Mailgirl Number Thirteen: Day 01

Sarah, as she took in the spanking bench before her, wanted to walk out right then and there.

Gillian took the girl by the arm, and led her down the length of the plate glass. Everything transpiring within the locker room was transpiring on the left-hand side of the room; the right was empty. The lockers were bare.

"Yours, you think?" Gillian asked, rapping gently on the glass after they'd crossed to the other side of the double-doors leading into the locker room. She nodded in the direction of an empty locker to one side of a large metal desk that split the room in two, the first locker just to this side.

"Probably," Sarah replied, unnerved. USF had recruited Mailgirls Number One through Six in April, and Seven through Twelve in May. She'd be a member of June class, numbers Thirteen through Eighteen. She hadn't been told she'd be Number Thirteen, exactly. But she was -- through the circumstances of her arrangement with Human Capital -- technically the first volunteer for the class. Will Barrow would be tapping additional candidates throughout the morning.

The locker -- her locker -- wasn't so much a locker as it was an open cubby. There was a shelf towards the bottom, below which the girls were expected to store their shoes without interfering with the other end of their leashes, which attached to an eye-hook on the floor. Purses, bags, and any clothing that couldn't be hung were to be placed on top of the shelf. The locker itself was only about shoulder-width, and there was a single dowel that ran from the left-hand side of the first locker, through the partition on the right, all the way down to the last locker in the row. Below this were coat hooks -- one on the left, two in the back, one on the right. Up top, another shelf, this one already occupied by a smartphone standing vertically in a charging dock, as well as tin cup with the number thirteen printed on one side.

"Right in the middle of things," Gillian observed.

It was true. Eleven lockers on the right, and nothing but a corridor disappearing deeper into the building on the left. A corridor lined with toilets, about which Sarah did her best to ignore. Her locker -- or, at least, the locker she assumed would be assigned to her -- was maybe ten to twelve feet from the unadorned metal desk that sat at the center of the room. There'd be no hiding from Mistress Zero there.

"Okay," Sarah said finally, gathering her faculties. "I think I've seen enough for now."

***

Sarah remembered the first time she'd read of mailgirls. She'd been a Senior at Pepperdine, and it was relatively early in the Fall term; she'd only just recently broken up with Mark Agnew. She was in the library with her laptop, taking a break from this paper or that project, and absentmindedly surfing the Web. Sarah couldn't recall what page she'd been on or what she'd been looking at up that point, but she remembered clearly the link.

"You won't believe the sexy new business practice sweeping Japan!!" the banner read, plastered in big bold letters over a picture of a woman's silhouette. "Jaw-dropping!!"

It was the definition of click-bait, and Sarah generally knew better than to be suckered in. Something about that silhouette grabbed her, though -- a slender woman, posed in such a way to suggest she was running top speed, with an envelope in one hand. Whether it was boredom, or curiosity, or some combination of the two, she clicked through -- half-expecting to be assaulted by pop-ups, or encouraged to refinance her nonexistent mortgage, or to send away for penis-enlarging pills. Or, for that matter, to accidentally stumble upon porn.

What she got, instead, was an over-the-top report about mailgirls -- no, they were simply "mailroom girls" in that first account -- delivering interoffice communications in the nude. The practice, at that point, had been picked up by a handful of Marunouchi-based firms, and involved female employees volunteering to take of their clothes and take on the lowliest of duties to help "employee morale." The sensational nature of the reporting, combined with the fact that Sarah didn't recognize the name of the news outlet she was reading all this on, led her to believe that it was some sort of prank. It all sounded too fantastical to be real, and was undoubtedly nothing more than the elaborate imaginings of an undersexed pervert.

Still, Sarah conducted a cursory search of the Internet, to see if there was any corroboration. She got a few hits, mostly in Japanese, before managing to find one that purported to detail the abuses these "mailroom girls" had suffered in their new jobs. It talked of girls being forced to drink out of doggie bowls on the floor, of carrying messages in tubes they were required to hold between their teeth, of being spanked in front of their colleagues for racking up too many demerits. One girl recounted the time she'd had an executive practice his putting; she'd been instructed to get on the floor, open her mouth, and let him tap his balls in. Another had had her vagina used to "polish" someone's shoes. It went on.

Again, Sarah hadn't believed any of it. She wasn't sure what she'd stumbled into, but not once did she believe that any of this was for real. Maybe this was just a weird fetish she hadn't heard of; you could have filled a book with the things Sarah didn't know about the predilections and proclivities of men, the weird sexual subcultures that existed out there on the Internet. Maybe this was just that? Maybe this wasn't any different than people who got excited about feet, or just an odd, specific subset of the larger world of bondage and discipline or submission and domination.

She'd masturbated that night, back in her dorm room -- the first time she'd done so in almost a month.

It was a few weeks later that one of her classmates brought the subject up, during a discussion group as part of a Women's Studies course she was taking. Sarah's initial reaction was to feel sorry for the poor girl, for being suckered into believing that naked mailroom girls were a real thing. But then someone else had added her own two cents on the topic, and Sarah began to doubt herself. It couldn't be real, could it? What woman would subjugate and humiliate herself like that? What reputable business was capable of inflicting that level of cruelty on their female employees? How could any of this not run afoul of sexual harassment protections?

There was a single girl -- Valerie Plympton -- who chose to defend the concept. It was an unpopular stand, and Sarah took it as an attempt to play devil's advocate and spur debate among the discussion group. Valerie pointed out that these girls were all volunteers, and were able to opt out any time they wanted to. They weren't slaves. They weren't being forced into this weirdness against their will. They suffered a good amount of abuse, yes, but they well compensated for their suffering. These were all private companies, operating on private property, behind closed doors, away from the eyes of children and away from the public at-large. Valerie even went so far as to point out that there were accounts of the girls "touching" themselves during breaks and other lulls in their daily routines; the mailroom girls seemed to be getting off on their part in the exercise. Who were they to judge the decisions these girls made?

From Tokyo, the practice began to seep out into businesses throughout the rest of Japan. Yokohama. Osaka. Nagoya. Sapporo. Kyoto. Then into the regional offices Japanese companies maintained in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul, before expanding to Chinese, Singaporean, and Korean companies, as well. Berlin and Frankfurt came next, followed by Moscow, Zurich and Geneva, and eventually even Paris and Rome. In its early stages, it had been tempting to write off the idea of naked mailgirls as an Asia-specific oddity, a cultural thing that the West simply didn't understand. But as mailgirl programs began popping up in Europe, it was clear that there was something more going on.

Sarah graduated from Pepperdine with dual degrees in Sociology and Anthropology, and a minor in Women's Studies to boot. She came East to study under Doctor Gillian Schang, an Anthropology professor at Yale who'd made a name for herself with her work on Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism. Sarah's own interests were in the Socio-Cultural Anthropology space, and -- like Gillian's -- were intertwined with Women's Studies. She'd spent the better part of four years examining women's place in society - "women's culture," more specifically. The roles women played, the jobs they took on, the decisions they made. Some of her early work had been with groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution, the League of Women Voters, the Women's National Republican Club, and even the International Women's Action Committee. She'd done a ton of research around Greek organizations, too, spending an inordinate amount of time getting to know every detail about sorority life at Yale.

...all while the mailgirl "revolution" spread like wildfire overseas.

That there were perverts and creeps among Boards of Directors and Executive Leadership teams the world over was perhaps not unsurprising, men in power and men of means capable of realizing the twisted fantasy of stripping their employees down and sexualizing them in the workplace. One could obsess about the difference between right and wrong, or pine for chivalry. One could hope that the better angels would prevail, that attacks of conscience or pangs of guilt would nip the thing in the bud. But without government intervention, without a strong and powerful opposition pushing back and putting an end to the practice from the outside, these executives had nothing to keep them in check. They could get away with it, and so they did.

For that matter, it wasn't completely shocking that there were girls out there who were willing to comply. There was no shortage of strippers or porn stars on the market. Prostitution, it was said, was the world's oldest profession. And men didn't have a monopoly on kink. In its way, the Sexual Revolution had empowered women to go after their own interests and fetishes; modern-day feminism may not have liked the fact that this freed women to explore submission and exhibition and humiliation as turn-ons, but nor could they stand in the way of that exploration without coming across as hypocritical.

