Gender performance, summer jobs, and memories.

I was in a Reddit conversation with a woman who told a story of a summer job at a grocery store, saying that she was tired of being a cashier and wanted to occasionally sack groceries. The response of her supervisor– to the amazement of both her and me– was that certain jobs are better suited to men, so it wasn’t sexist to say women shouldn’t do them.

This was a female supervisor saying this.

So, apparently sacking groceries is a man’s job and cashiering is a woman’s job?

Flashback a couple of decades. I’m in my late teens and working a summer job at a grocery store. I’m in the opposite scenario to the Redditor– I’m a bagger who wants to learn to work the registers. Like them, I wanted to learn new skills and break up the monotony.

I asked my supervisor, a 50ish man, why they weren’t training me to be a cashier, and his answer floored me– he didn’t think I smiled enough, and I didn’t come across as friendly enough.

I lost all enthusiasm for that job the rest of the summer. I hated that condescending old bastard of a supervisor, pulling up the corners of his mouth in a smile every so often when he walked past me.  I also watched the cashiers I worked alongside, wondering what they had that I didn’t. When I wasn’t thinking about how thoroughly my life sucked, I could smile just fine. I didn’t see a whole lot of difference between the cashiers and me– the only difference was the management thought they were “smiley enough” and I wasn’t.

This was in the midst of a social crisis for me. I wasn’t especially well-liked by people outside my family at the time. Guys didn’t find me attractive, and I didn’t even get catcalled– a damn near universal experience for young women. I had gotten a few catcalls in school when I was even younger teenager, but not as a late-teen-almost-20. I liked that I didn’t get my space invaded when I was out in public, but I wondered if that’s when I knew I’d be likeable enough to people and friendly enough to be a cashier– when guys started harassing me on the street. 😬

You tend to get more catcalls when you’re thought approachable and vulnerable. Others at that time found me unapproachable– but I felt that learning to be more approachable was a task I didn’t want to undertake. It was thankless; it was likely to be maximum effort for minimum return; and most of all, it was gendered. Learning to be approachable was basically learning to present more feminine. Being more likeable meant I had to become more “catcall-able”.

Today, I consider myself at different times female or nonbinary. I go by she/they. People respond to me better now, and I can believe I’m good at this socialization stuff for the first time in decades. How much of that is due to my getting more mature– and how much of it was society deciding to be kinder to those who don’t conform to gender?

And will I lose all of that in the coming years? Will I go right back to being thought of as unapproachable and off-putting? Will “ready for a public facing job” become synonymous with “sexually harassable” again?

I also think I fell into some kind of uncanny valley where I was that close to being feminine enough, but just enough off that I unsettled people. Remember, people who are closer to the uncanny valley are more off-putting that those farther away from it. 

We like people better when they’re similar to us, and we like them better when they stay in their gender niche. They make us more comfortable, and comfortability is thought of as a necessary prerequisite to liking and loving.

Even, I thought as a youngster, in modern and enlightened America. Nowadays, I see America isn’t so enlightened– in large part, because we get uncomfortable so easily when someone doesn’t fit in.