Sexual Office Politics: A Guide for the Eighties
January, 1981
A few years ago, when I wrote Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, I acquired brief gurudom by suggesting a number of ways in which ambitious men could make their way to the top by observing how the top dogs placed their desks, wore their clothes and carried into every phase of life a concern for the power style.
I have every reason to believe it worked for a lot of guys--after all, if the boss wears Gucci loafers and a blue suit, it seems pretty obvious that he's going to like seeing the people around him in the same kind of clothes, and therefore a bad idea to turn up in blue jeans and running shoes.
I must confess with hindsight, however, that I didn't give enough thought to a problem of the Eighties: What do you do if the boss is wearing a neat skirt slit up to the thigh, a silk blouse with the top three buttons unfastened and a fetching pair of high-heeled sandals?
It hasn't happened to you? Rest assured, it probably will. And when the sexual roles are reversed, don't suppose that it won't hurt. I recently heard a woman executive dismiss one of her eager subordinates as "just another pretty face" and another, in an unguarded moment, describe a man in her department as "a great fuck but a lousy manager."
When a woman was recently picked to head a large entertainment conglomerate, it was astonishing to see how the men whose jobs and salaries she now controlled began to preen themselves, trying to catch her eye, flattering her, telling her how great she looked, though to an outside observer it was interesting to note that she accepted all the attention lavished on her with a winning smile (or possibly a winner's smile) marred only by a pair of the coldest baby-blue eyes seen in a long time. The eyes told the story. What they said was, "Eat your heart out, baby, I've got you by the balls."
If you supposed that women would be nicer, or at any rate different, when they got power, forget it. Kipling took care of that a long time ago ("The female of the species is more deadly than the male," remember?), and it's worth bearing in mind that since women usually have to put up with a certain amount of humiliation, sexism and male resentment on the way to the executive suite, they're not only tough when they get there--probably tougher than a man because the odds against them were greater--but also determined to prove that they're tough. Also, women, who don't live in the semitribal camaraderie of male bonding, (continued on page 278) Sexual Office Politics (continued from page 156) aren't naturally given to bullshit. Men talk tough--it's the macho success style--but a great deal of the time, it's a pose. Women mean it.
When I wrote Power!, there were very few women in a position to get it, let alone to use it. Back in those days, I assumed, as most people did, that sex in the office, for instance, was basically a question of exploitation or harassment. The big question then was what a woman should do (or say) if her boss made a pass at her, and whether or not she'd be fired (for some other reason, of course) if she discouraged him, or kneed him in the groin. Nowadays, the problem is what you should do, sitting there in your power suit and your Guccis, if your boss brushes her long blonde hair out of her eyes, unbuttons the top of her blouse and licks her lips invitingly while you're asking for a raise. Or how you should respond to a smoldering look of sexual invitation from a stunning young woman sitting opposite you at a meeting, when she just happens to be the hotshot lawyer for the other side. Or what to do when you take the great-looking woman in the office across the hall out for an after-work drink only to discover that she's after your job and had a cozy little dinner the night before with your boss, who has a notoriously roving eye....
Perhaps the thing that most scares men is the possibility of a woman's using sex to get ahead of them in business. When men slept with their secretaries, the worst that could happen was a little bit of gossip; but now that women are competing with men at the top and filling positions of high responsibility, there is a certain residual fear that pillow talk can be a deadly weapon. What happens if your rival for a promotion is a man who is having an affair with your boss, who's a woman? Does it improve his chances? Should you make a pass at your boss, if only to show that you're not sexually indifferent to her? Will she be flattered, or will she fire you? And what if you do go to bed with her and she thinks the other guy is a better lay? It's enough to give a man migraines or a bad case of premature ejaculation.
•
The etiquette of sex at work has changed radically in the past decade, and taking your secretary (or someone else's) out for an intimate little after-hours drink is a different proposition from asking out a woman who is making $75,000 a year, has her own parking space with her name on it and may be in a position to decide what your salary and bonus for the coming year will be--or even if you'll be around to receive them.
One guy remarked, with a sinking heart, that he realized it was going to cost him money. "For years," he said, "I've been taking women out and putting the drinks and dinner on the expense account; then, while I was having dinner with Sandra, it occurred to me, 'My God, she OKs my expenses!' So I had to pick up the tab myself, except that the second time, she told me she'd put it on her expenses, which made me feel a little funny, frankly. Still, at least it proves women are no more honest than men."