But it wasn't degenerates at the top of the house or deviants on the ground that propelled the model ever forward. Instead, it was the impact that mailgirls were having on those early adopters' bottom line. If a company were able to weather heavy attrition among their female employees at the outset, if they could survive the exodus of their more righteous and upstanding clients, and if they had the fortitude to stand tall against the public outrage that accompanied their decision, they were rewarded -- eventually - with gains in almost every conceivable performance metric. Rewarded to such a degree that even the most conservative of companies were forced to at least consider the idea.

Turnover always spiked up when a program was introduced, and no one would have been surprised to learn that women comprised the bulk of that increase. But those spikes were never as high as they probably should have been, given what was happening. And the employees who remained behind tended to stick around longer than they had previously, before the program was launched. Time and time again, attrition rates would plummet to new lows; counterintuitively, turnover among women who remained behind declined even more significantly than among their male counterparts. Attendance issues all but disappeared, and the number of employees on leave dropped to never-before-seen lows. Employee engagement went up. Job satisfaction went up. Workforce performance, overall, went through the roof. And, with those gains, companies saw meaningful increases in sales, in profits, and in market share. Mailgirls turned out to be every bit as exciting to the accountants tasked with managing a company's earnings as they were to everyone else.

It was perhaps inevitable that Sarah would turn her attention back to mailgirls. She came at it sideways at first, due to her work with Grace Burgmeier's Actioneers. A video game company in Seattle, well-known for pushing boundaries when it came to both content and business practices, launched the first widely-publicized mailgirl program in the United States. There'd been others, on a smaller scale and more under-the-radar, but it was DumpsterDawg Enterprises upon which the Actioneers, the UAW, and a host of other protest groups descended. Finder-Spyder and eVendr.com came next in Silicon Valley, and the Actioneers went there, too.

But rather than continuing to study the Whitestocking groups who were fighting against the arrival of mailgirls in America, Sarah recognized the mailgirls themselves were fertile ground for a sociological and anthropological study. There'd been a paper published in the British Journal of Industrial Psychology, and a handful of pieces in various business journals, but no one had yet explored the cultural aspects of such programs. She pitched the idea to Gillian, and Gillian was enthusiastically supportive; with mailgirls now popping up all along the West Coast, there was an opportunity for Sarah to be at the forefront in capturing the Zeitgeist of the day. In fact, Gillian was so enthusiastic that she began to run away with Sarah's proposal, and Sarah increasingly felt caught up in the undertow.

Sarah's approach was to have been done with surveys and interviews. She would visit Seattle, and take in the scene there. She would go to LA, and conduct her research there, too. She would go home to the Bay Area - maybe visit with her mom and her step-dad -- and talk the girls of Finder-Spyder, of eVendr, of Hooli. She'd immerse herself in the culture of mailgirls.

Gillian proposed a more radical path: Sarah would become a mailgirl herself. It was Gillian who observed that, while the Whitestocking groups had plenty of former mailgirls they held up as victims and as the aggrieved, it was the Blackstocking groups that included a greater proportion of the girls who'd successfully lasted the full duration of their contracts. As awful as the treatment these girls had suffered had been, they'd come out the other side championing the concept of "individual life, individual choice," a libertarian worldview that held they could make up their own minds about what they were or weren't willing to do with their own bodies. The only way that Sarah would ever truly understood the mailgirl experience would be to experience it firsthand.

Sarah, naturally, had balked. Though she should have been more concerned with the nudity and the humiliation of it all, her first reaction had been centered upon how she'd explain it to Christopher Reardon. The pair had been dating for the better part of six months, getting together shortly after Christopher had arrived on campus for a junior faculty position in the Sociology Department. Though not unheard of, a graduate student dating an Assistant Professor -- even if he wasn't her professor - was still frowned upon. Sarah had initially been excited by the forbidden and hush-hush nature of their relationship. They were serious. Or, Sarah was serious, at least, and unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize what she and Christopher shared. And, of course, the nudity and the humiliation, yadda yadda yadda...

