From Thesis to Reality

On the face of it, the entire mailgirl phenomenon was preposterous.

The first Thirteen had heard of it, four or five years earlier, she hadn't entirely believed that it could be real. After all, how could this really, truly, be a thing? It had popped up in an "infotainment" type news story online, that covered one of the first two or three programs in Tokyo in a laughing "isn't this weird?!" sort of way. Maybe it was just a cultural thing that Americans couldn't understand -- a bunch of young girls scurrying around an office building, delivering packages in the nude? Thirteen remembered the general tone of that first story: "Ha ha ha! Aren't the Japanese crazy?"

But it turned out it wasn't a culture issue -- at least not in the traditional East vs. West sort of way. The first few mailgirl programs in Tokyo turned out to have an odd sort of staying power, and tapped into the imaginations and secret (or, not so secret) desires of men in positions of power throughout the region. Osaka. Sapporo. And then, Hong Kong. Singapore and Seoul. And then onto Berlin. Mailgirls went from a masturbatory fantasy of teenaged boys to a viral reality overnight.

It was a simple enough idea that got picked up and repeated again and again. Relatively young, attractive girls volunteered to take over mailroom duties at their places of work, always in the nude, and usually in exchange for some large sum of money or promise of eventual career advancement. It didn't surprise Thirteen that there were perverse older men, high up in some of these companies, who would support the idea. She supposed it didn't entirely surprise her that there were women out there -- exhibitionists, submissives, girls desperate for cash -- that would agree to work naked in exchange for some sort large lump sum. Even if Thirteen, when news of the programs first broke, could never in a million years have imagined that she'd end up as one of them, she supposed she didn't fault these mailgirls-of-her-imagination for signing on. And maybe, maybe, it made sense in a porn-obsessed place like Japan, or in Germany with its FKK culture. After all, this was occurring in privately owned office buildings, during work hours in which children weren't around.

But then the Times ran a piece on the "mailgirls phenomenon" in its International section. Cosmo ran a feature-length piece on what being a mailgirl was like in Tokyo. 20/20 covered it, as did all of the cable news networks, and all the major networks soon after. Mailgirls were featured as part of one of HBO's "Late Night" documentaries. And photos and videos soon began showing up online.

What Thirteen found was that mailgirl programs were darker and more sadistic than she'd ever imagined. Sexual abuse was rampant, though perhaps she'd been naïve to ever imagine a world where it wouldn't have been. More disturbing was just how terrible these girls were treated without sex even directly entering the equation -- instead of the whole thing being soft-core and sexy, it had strong BDSM elements that were demeaning, at best.

And yet...

And yet...

And yet Thirteen hadn't been able to look away. She hadn't been able pass by some new account of a girl's life as a mailgirl. She hadn't been able to keep from clicking through to see some sort of NSFW video. Or to stop from downloading a picture of some girl being whipped for delivering a package a few minutes too late. And she knew she wasn't alone -- the mailgirls "thing" seemed strike a nerve for a lot of people worldwide. It scratched an itch than a lot of people hadn't even known they had.

For Thirteen, this curiosity hadn't been sexual at the time. Or, at least, she didn't think it had been; who knew anymore? She'd minored in Women's Studies as an undergraduate, and she'd come to the East Coast specifically to study under Dr. Gillian Schang in New Haven, whose work in Anthropology included a particular focus on Third- and Fourth-Wave Feminism. Thirteen's own forthcoming doctorate was technically in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, but it was heavily flavored by Women's Studies. Her research to that point had been women's place in society, but also women's "culture," in and of itself. She'd been interested how women interacted with one another -- almost with a social psychology bent. And so, Thirteen had approached what it meant to be a mailgirl from a purely academic standpoint.

Gillian had pushed it upon her even more, encouraging her to double-down on "mailgirl culture" as an area of focus for her doctoral thesis. And Thirteen had complied. After all, the entire thing seemed tailor-made for her particular sliver of academic interest. It was also Gillian who suggested field work: although there had been a handful of peer-reviewed journal articles about mailgirls from an industrial psychology or economic standpoint, no one had yet looked at it from a cultural or anthropological direction. And then, too, Thirteen had agreed and complied, fully intending to fly to Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, to interview and observe some of the nascent mailgirl programs that had begun to get a foothold on the West Coast.