Until recently, men had office affairs (or one-night stands) with women who had, almost by definition, less power than they did. For women, the old come-on was not only a sexual invitation but also a way of getting ahead. As one woman put it, "Even if I don't go to bed with the guy, once an executive has done his little flirtation dance with you, and taken you out for a few drinks and lunches, and maybe made a pass, it's hard for him to say no when you ask for the raise you deserve. At worst, he may promote you out of his department from sheer embarrassment."
The basic rule of the game was that women had something to gain from men (besides sex or a good time) and that men held the power, from raises and promotions to the key to such exclusively masculine prerogatives as the executive washroom. These days, however, the executive washroom is as likely to contain a bottle of Ma Griffe and a box of Tampax as bay rum and an electric razor. The rules have been changed--in fact, they have been discarded altogether.
A good index of this is contemporary advertising. Women are now shown, in ads for perfumes or clothing or cosmetics, in positions of power--seated behind desks (but still looking sexy and glamorous), driving a Ferrari at top speed (skillfully and with leather racing gloves) to come to a squealing stop in front of a corporate Learjet, where the male pilots and a couple of male executives with briefcases wait for her, or coming in through the door, a vision of loveliness, to sit down at the head of the table and take charge of the meeting....
Needless to say, there is a certain amount of fantasy in all this. The majority of women still work in subordinate positions, still make less money than men who are similarly qualified and have fewer chances for promotion; but the fantasy itself tells us a great deal about what women want and what is beginning to happen. Hotels are being redesigned for the single woman executive (brighter lighting in bars, low-calorie meals, pastel colors in the rooms, more attention to services a woman may need, better room service, because many women traveling alone rightly don't want to eat or drink alone in hotels), airlines are beginning to come to grips with the traveling woman executive by providing male stewards, instead of the ubiquitous stewardesses, whose traditional role is to make the traveling man feel good. Even executive health clubs, former bastions of male supremacy, are opening up to women.
Office designers have finally begun to develop furniture and decoration for the successful woman, instead of simply giving her what the male executive wants--dark colors, heavy leather furniture, a desk the size of a Sherman tank and a chair so big that anyone under six feet sitting in it looks like a dwarf. Helen Gurley Brown, for instance, wields absolute power at Cosmo from an office that is done in flowered chintz, antiques and cut glass; and one publishing executive recently celebrated her rise to the top by having her whole office decorated in white, with the furniture scaled to her own 5'4" petite size, which has the additional advantage of making most men ill at ease and uncomfortable, since the chairs are too small and too low for them, and the general feeling is that of having entered the ladies' room by mistake. Women have learned that you don't have to sacrifice your femininity to be a success. The velvet glove can cover the mailed fist very effectively.
Nor have earlier predictions that successful women would be tough, "un-feminine," dressed in imitation charcoalgray business suits and basically asexual proved to be the case. A very large number of successful, ambitious women are beautiful, strikingly--even provocatively--dressed and very conscious of their own sexuality. In fact, as it turns out, success seems to increase the sex drive and the predatory sexual instinct in women, just as it does in men.
A quick scan of women's magazines reveals that power is the new turn-on, which shouldn't come as any surprise to men. For years, after all, we've known that winning makes you feel good, at the very simplest and most basic level. Several studies have shown that the usual picture of the success-oriented executive is mistaken on a number of counts. It's generally assumed that the achieving personality is a workaholic whose sex drive is diminished by ambition and who has no time for pleasure: but, in fact, most achievers are determined to get the best out of life in every area, and sexual success is as important to them as any other. Achievers maintain an active sexual life to a significantly later age than nonachievers; and they're more likely to exercise, keep to a diet, care for their appearance and their body as well. At 60, the average nonachiever is overweight, washed up, ready for the garbage heap of retirement and old age (with the prospect of having to eke out life on Social Security). Achievers at 60 are very often ready to take up a new career, determined to remain fit and tough, socially, financially and sexually active.
