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had described the women there as so sexually aggressive, they were scary. Many of them had been molded on trading floors or in investment banks with male-female ratios as terrifying as two hundred to one, so they learned to keep up with the boys. (At this business school, the ratio was a piece-of-cake seven to three.) Women told me stories of being hit on at work by “FDBs” (finance douche bags) who hadn’t even bothered to take off their wedding rings, sitting through Monday morning meetings that started with stories about who had banged whom (or what) that weekend. They’d been routinely hazed by male colleagues showing them ever more baroque porn downloaded on cell phones. Snowman fellatio was nothing to them. In general, their response was not to call in the lawyers, but to rise—or maybe stoop—to the occasion.
    In college, the average freshman might have been shell-shocked by the speed and crudeness of come-ons, but here I barely found anyone who even
noticed
the vulgarity anymore until I came across a new student. She had just arrived two weeks earlier from Argentina, and found herself stunned by the party scene around her. “Here in America, the girls, they give up their mouth, their ass, their tits,” she said, punctuating each with the appropriate hand motion, “before they even know the guy. It’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘You wanna hookup?’ ‘Sure.’ They are so aggressive! Do they have hearts of steel or something? In my country, a girl like this would be desperate. Or a prostitute.”
    But maybe these women consider a heart of steel a fair price to pay for their new high ranking in this social hierarchy. In eras past, the pretty women in such a corporate setting would have been imports brought in to liven up the party, secretaries maybe, or paid escorts, in the early Playboy Club days. But here the women floating around in their feather earrings, thigh-high boots, and knowing smiles were social equals, at least. These twenty-eight-year-old women halfway to an elite MBA, with five years of finance experience behind them and enough money to shop at Barneys, were using their sex appeal not just to catch the man or dazzle him with some girls-gone-wild striptease, but to challenge him in his most important domain, the workplace.
    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 CatherineHakim 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