Counter Culture

Years ago, when I first learned what a flâneur is—that rapacious urban wanderer—I was struck by the thought that the female equivalent is not a fellow traveler, a gender-flipped idler whiling away her time in the streets, but something more constrictive—the “girl behind the counter,” to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase. She’s the shopgirl, the saleslady, the woman offering tickets or goods or information, always some kind of an exchange. Restricted to her place behind that counter or sitting at her desk, she, like the flâneur, is a 19th-century invention, born in the nascent world of the department store but soon enough translated into other workplaces, other contexts. She, too, is a public creature; her eyes smooth over the crowds that surround her, and her existence is almost wholly observant. However, though the male flâneur merges easily with passersby, the woman behind the counter becomes invisible among those same crowds for a different reason.