Women have come to understand this, if only because they were usually the victims of it. Until recently, a woman of 60 was a grandmother, with no career and no training for one, while her husband had reached his peak earning power and was getting into gear for a burst of second wind, very often leading him to divorce and remarriage to a younger woman. Now women are tasting the joys of achievement, and the choices it offers them, and women like Olive Ann Beech (who cofounded and ran one of the largest manufacturers of business aircraft in the United States) and Katharine Graham (who controls the Washington Post empire, which includes Newsweek) are maintaining their power and keeping up busy schedules that more than match those of their male counterparts. Grandmothers they may be (or of grandmotherly age), but they put in a 14-hour day and run their businesses with an iron hand.
Both of them were significantly misjudged early in their business careers, as was Helen Copley, the woman who runs one of California's largest newspaper syndicates, and for a very simple reason. Men find it difficult to assess a woman's strengths in business. Women are different (yes, I know, vive la différence!). They don't follow the same rules as men and they aren't educated in the same way. They don't have a background of team sports; they don't have a man's instinctive grasp of hierarchies; they are less inclined to accept authority figures at face value; they are generally less good at hiding their emotions than men and more reluctant to compromise. Above all, they're conscious of the fact that they are seldom accepted as "part of the team" and that their position on the team is always an ambiguous one, as long as the team rules and the team roles are defined by men.
For many men this is a worrying proposition. Most men instinctively know how to rate their position with other men. Like wolves in a pack, we are born to smell out the dominant individuals, to sense who is weaker than we are, who is stronger, who is a rival for leadership and who is not. In wolf packs, the females do not participate in this Darwinian struggle, except in the sense that they mate with the stronger wolves, the object of lupine sex being the improvement of the wolf species.
We are not so lucky. In the business world, females now compete in the leadership struggle for dominance on equal terms, but men have few, if any, instincts to guide them when their opponent or rival is of the opposite sex. Men who may be pretty sure how to interpret sexual signals from a woman often fail to recognize that a woman is a serious rival or that she's using sexual signals to disguise the fact.
You may be looking at those pretty little fingers toying with the buttons of her blouse, as she exposes just a little more cleavage, or a flash of well-tanned thigh as she crosses her legs, but beware. Even if her eyes are fixed on yours, wide-open and inviting, her mind may be on your job or on beating you out of a couple of crucial points on a deal. More complicated still, women who want to win, and many do, want to win it all. They may, in fact, be giving you sexual signals, they might even respond to an invitation and end up in bed with you, but they may also still want your job or to win out over the deal. Modern women don't trade sex for gains; they want equality in bed and equality at work; and the woman who goes to bed with you may well cut your throat in front of the board of directors the next day, without connecting one thing to the other. As one woman said, "What I do in bed doesn't have anything to do with what I do in court, and the fact that I've had a good time with a guy doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on him if we're on opposite sides of a case, or even if we're trying to impress the senior partner. I play to win, and I expect everyone to."
Women intensify this by adopting the accouterments of men. I remember being at a meeting of crusty, tough old lawyers, who were waiting for the other side's attorney to show up, and ready to make mincemeat of him. The door opened and in walked a very attractive woman in her 30s, with a bosom that was, to put it mildly, overdeveloped. There was dead silence as she walked in. Then she placed on the table possibly the largest, most expensive and heaviest briefcase I'd seen--lavishly equipped with buckles, straps and zippers--and began to remove from it files, a yellow legal pad, a gold pencil, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, which she put on, and several lawbooks with place markers. "Well, gentlemen," she said, sitting down and staring at them, "shall we get down to it?"
Needless to say, she quickly made her case. She had thrown the men off balance, first by being a woman, second by being attractive, but finally because her briefcase was a masculine status symbol, a male badge of power and potency. And here it was, bigger than their own and in her hands: a totem defiled. If she had been carrying a handbag, they'd have eaten her alive.
Women are getting harder for men to pigeonhole. You see a man, and after a minute you can sum him up, if you're any good at those things. "Choate, Harvard, jock type, probably plays golf," for instance; or "State U, football fan, a good ol' boy who's concealing real shrewdness and toughness with a lot of Gee, shucks crap"; or "smart, pushy, but basically a weak guy trying to look tough." And so on.
Men are pretty familiar with male weaknesses and strengths, and quick to observe them; but faced with a woman, they are at sea. They can't read the signs or, worse yet, they misread them.