But Gillian wanted Thirteen to go one step further. There was an opportunity, she pushed, to truly understand what made a mailgirl tick, and how a mailgirl interacted with both her peers and her superiors. Thirteen would be losing something by using anonymous surveys and one-on-one interviews, researching and reporting on everything second-hand. No, Gillian reasoned. The best way for Thirteen to study what it meant to be a mailgirl was the live among the mailgirls, to live as a mailgirl herself.

Thirteen, naturally, had balked.

She had more information than most girls had when opting to become a mailgirl, having studied how the programs had worked in Japan, Central Europe, and in the Pacific Northwest. She'd read firsthand accounts of girls being humiliated and tormented time and again. Not every program was exactly the same; in fact, policies varied widely from company to company, depending on their authors. But the commonalities and central concept should have been enough to terrify any girl away. There was no way Thirteen would ever be caught stripping off her clothes and signing her life away.

As she remembered how adamant she had once been, Thirteen slithered out of her skirt, and let it pool at her feet.

Gillian had continued to push her, and had even gone so far as to secure a privately-funded research grant for the two of them. There wasn't a company out there that was going to sign a sixty-year-old like Gillian on as a mailgirl, but she continued to believe that she and her student were at the forefront of something truly fascinating. She pressed Thirteen forcefully, over the course of three separate meetings, before Thirteen had made an empty promise to give it more thought. And, even as Thirteen designed a framework for her research into a mailgirls program that had sprung up in a dot.com in San Francisco the year prior, Gillian hadn't given up on the idea of a placing a research assistant into a program as a mailgirl; if that wasn't going to be Thirteen, she was going to find another girl. Gillian arranged a meeting between Thirteen and Guy Dubuc, another faculty member at Yale, as Gillian herself interviewed a handful of young, attractive first- and second-year female graduate students. While Gillian hadn't come right out and said it, the implied threat was clear -- she'd move on with another girl, and Thirteen would be looking for a new faculty advisor.

That was the stick. But Gillian wasn't empty-handed when it came to a carrot. The research grant she'd received was sizeable, and she was willing to put the majority of it into Thirteen's hands. Food and housing would be completely covered, and Thirteen would receive a generous stipend for other expenses, to use entirely as she saw fit. Moreover, a doctoral thesis on the mailgirl controversy, along with a joint publication with the reputable Gillian Schang, probably meant a faculty position at a place like Stanford or Berkeley, or one of the Ivies.

In the end, it was the opportunity at USF that got Thirteen to finally commit. In San Francisco, she would have been only just north of her mother and step-father in Santa Clara, whereas USF's New York headquarters meant there would be an entire continent between the shame of what she was doing and her family. Also, USF at that time had only just announced their mailgirls program -- which meant that Gillian and Thirteen could watch a program be built from the ground up. And, perhaps most importantly, Gillian knew the program's director personally. Will Barrow, now USF's Director of Human Capital (a smaller unit within USF's larger Human Resources division), had been an undergraduate at Yale, and had studied under Gillian. Unlike other programs, Thirteen could be assured she'd be protected and looked after -- relatively, of course. With Barrow in charge, Gillian was convinced that there was less of a risk that USF's initiative would descend into the realms of full-on sexual slavery that had swallowed up a handful of other iterations of mailgirls.

Even then, the uneasy agreement Gillian had brokered between USF on one end, and Thirteen on the other, had nearly fallen apart half a dozen times before the summer began. Fearful of extensions and legal trickery, Thirteen had refused to sign away her Power-of-Attorney to the company, as other girls were forced to as part of their standard mailgirl contracts. For USF, this was a sticking point, and they ultimately budged only after Thirteen had agreed to sign her legal rights over to Gillian and Yale's Anthropology Department, instead.

USF, on their end, was wary of what they were getting out of the deal, and concerned that they hadn't laid eyes on this grad student turned potential mailgirl. In addition to sharing Thirteen's research, Gillian assured the company that that needn't worry about Thirteen, but they insisted on seeing her picture nonetheless. When they received headshots and fully clothed pictures, they insisted on seeing her body. When they received a naked selfie that Thirteen had taken in her bathroom mirror (to that point, the most humiliating thing that Thirteen had ever done), they'd insisted that she send them more, including shots from behind, from below, from all over. And, the fact that there had been six days between that next submission and when Thirteen finally received an invitation to come down to New York had been tortuous to the girl's self esteem.