Gillian had been insistent. She'd gone so far as to meet with Deepa Chaudhri, a second-year grad student, and Liz Smith, a first-year. Liz, like Sarah, had issued Gillian a flat-out "no." Deepa, meanwhile, had given it some amount of consideration, and had even sought out Sarah's advice, on the basis that no one in the department knew more about mailgirls than Sarah Scott. The implications were clear: though the proposal had been Sarah's, Gillian was going to move forward with it, herself, in her own way -- with or without Sarah on board.

In the end, Sarah caved. It had been a combination of factors -- not least of which had been Christopher breaking things off to pursue a relationship with another student. Gillian continued to work her, and brought to her attention that US Financial would be launching a program of its own that Spring in New York. Sarah could get in relatively early in the roll-out, and the fact that it was on the East Coast meant that there'd be an entire continent between her and her mother in Santa Clara. Moreover, Gillian knew USF's program director personally, and was therefore in the unique position that she could guarantee certain guardrails would be in place for Sarah specifically, as well as for the program overall. As difficult as the study would be, and as much as Sarah would be forced to put herself through, Gillian had promised that the work they'd do together would make Sarah a star in the field. It wasn't an empty promise, either; a paper co-authored with the venerable Gillian Schang all but guaranteed Sarah would get consideration for a tenure-track faculty position at any number of top tier national universities.

Sarah, like so many girls before her and so many more after, had been lured into becoming a mailgirl by the rewards that awaited her on the other side.

***

Sarah and Gillian stepped out of the elevator and onto the 18th Floor, and were met by an attractive woman with dark, chin-length hair. Though Sarah guessed her to be in her mid- to late-forties, she easily could have been among the goddesses kneeling naked back on the 2nd Floor. Thin lips, long eyelashes, and a flawless complexion. She had a slender, athletic frame that suggested the gym was an important part of her daily routine, that she wasn't entering middle age without a fight. She wore a tight-fitting mini-skirt that might have been looked upon as inappropriate somewhere where there weren't bare-skinned girls flitting about the building. This was accompanied by a blouse with a few too many buttons undone, dark stockings, and a set of heels. If she were younger, she might well have been a prime mailgirl candidate.

But Sarah knew that USF had a preference towards girls in their late twenties and early thirties, girls that came from management-track positions and executive development programs, girls with law degrees, business degrees, and even -- in the case of Mailgirl Five - PhDs. At twenty-six, Sarah would be the youngest girl on the roster by almost a year, and one of just two girls recruited thus far without a successfully completed terminal degree. Though they might have been overlooking girls both young and attractive, and overspending in going after the profiles they had been, USF wasn't approaching administrative assistants and receptionists. Even if his assistant had been Sarah's age, and still in the prime of her beauty, Will Barrow likely would have passed her over in favor of more qualified, better-educated candidates.

"You must be Gillian," Barrow's assistant smiled with questionable sincerity, coming forward to meet them both.

"Good morning," Gillian replied, taking the woman's hand.

"Melanie," the girl said, introducing herself. Turning to Sarah, she sized her up and down, nodded, and said, "Mrs. Lowrie."

Melanie Lowrie. Why was that name so familiar?

The distinction between Gillian and Sarah -- "Melanie" to the former and "Mrs. Lowrie" to the latter -- Sarah didn't take as a cruelty, even if it was accompanied by a sneer. Mrs. Lowrie didn't think much of Sarah, which meant she knew what Sarah was here for, and she did little to hide her judgment. But Sarah knew full well that she'd be expected to be deferential and proper in how she interacted with USF employees outside of the mail room. "Yes, sir," and "No, sir." "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am." "Mr. Such-and-such." "Miss So-and-so." "Mrs. Lowrie." In introducing herself to Sarah the way she had, Mrs. Lowrie was only just stating the facts; though Sarah wasn't yet a mailgirl, officially, there was no need to pretend that they'd ever be anything more to one another than "Mrs. Lowrie" and "Mailgirl Number X."