|
Author:
Elisabeth Finch
Assistant on her way to boss.
|
Elisabeth R. Finch earned her MFA in Screen and TV Writing from USC and BA in Creative Writing and Drama at Carnegie Mellon; won a Television Academy Internship for Script Writing; and finally changed her New Jersey driver’s license after six years living in L.A.
Her essays were recently featured on Fresh Yarn, Annalecta, and her mother’s refrigerator. A 2008-2009 Jerome Fellowship Finalist for playwriting, Elisabeth's work has been performed at the Kennedy Center/American College Theater Festival and the WorkShop Theater in New York. She is currently a writers’ assistant on True Blood where she successfully drinks her weight in Diet Coke on a daily basis.
Elisabeth taught at the American School of Madrid, learning no Spanish whatsoever (except "swing set" and "furnished apartment"); stuffed dead squirrels in high school for extra credit; and can recite 147 prepositions on command. She has neither a sense of smell nor sense of humor.
|
I AM NOT.... A PIECE OF ASS
The very first day of my very first high profile "industry job," I received an email from my boss by accident. It was meant to answer a colleague’s seemingly innocuous query about me, The New Assistant. The subject heading: "I did not hire..." The email : "I did not hire a piece of ass. But she's a Harvard grad, very bright, and laughs a lot. So there you go." The fact that he considered me intelligent and funny was instantly and utterly lost on me. Less than ten minutes at my brand new desk, there I was, signed, sealed, and delivered. And I was nothing more than a product marked: Not even a piece of ass. Less Than. And therefore, my bruised ego concluded, somehow least likely to succeed.
Granted the email debacle came before I knew of my boss' intelligence, loyalty, and big-hearted generosity. This was before the extra vacation time he gave me "just because," before I became intimately familiar with his inability to retain details, like the fact that I never attended Harvard in the first place. This was also before I knew the pig-dog identity of the cohort to whom the email was supposed to have been sent. But the moment the email arrived in my inbox, none of that mattered.
My initial instinct was to run, tail between my unattractive legs. My second inclination was to quit in a flurry of righteous indignation. Instead, I did what I always did when an email made me want to vomit on my desk: I summoned the sisterhood. I sent emails to my three closest friends. I expected words of encouragement or empowerment. Sadly, what I got in return were three stories echoing my experience. Three stories from three fiercely capable, intelligent, and, yes, attractive women wherein they caught their bosses in one way or another yucking it up to their fellow Middle Age Crusties about how big a threat their assistants were or weren't to their marriages.
I started to wonder if it was possible for female assistants to be just that -- assistants -- there to learn, grow, and ultimately advance. Or were we forever relegated to be our bosses’ wives, Madonnas, or whores? Sure, we were a banded sisterhood who insisted over late-night margaritas that we deserved better. But were we still Ivy League graduates doomed to acquire a collection of Victoria Secret miracle bras, Daddy Issues and therapy bills from every male boss we encounter?
If fulfilling men’s fantasies was part of the job description, I was realistic enough to know I’d always fall short. Even on my best hair day with perfect makeup and killer shoes, I wasn’t a piece of ass. But before that email, it never occurred to me to think to care. Sure, I’d gone on interviews that lingered just a little too long in a little too dark of a restaurant. And there was that one “meeting” on the third floor of a beach house I convinced myself was totally normal. I was too busy filling myself with lofty Steinemesque visions of success rewarding the meritorious, of changing my own flat tires and moving furniture, of earning, not sleeping, my way to the top.
After wallowing in a triple cocktail of naiveté, self-pity, and Guinness, I quit whining and started spending my time more wisely -- and by that I mean using valuable office hours to take an opinion poll. I asked my assistant-sisters and male assistantites to describe their relationship with their bosses. Five men replied back: “He’s my boss.” “Boss and Mentor when he’s in the mood.” “Boss, I guess.” “Finch, what the hell are you talking about?” “Boss.” The women’s replies? “Wife!” “He thinks it’s funny that half my office thinks we’re sleeping together.” “Too busy planning his mother’s 80th to reply.” “I’m the wife he neither fucks with nor has the balls to divorce.” “Ugh.”
The more people I asked, the clearer it became – if you were hot, and smart, you were fodder for the perpetual male sniggers and swaggers, and stuck. If you weren’t a piece of ass, but intelligent, you were indispensable – and stuck. Being invaluable wasn’t pushing any of us forward, it was holding us back.
Male assistantites were somehow excused from the late night phone calls, the questions about their dating life, the casual meetings in peculiar locations. And one by one they were advancing while I was standing still with the sisterhood. The presumed illicit affairs and snickers behind my “piece of ass” assistant-sisters’ backs gave them anything but cache. And on my end, being deemed “part of the family” never amounted to an agent or staff-writing gig. We were loyal, indispensable, and going nowhere.
But we were the ones drinking the Kool Aid. Sure, we didn’t initiate bizarre conversations about boyfriends and whether or not we’d ever cheated on them. And, true, none of us could sustain any healthy relationship outside of our bosses, because, after a long day of work, the last thing we wanted was to be around someone who wanted to harass us or sleep with us. We drank the Kool Aid because we believed that being invaluable would pay off. We drank because we were optimists, we had strong work ethics, and because we were really, really poor. And, let’s face it, we drank it because our well-intentioned mothers taught us to, and no one since has thought to give us the tools to do anything different.
As much as I wanted to believe my boss was the exception to the rule, and that I was different, I wasn’t. I quit my job after a year. Actually, I’m lying. Three-and-a-half years. I’m learning. Slowly. After three-and-a-half years working for the same boss, where the creative opportunities came, went, and I took multiple extended vacations to the Virgin Islands, it occurred to me that if I looked closer, his email was far less an insult and far more valuable than I ever realized. Sure I objected to its necessity in the first place. I despised the implication that you couldn’t be both attractive AND smart, and if you were to choose one over the other, I came up on the Other side. But being told that I wasn’t a piece of ass did give me room to be everything else that I was:
Not quite the daughter of Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan, not the doormat who accepts scraps with a shit-eating-Stepford grin, but somewhere imperfectly aware and in between.
Try as I do to convince my male assistantites that they have it easy, they remain convinced that a great rack and high heels are our golden tickets. Perhaps their claims that I bend to stereotypes about the “female assistant/male boss thing” have merit. But so far, unlike their straight male counterparts, none of the two gay men and three women I’ve worked for ever asked me to lie, buy their lovers “sorry I fucked up” flowers, or assure them I’m not mad at them four times a day.
And maybe they’re right, that male assistantites have their own crosses to bear. Maybe they, too, are missing the tools to navigate increasingly murky assistant-waters. Or maybe my therapist is dead-on when he tells me I’m over-thinking this way too much. But I’m allowed to do that. Thinking, I mean. After all, I’m not a piece of ass.
|