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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: