15. Sweet About Me – Gabriella Cilmi 2008
And if there's lessons to be learned
I'd rather get my jamming words in first, so
I'll tell you something that I've found
That the world's a better place
When it's upside down, boy
‘Sugar and spice and all things nice, that’s what little
girls are made of’
Sorry, but there’s nothing sweet
about me and I don’t think I need to apologise for that.
That said, society doesn’t just
condition girls to be ‘sweet’ and ‘cute’, but many reward them for it.
While an undergrad I supported myself
by tending bar at various establishments around Townsville. Eventually I ended
up working at the student association bar at my uni. An establishment ran by the
student association – elected representatives of the student body – for the
students – more female than male graduates, even in the late 90s and early naughties.
However, with the males strutting
around as bouncers ready to eject anyone that they felt was out of line, the
females were working our arses off keeping the patrons hydrated (drunk) from behind
the bar.
This isn’t meant to be a rant. I
enjoyed bar work and had no interest in physically taking on drunk idiots, but
this does set the scene.
Enter the cute, young, compliant
and ‘sweet’ young bar maid.
This chick was nice enough, but,
as one of my mates had referred to her, she was a ‘private school girl’ – synonymous
with the term ‘princess’.
While I got on with her on a work
level, she, either by design or happenstance, had the guys wrapped around her little
finger. The finger wrapping was so tight that the males would jump to her defence
at the slightest interpretation of someone speaking ill of her, putting down
other female staff members in the process.
Some of these guys were in
management roles. This meant that there was an unstated expectation that I and
the other female staff members would have to play the game of assuming that this
one bar maid could do no wrong in order to not put a target on our backs, resulting
in less shifts, down graded duties and the like.
As the male staff jealously guarded
her I really wanted to tell them ‘It’s okay, I don’t think you’re all that either’.
Instead I bit my tongue and did my job.
Sometimes the world does turn upside
down. After holidaying in Bali I came home feeling a little sorry for the males
over there. Many of them were happy to tell me that they felt that females had all
of the professional opportunities because they are so beautiful – contrast with
beautiful females being offered bar work in Australia. Additionally, many younger
Indonesian males in Bali have resorted to becoming Kuta Cowboys in an attempt to
trap a middle-aged western female into providing for them. Now there’s
equality of the sexes, it’s just a shame it’s happening with sex tourism rather
than something more admirable like aid tourism to developing countries.
Towards the end of my final year
as an undergrad there was a changing of the guard in management at the student
bar. As the protege was organising interviews for new bar maids to join them in
the new year he was stupid enough to ask his mentor in full hearing of other
staff ‘Should we be recruiting skinny and attractive types?’!
As a student union member I really
took offence at my membership fees being used to recruit ‘skinny and attractive
types’, but then again, I was also soon to be the proud holder of a degree and
therefore didn’t plan on hanging around just to tend bar, or deal with this
wally.
As for the ‘private school girl’
that I’d been working with, I didn’t think of her for many years until I became
aware of Chris Lilley’s character Ja’mie on several of his ABC series. This
character ultimately ended up in a series titled ‘Ja’mie: Private School Girl’.
I got a chuckle out of remembering
my former bar tending colleague, but also found it perplexing that the titular
role in this series is played by ‘Oh my
God! A man!’.
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