One consequence of this is that men tend to be somewhat frightened of women--they represent an unknown quantity. Men, therefore, develop ways of dealing with this particular loose cannon on the ship, the most popular approach being to cut her down to size by treating her as a little girl or to embarrass her by making overtly sexual remarks, the object being to see how far they can push her. If the woman doesn't answer, she has lost face; if she does, she's a bad sport, a "libber," with no sense of humor. Either way, she loses.
This pre-emptive strike is a very popular move in business of the Eighties. The man looks at the young woman and says, "Hey, that's a terrific-looking dress you have on, and you look really sexy in it, you know that?"--thus turning her into a sex object in the eyes of the rest of the men at the meeting, who will now pay more attention to her thighs than to her ideas. This puts the woman in an embarrassing position; but even so, she can fight back. At a recent meeting I attended where this took place, the young woman coolly stared back at the man and replied, "Thank you, I think you look cute, too." Having thus reduced him to a sex object, she proceeded to mop up the floor with him.
Beware of the fact that a woman can easily make you look like a schmuck in front of your colleagues, if you press your attack too hard. Very few women will resort to tears these days, but tears remain an effective weapon for making a man look like a fool and a boor, though one woman executive has found it more useful simply to look an opponent in the eye and ask him, point-blank, "Does my being a woman make you nervous?," which effectively undercuts his masculinity.
One threatened male executive relied on a rich knowledge of sports to make the lone woman on his executive committee feel out of place; and it's true that men can usually freeze out a woman by talking about hockey, baseball or football. In this case, however, he misjudged his opponent. She simply took a crash course in sports and became a greater expert than he was.
Another way men often exclude women is with the use of obscene language, which is a kind of basic male-bonding device; but the new woman is very often capable of holding her own in this area. One woman lawyer, a comely girl in her 20s, sat through an hour of this at a contract meeting, listening to the men talk like Marine sergeants so as to put her in her place (this is macho land, honey, so don't mess with us), then calmly brushed her long hair out of her eyes, smiled sweetly and said, "If you guys think my client's going to accept this, you're out of your fucking minds." Instant silence. Not another obscene phrase or word was uttered during the rest of the meeting.
Afterward, one of the men said to her, "You're a tough girl, Shirley," and she looked at him calmly and replied, "And you're a tough boy!"
•
Still, men are fighting back. In fact, sexual combat in business is becoming increasingly sophisticated these days. One man I know found himself locked in combat with an attractive woman over a contract negotiation. At a critical moment, she leaned back, thus exposing a very fine pair of breasts, and began playing with the top button of her blouse, which was already unbuttoned to the cleavage line. Calmly, he took off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and scratched his muscular chest: then he rolled up his sleeves and said, "Shall we move on to the next point?"
I think that is probably the right approach for the Eighties. The put-down is out--it's gauche, blatantly male chauvinist and, in the long run, a losing proposition. Equality is in. When you think a woman is giving you a sexual come-on while you're doing business with her, say, "How about a drink this evening--after we've concluded this?" Equality means the freedom to respond to (and initiate) sexual approaches while still competing as equals, and men simply have to learn how to do it. When you walk into your boss's office to ask for a raise and she sits down beside you on the couch, exposing a pair of very attractive legs, and gives you a close scrutiny, it is perfectly OK to say, for example, "You know, you're a very attractive woman, and I'd like to get to know you better; but, in the meantime, let's talk about my salary needs....
In the office of the Sixties and Seventies, it was necessary to watch out for the power games of the guys around you. It's still necessary; but today you have to be on the lookout for the sudden come-on, the sexual innuendo, the inviting glance that is designed to take your mind off the business at hand. Bear in mind that--in women executives--beauty, sexuality, elegance and femininity have become success/power symbols, the ideal being someone like Sherry Lansing, who is not only a very attractive woman but also the head of a major studio. Successful men are usually recognizable because they look, act and dress like successful men, and have a certain cultivated aura of success and power; successful women want to look glamorous, and very often do, in just the same way that their male counterparts go in for exercise, suntans, expensive barbering and tailor-made suits.