In the locker room, Thirteen hung her skirt in her locker, and began to unbutton her already half-unbuttoned blouse. Her black lace, demi-cup bra was exposed first, and a matching thong came into view as she worked her way south. Because USF now controlled every aspect of her life within the building, they even mandated how she hung and folded her "street clothes" as she got "into uniform." Her blouse was hung carefully alongside the skirt, but everything else was to be folded neatly on the lower shelf -- pants, if she'd been wearing them, top (if not hung), then panties, then bra. Outerwear to innerwear, top to bottom. Mistress Zero claimed that this was so the mailgirls' locker room, exposed to the elevator lobby, would never look cluttered or out-of-sorts. The truth was that it was just another petty form of control.

Thirteen was certainly exposed. She was facing her locker, and had her back turned towards the locker room's entrance, but she guessed there were still almost twenty people on the far side who were able to watch her undress. If she turned, Thirteen would only see her own reflection, wearing nothing more than her bra and panties. But it was mirror-glass, and though Thirteen couldn't see out, she knew full well that her audience was able to see in. The mirror-glass ran the length of the locker room -- from the showers, to the sinks, to the bondage-and-discipline set-up by the front door, and anyone on the other side could watch her shower or put on make-up, watch her lap water from the dog-bowl, watch her pee while on one of the exposed toilets. But the mirror-glass had become a blessing in disguise, as even if she knew there were men and women out there able to watch her every move and see every part of her body, Thirteen could trick herself into almost forgetting that fact. She'd entered through the main elevator lobby that morning, and she'd exit through it that evening; in-between, she could deny that that outside world was even there.

Thirteen reached behind her back and unsnapped her bra.

She slid the straps down her exposed arms, revealing round, natural, and firm Goldilocks breasts -- neither too big, nor too small. She had pinkish brown areolae, and nipples that had, as of late, spent more time standing at attention than at rest. That very moment was no different, as the cool air of the locker room, combined with the embarrassment and excitement of undressing more-or-less in public, had them standing upright and outwards.

Would transferring to Guy Dubuc to finish out her PhD have been the end of the world? Would letting some other girl assist Gillian Schang and her research into mailgirl culture have set Thirteen back that much, career-wise? After all, Thirteen had suffered for that honor, more than she had ever expected to. Earlier that summer, Thirteen would have mostly certainly said "no," and been more than happy to let some other girl take her place here at USF. Now that she was mostly looking at her time as a mailgirl in the rearview mirror, she felt differently, and just hoped that her work was as significant as Gillian assured her it was.

Thirteen found the waistline of her panties, and slid them off. She dutifully folded the thong neatly, or as neatly as anyone could expect her to fold such a minimal amount of fabric, and carefully positioned it in her locker with her bra on top. She was shaved bare -- as all the girls were -- from the neck down, and her pussy was visible to anyone who even bothered to glance in her direction. She had no tattoos and no piercings (aside from her ear lobes), and the only markings she bore on her body were from a faded, black, felt-tip marker: Thirteen was clearly demarcated as such, with her assigned number scrawled on her right hip.

She'd showered three times since Mistress Zero had traced the number thirteen on her body the previous morning, but the reality was that the marker was stubborn and difficult to get off without vigorous scrubbing. Back in early June, Thirteen had insisted on getting it off before she went home. She had hated seeing it when she was home, being reminded of what her daily life was now like. But, like so many other things as she spent more and more days as a mailgirl, Thirteen had eventually surrendered -- why bother going through that effort if she was just going to be marked up again the next day? Yesterday, Mistress Zero had only run her marker over the previous day's number thirteen, as she'd done the day before that and the day before that. And as she'd do later this morning.

Thirteen took her earrings out. She took off her rings, bracelets, and watch. She unfastened her platinum pendant. All of these things were placed in a utilitarian metal cup that each girl had in her locker for such items, and Thirteen wondered -- not for the first time -- why she bothered to put jewelry on in the morning, in the first place.