The End of Men and the Rise of Women (5 page)

When I watched the business school women flirt at the bar, it seemed to me they were testing themselves. If they could ignore the porn jokes, they could hold their own on the trading floor. If they could make the first move, then they could also beat the guys at a negotiation. This was their way of psyching the men out, by refusing to back down in any game where, in another era, they would have been assumed to be the weaker opponent.

It’s even possible that women their age are using their sex appeal not just to keep up with the men, but to surpass them. If in college sex appeal is something you have to rein in to focus on your career, after college it might actually be a career-booster. For the last few years, economists have tried to measure the tangible marketplace value of various amorphous traits—social skills, for example, or cultural capital, or “soft power”—all of which refer to something other than concrete assets or skills. Recently British economist Catherine
Hakim has identified a new potential asset she called “erotic capital.” The term refers not to beauty or sexiness, exactly, but more to charm and charisma. People who have it (Michelle Obama, Ségolène Royal) reap financial gains, because they can attract other people to them and be seen as potential leaders. “Properly understood, erotic capital is what economists call a ‘personal asset,’ ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human, and social capital. It is just (if not more) as important for social mobility and success,” Hakim writes.

In Hakim’s view, erotic capital has always been an obvious asset, but not considered to have any measurable value in the workplace. Men in charge trivialized it because it was something women had mastered. And feminists disdained the idea of claiming it as a real source of empowerment. But now those dynamics are changing, Hakim writes. Instead of being done in by a highly sexualized culture, women are learning to manipulate it to their advantage. In an economy that values social skills and a more charismatic style of leadership, attractiveness gives you a genuine edge. Economists have even begun to measure the “beauty premium,” or the idea that magnetism has a direct connection to earning power. In the United States, for example, a large national study showed that people labeled “attractive” earned 12 to 17 percent more than those labeled “plain.” The bump applies to both men and women, but women have been playing on this turf a lot longer.

Men, by necessity, have been playing catch-up. The recent rise in plastic surgeries is fueled by men—especially middle-aged men—who have been lining up for face-lifts, Botox, and liposuction. In 1986,
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive was the actor Mark Harmon, who had so much back hair it was visible from the front. Now the new standards for male waxing and trimming are as stringent as they are for women. The new men’s magazines crib directly from
Cosmopolitan
:
WHAT SEXY WOMEN LOVE!
and
SIX-PACK ABS
calls the cover of
Men’s Health
in headlines recycled every few months. Designers are starting to peddle “mancessories,” feather bracelets and metal cuffs and even makeup for men.

Of course, these shifts in the power dynamic do not mean that men and women just cleanly switch roles on the dating scene. In the very first episode of
Sex and the City
, aired in 1998, Carrie Bradshaw asks in her column if a woman can get laid like a man. The answer, delivered barely ten minutes into the episode, is not exactly, and that is still largely true. With sex, as with most areas of life, women tend to preserve a core of their old selves—romantic, tender, vulnerable—even while taking on new sexual personas. The women at business school no longer
needed
a man to support them, but that didn’t mean they didn’t
want
one. And years of practice putting up their guard made it hard for them to know when to let it down. As Meghan Daum writes in
My Misspent Youth
, her memoir of single womanhood, the “worst sin imaginable was not cruelty or bitchiness or even professional failure but vulnerability.”

I arrived at the business school during recruiting week, and I could see the strain it was causing the women who were already in relationships. One woman was dating a man who’d just gotten a job offer in London. She was willing to go to London, but he hadn’t asked her yet, and she wasn’t going to bring it up for fear of seeming too needy. In the meantime, she was putting off her own job offer to see how it all sorted out. This same situation was playing out between other couples, with Tokyo and San Francisco as potential backdrops. For these tough, ambitious women, the challenge was how to hang on to their hearts of steel for long enough that they seemed invulnerable, but not for so long that they missed their chance at happiness.

I
FIRST HEARD
about Sabrina from her ex-boyfriend of nine months, a fellow business school student I met on the balcony at the party. I trusted him immediately because he did not resort to the kind of jerkoff party swagger I’d heard from some of his classmates: “I just don’t want to be tied down right now” or “Fuck marriage.” He was at least willing to entertain the theater of romance. “I’ve already found my dream girl,” he told me. “Six different times.” He was in love with Sabrina from the first night they hung out after a business school happy hour, he told me, although they didn’t sleep together, not for another two weeks. Once they did, he told me, it was a whole new experience for him. In bed she was her sublime, adventurous self: confident, aggressive, and totally comfortable asking for what she wanted; nimble and responsive and full of surprises, suggesting things he wouldn’t have thought to ask. She seemed to want it more than he did. “I was always the one to be in control in that scenario, so I wasn’t used to it,” he said. He kept describing her as “unique” and “one of a kind,” although they had broken up several months earlier. “You’ll see when you meet her,” he said, and so I sought her out.

I tracked her down several days later in a classic single-girl-in-a-sitcom pose. Sabrina, who is thirty-one, was hanging out with a girlfriend, drinking wine and not eating the crackers and cheese on the table. In a few hours she was going to meet a guy she had just texted with, a trader they refer to as “the hot guy” she’d met at work that summer and slept with a couple of times. (After the second time, she’d texted him, “I’m just not feeling it” and—miracle—“he was cool with it. He didn’t take it personally.” So they
still hang out occasionally as friends, even though they don’t have sex anymore.)