It used to be said, in the days when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, that "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," by which it was meant that women find powerful men sexually attractive even when the men in question are physically unremarkable by any rational standards. The saying still holds true, but with a different meaning. Power is a direct aphrodisiac for women. They have discovered that it is not only the next-best thing to sex but is closely linked with sex. Power, in short, feels good; and while it may be nice to be taken out to dinner (or even to bed) by a powerful man, it's even better to beat him at his own game, which is the real high of the Eighties, or, better still, to go to bed with him and beat him at his own game.
It is reasonable. I think, to count on a certain natural intensification of the war between the sexes, since men can hardly give up their prerogatives without some bitterness and women can't help but feel a certain resentment of the way they've been held back for centuries. When Marilyn Monroe became a star and signed her first big studio deal, she is reported to have said, "Thank God, I'll never have to give head to a producer again!"--a sentiment that probably applies more to the movie business, in which women and sex have always been commodities, than to any other. Still, a woman who becomes successful in any business is bound to feel that power frees her from a number of hitherto obligatory pretenses, if nothing else. She no longer needs to pretend to be dumb, or to fake admiration for guys who aren't as bright as she is, or to worry about what will happen to her if she turns down a pass from some schmuck who is in a position to fire her, or live up to the stereotyped expectations men have of women.
Not so long ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of the first women generals in the United States Army, and I was struck by the fact that nobody had any trouble accepting her in that role. When she walked across the parade ground, six-foot sergeants came smartly to attention and saluted; her aide, a male lieutenant, followed her, carrying her briefcase and making sure the red flag with two white stars was unfurled from the fender of her car as she stepped into it: her driver, a grizzled veteran with a chestful of combat ribbons, fetched her coffee, opened doors for her and seemed to have no difficulty in adapting to the situation. I asked her why, and she seemed frankly surprised.
"You have to understand," she said alter a moment's thought, "in the Army, what counts are these!" She patted the stars on the epaulets of her tunic. "I'm a general. I happen to be a woman who's a general, and that's unusual, but even the dumbest, most male-chauvinist soldier recognizes those stars and knows what they mean. I sometimes see a major or a colonel looking at me, and I know he's annoyed about being given a command by a woman, but when push comes to shove, he'll salute and say, 'Yes, General,' because we're both part of the system and I outrank him. And in the Army, that's all that matters. Civilian life may be different, of course ... I wouldn't know. Once, when I was out of uniform, at a seminar, a captain asked if I'd get coffee for the group. He didn't know who I was. Then he realized that everyone was staring at him in horror and he said, 'Oh, my God. General, I thought you were just a woman!' " She laughed, a deep, hearty laugh.
Did she think that women would make good combat soldiers? The general nodded. She wasn't a combat soldier herself, so she didn't put herself forward as an expert on the subject. "Still," she said, "I don't see why not. Not too many men make good combat soldiers, actually: and I expect women will be in much the same proportions. Most of them won't want to: some of them won't be able to: and a few will be natural killers, just like men. People used to say that about blacks, but some of the best soldiers in 'Nam were black. People used to say that about Jews, but one of Patton's top armored commanders was Jewish. You show me a job, and somewhere I'll find you a woman who can do it as well as a man, and maybe better. And I'll tell you something: Life's going to be a lot more fun that way!"
In New York, a senior woman executive said much the same thing, looking out at the lights of Fifth Avenue from her 40th-floor office, long after most of her employees had gone home. Her limousine was waiting downstairs to take her to a meeting; there were photographs of her husband (himself a successful lawyer) and her children on the desk. She was a woman who had succeeded in every way, still handsome, a demon tennis player and skier, a formidable competitor in everything. "It's going to be a different kind of world," she said, pausing for an instant while her secretary prepared her briefcase. "It's going to challenge men to be more secure in their masculinity, more open in their relationships with women. It's going to develop a new breed of women. I think: tough, ambitious, successful, but still very feminine. You unleash all that energy that's been held back for years, cooking meals and changing diapers--it's got to have an effect on business.
"The competition is going to be a lot hotter. And I'll tell you something: When women are competing equally with men, you're probably even going to have better sex! Women have always used sex as a substitute for power, a way of fighting back; and men have always thought of sex as a way of keeping women in their place. That's gradually changing--oh, not for everybody, by a long shot, we're still talking about a small number of people, but eventually it's going to make a big difference.... Sex between equals ... now, that's a revolutionary idea!"
"Now that women are competing with men at the top, pillow talk can be a deadly weapon"
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