clare looks like she should be a greeter at a J.Crew in Greenwich, Connecticut. But from the shoulders down, she is covered in tattoos.

“Okay,” I said. “But why do they have to be girls?”

Then came art school–speak.

“You have to remember the origin of art is the woman's body. That was one of the first forms of art.”

I let out a slow and unconvinced, “Okay,” stabbing a cranberry with my straw.

“I'm of the school where something like this is celebrating the woman's body, not degrading it. All the girls are dressed the same but they are all different shapes and sizes.”

“Really?”

“Yes. They're not all model-looking girls. Not at all.”

“Huh,” I said, nodding my head.

I did not know that. I had always assumed, based on nothing more than email correspondence, that they were, in fact, model-type girls. I had received countless emails asking me to cover shifts for girls who had castings, or callbacks, or, for one obligation I will never forget, because a Box Girl was “recovering from breast augmentation.”

I share this with Clare.

“Some are. But not all. That's not the point. It's supposed to be a peek into human nature, not just a display case for guys to look at pretty girls.”

I replied, “Well that's what I had always thought, had always hoped, until I heard a man ask if I was for sale.”

She already knows this story.

“That was one time,” she said briskly. “So the girls are all in the same outfit, but each one of them is different, and they are all doing different things. Some read, some sleep, some play guitar. You write, for instance.”

Driving home that night I thought about this. I thought about how, for the most part, I agreed with Clare. I tried to figure out why. Why was I okay with sitting in a box wearing so little clothing?

Panopticon

An older lady in a black button-down blouse and thick, tortoiseshell
glasses is resting an elbow on the front desk, staring. No,
glaring
. I peek at her quickly and shrink back to my book. I now understand what it means to “steal glances” or look at something “out of the corner of your eye.” Since the most important Box Girl rule is “no eye contact,” I have to be sneaky about it—observing slyly, peripherally. I'm not supposed to make eye
contact
, but they say nothing about
looking
. With this woman, though, I don't need to look. Judgmental eyes, after all, are meant to be felt, not seen.

Some nights, if the lights in the box are particularly bright, I can't see anything. The glass becomes reflective, and I'm in bondage to the gaze of others. It's like being alone in a house at night with wall-to-wall windows and no blinds. On nights like this, the box becomes a sort of Panopticon—the circular-style prisons conceived in the late eighteenth century by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. With a surveillance station in the middle and cells facing toward the center, a guard could observe the inmates without them knowing whether or not
they were being observed. Central to Bentham's design was the idea that, not only were the guards able to view the prisoners at all times, but also, and most importantly, that the prisoners could not see the guards, thus ever-unsure whether they were under surveillance. Bentham described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” and “a mill for grinding rogues honest.”

The French philosopher Michel Foucault was fascinated by Bentham's design and argued that the Panopticon scenario forced prisoners to govern their own behavior, assuming they cared about the repercussions of bad behavior. Foucault believed prisoners would regulate their conduct based solely on the
possibility
that they were being watched.

It's easy to argue that social media is our modern-day Panopticon. It is impossible to know who is watching you, and we filter our online behaviors based on the off chance that someone might be looking. It forces us to see ourselves the way the watchers do. We are both the guards and the prisoners, judging others while allowing others to judge us.

On these nights in the box, when the glass operates like a mirror, the only thing I can see is myself. I get to observe myself, judge myself, see myself as they do—as this woman does—from the outside, looking in.

It's hard not to wonder on those nights, seeing myself sitting there, stuck in a box, is this valid? Putting young women in glass boxes? Have I surrendered myself as an object for others to ogle? Am I someone who willingly objectifies herself?

Marina Abramović, the performance artist, has always used her body as the subject, medium, and object of her art. For her piece entitled “The Artist Is Present,” Abramović sat in silence for more than seven hundred hours while strangers stared at her. For seven hours a day, from mid-March until the end of May, she sat motionless in an armless wooden chair, inside the atrium at The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Anyone
who wanted to (and was willing to wait in the sometimes overnight line) could sit opposite her, for as long as they liked, if they agreed to sit silently and motionless, too, and stare back into her eyes.

People often ask of Abramović's work, is it art? And perched like a doll in a display case, I have to wonder the same: Is this? Am I, too, performing in here? I'd like to think so. I'd like to think I'm playing an important part in an ongoing installation. But am I just deluding myself? Because if that's the case, then why the scanty outfits? Let's be honest, here. Am I a piece of art or a piece of ass?