But for the moment, the two women were talking about things they like: red wine, Lady Gaga concerts, Angela Merkel, and their favorite advice book of the moment,
Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
, which advises women how to stop sabotaging their careers by being excessively deferential. Things they don’t like: short men; FDBs; men who, when you reject them, send texts saying “shouldn’t you be thinking about your eggs?” Also, their friend Anna, “who sits on the couch all day obsessing about finding
The One
”—that last phrase drips with sarcasm.

Sabrina had met her share of Annas in business school, the girls who microanalyze every text and phone call, who wait, wait for the phone to ding or beep or pirouette out of their hands or whatever it does when they get a text from a boy. And who, when it doesn’t, when it just sits in their lap obstinately like a permanent stain, moan, “Why isn’t he texting me? What’s going on?” (this she says in a mock idiot-girl-who-reads-
Cosmo
voice). “Well, because we all need affection sometimes, and he just happened to get it from you that night,” she barked at the imaginary Annas. “Retard.”

Did she ever wait by the phone? “Never.
Never.
” At least not since college, when she was not as good at reading the signals. “I started to think about it,” she said, lounging back on her friend’s couch, putting her socked feet up on the coffee table. “What do I need a man for? I don’t need him financially. I don’t need him to do activities. I have lots of friends here. So fuck it.”

One problem I had with our conversation was the cognitive dissonance produced by the difference between the voice and the person: The distinctive thing about Sabrina is her effortless, natural
beauty. It’s hard to describe her physically without resorting to Nancy Drew–era clichés such as “youthful” and “fresh.” She is half Asian, with creamy skin and long black hair and clear green eyes. On the day I met her she was wearing an outfit that Katniss, the heroine from
The Hunger Games,
might wear to go hunting: jeans and what looked like a boy’s flannel checked button-down shirt, with no makeup. (She made no wardrobe adjustments at all when it was time to meet “the hot guy” at the bar.) “In both cases I think I’m a hunter, a killer,” she said, musing on how her dating style echoed her favorite negotiating tactics.

But my larger problem was my inability to judge how much of what she said was bluster and how much was real. And even if it was all real, whether Sabrina was an unusual case, or whether there was a little bit of Sabrina in every woman of this generation. I couldn’t say. But what I wanted to know was whether her years in the hook-up culture and on Wall Street had landed her in an extreme and untenable place.

This is the diagnosis Lois Frankel makes in
Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office
, one of Sabrina’s favorite books. The cautionary examples in Frankel’s book—the Susans and Rebeccas and Jills—are polite and accommodating. They work hard and they don’t play the office politics game. Mostly they wait around at work to be
given
what they want, just as Anna waits around for her phone to ring.
Nice Girls
is a business advice book, but Sabrina uses it as a dating guide, too, a primer on how to play in the big-city dating scene and never lose.

Sabrina was twenty-three and just finishing college when she met a guy who looked like Justin Timberlake and “I totally lost my head. I was obsessed.” After less than a year they got engaged, and then he cheated on her. She was “miserable. Totally out of control, and I hated feeling totally out of control.” She vowed that she would never be “that sad miserable crawling thing again.” How did she do it? She put some distance between herself and sex. Sex was something apart from her, something “I could step back from and put in a box so I would never be overwhelmed again. It’s like, ‘I can’t be obsessing, I have shit to get done.’”

From then on, Sabrina has scrutinized herself for any vulnerability and rooted it out. “We have sex, there’s that oxytocin floating around, we get attached, blah blah blah.” Or maybe it’s the way she was raised, by a Japanese mother who convinced her that she was supposed to make herself “easy to be around” and not talk too much around men. “There is always this little voice in your head saying, ‘This is not ladylike. This is not normal. Nice girls don’t do that. Nice girls don’t ask for raises.’ But then it’s like BAM! Smash it! ‘Nice girls don’t ask guys out on dates.’ BAM. Clear that! And then it’s gone.”

After her disastrous college engagement to the Timberlake look-alike, Sabrina took a safer route. She picked someone with whom she had less sexual chemistry but who was her friend, and within a year they got engaged. One day, at twenty-eight, she found herself sitting next to her fiancé, on a plane that was experiencing massive turbulence. As the plane shook she thought to herself, “I am not living the
life I want to live. I am not dating the guy I want to date. I am engaged to a guy I don’t want to be engaged to.” She had by that time been working at banks for several years and had traveled all over the world and experienced turbulence dozens of times. But this time the plane was shaking so hard, she had imminent death on her mind. And she wasn’t thinking about the nice life she and her fiancé could have enjoyed together. She was thinking about herself in a house in Darien, Connecticut, cooking in the kitchen with kids at her feet, and feeling like a plane crash might be preferable. The plane landed safely, and shortly thereafter Sabrina broke off an engagement for the second time in her life. In the marriage market, twice fleeing the altar makes you the equivalent of the person who’s had a near-death experience and seen the white light. In other words, it makes you free, to text cute guys at eleven
P.M.
yourself and tell them to fuck off if you want to and forget about
The One
.

Or does it? When I met her a few days later, Sabrina was in a different mood and thinking more about what she wanted from life. That business school boyfriend—the one I’d met at the party—had inspired a breakthrough for her. Before business school he’d lived in Thailand for almost a decade, and this part of his sexual history had become a source of anguish for her in the relationship. In Thailand, she figured, sex was so ubiquitous that “it becomes just like Burger King. ‘I’ll have a blow job with a side of sex, and an extra order of massage my balls.’” After they broke up, she had begun to wonder if his attitude about sex echoed her own at all, and whether she’d better start worrying about whether a certain kind of cheap sex wipes out the ability to be intimate.