Mailgirl Chow

She glanced down the row of lockers. Fourteen wasn't beside her this time; apparently she'd had First Lunch. But Fifteen and Sixteen were both further down the line, as were Nineteen and Twenty-One. On the other side of the locker room, Thirteen cast about for Seven - but Seven, too, was nowhere to be seen, and Thirteen felt disappointed that she wasn't going to see her much today. Oh well, she thought to herself, knowing at least she'd be able to say her goodbyes that night at the Imperial.

A few of the other girls were still eating their lunches. Many of them had taken the opportunity to touch themselves earlier, while Thirteen and Twenty-One had been otherwise occupied by Mistress Zero. And so now they were trickling into the showers, a few minutes ahead of Thirteen, who was just now getting to her hands and knees for lunch.

She'd stepped over the bowl to check her phone, but Thirteen hadn't needed to confirm what was in her dish - the menu didn't change. For snack, for lunch, and for the occasional dinner, the girls were all fed a thick, protein-infused porridge that had all the consistency and taste of dog food. To hear Human Capital defend it, "mailgirl chow" had all of the vitamins, nutrients, sugars, and carbohydrates that they needed to maintain their weight and perform their job, stripped of all extraneous tastes, shapes, and textures of a normal meal. The taste and smell had been repulsive at first, but Thirteen could admit that such a strict, regulated diet, combined with the unprecedented amount of exercise and stress she put her body through daily at the Plaza, had her in the best shape of her life. She wasn't eating for taste or texture - she was eating for fuel. And besides, she had read of mailgirl programs that fed their girls actual dog food, so she knew she should be grateful for what was in her bowl.

There were only twelve bowls for twenty-four girls, and some of those very same bowls were left out over morning and afternoon breaks. They were washed by the Evening Shift girls at night, but by time that Thirteen stuck her face into the dog dish at her locker, it may have been eaten from by two, three, or any number of other girls over the course of the day. Their diet was tightly controlled, and any girl who tipped a bit too heavy on the scales was given a half-sized helping; any girl who was getting a bit too light was given a double. They were expected to eat all that given to them, and even to lick the bowl clean - a less than sanitary rule in practice, given that Thirteen could have been eating from the very same bowl Fourteen had eaten from earlier.

She hoped it had been Seven.

The girls weren't allowed to use their hands, either, which meant there was a row of naked mailgirls, collared and on all fours, eating out of dog dishes like animals. Thirteen had found herself wondering, on more than one occasion, what sort of twisted pervert viewed this as turn-on.

As she ate, the silver nipple clamps hung from her breasts, swaying this way and that, and tugging gently at her. At one point they even clanged loudly against her dish, which caused a minor chuckle from Fifteen - a chuckle that Thirteen had to share in. Her whole situation was ridiculous, and the only thing she could do was laugh. The fact that her paddling would be obvious to anyone who saw her, at least for the next couple of hours, was almost funnier than embarrassing, almost more comical than painful.

Corporal punishment might have seemed a step too far for even the most understanding of mailgirl apologists, but it had been an important aspect of mailgirl programs since their inception. Sure, there were successful programs for which enough demerits earned a girl a longer shift, or a lost weekend, or a cut in pay, or some other non-physical punishment. But spankings and paddlings remained pervasive in mailgirl culture worldwide, and Thirteen had found that even those programs that loudly proclaimed to be above the practice often still had regular instances occurring behind closed doors.

For detractors, the abuse was symptomatic of the abuse of mailgirls overall, and the fact that such punishment was often delivered by a dominant male figure only further emboldened their push to have the practice of mailgirls done away with altogether. United American Women, or UAW, had led the protests when mailgirl programs began to pop up on the West Coast, but they'd been joined by all manners of feminist organizations both Stateside and abroad. American Association of Professional Women. Femininsts For Equality. People for the Ethical Treatment of Mailgirls. And so on. For these groups, corporal punishment was an anathema. But then, for them, every single aspect of the mailgirl phenomenon was an anathema.

More interesting to Thirteen was the number of women's rights groups and other feminist organizations that had risen up in defense of mailgirl programs. For these groups, the argument was framed almost in a freedom-of-choice, my-body/my-rights sort of way, a worldview that Thirteen found herself increasingly aligned to as she approached the end of her time as a mailgirl. Submission and subjugation may not have been for everyone, but they were all volunteers. They all signed daily confirmations that said that this was their choice. They could make decisions for themselves, without a powerful women's group deciding if it was right or wrong on the part of their entire gender.

Sure, many - if not most - were coerced or otherwise bullied into volunteering, and threatened with retribution if they dared to leave. But, interestingly, one of the findings that Thirteen had picked up in her research was how former mailgirls themselves had lined up on one side of the debate or the other. Mailgirls who quit during their contracts lined up overwhelmingly against mailgirl programs anywhere, while those mailgirls who'd completed their contracts and moved on tended to line up overwhelmingly in favor.

Thirteen couldn't be sure if this was a misery-loves-company sort of thing, but the experiences of former mailgirls - successful mailgirls, who'd gone in one side and come out the other - was a research area she planned to devote more time to. A shockingly high percentage of girls signed on for a second, third, or fourth contract, even when they weren't being coerced to do so. Many continued on as mailgirls without a contract, enduring their daily abuse and humiliation despite being free from retaliatory penalties. She read accounts of girls who'd received promised promotions and agreed-upon raises, only for them to find something missing, to find that they had been happier as a lowly, naked mailgirl than they were in Marketing or Human Resources or Operations. Girls who got out for a year or two, only to go back. There were groups of former mailgirls who met both formally and informally, often in the nude, to share experiences and find something in one another that non-mailgirls simply couldn't understand. There was a group of former mailgirls in Berlin, for whom talk and sharing and support hadn't been enough, which had devolved into a kinky, BDSM sex club with a mailgirl theme. Thirteen wondered what had made Mistress Zero (Mailgirl Funf From Frankfurt once upon a time) come to New York and play dominatrix to a new generation of mailgirls.

But with her own release upon her, Thirteen found herself understanding the difficult-to-escape nature of being a mailgirl. She certainly wasn't proud of everything she'd done that summer, and there were more than a few things that caused her to cringe just thinking about them. But she was proud of herself that she'd seen it through, and proud that she'd been strong enough to survive everything that USF had thrown at her. She felt that she knew herself better than she had coming into the summer, even if some of that introspection left her feeling uncomfortable about what she'd found. And, of course, she was now more sexually alive, sexually experienced, and sexually realized than she ever could have imagined.

No, it wasn't an experience that she looked forward to confessing to her mother. But, despite all of the abuse and exposure and humiliation that came with being a mailgirl, it felt wrong to deny another girl that opportunity for self-realization and self-discovery, that sense of freedom in submission, that sexual awakening. Her sister had complained of a lack of adventure in her life; Thirteen would never be able to make that same complaint.