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"  A streak of evening light filters into my suite at the Crillon, the legendary Paris hotel where I&amp;#039;ve always dreamed of staying. In my fantasies, this instant is pure bliss, the fashion-magazine moment when I kick off my Roger Vivier sandals, lie back on the featherbed with its infinite-thread-count sheets, and relish having at last found my way to the apex of chic, all expenses paid by my employer. Instead, I&amp;#039;m standing in front of the closet, wearing little more than a black slip and a grimace, surveying the inadequate wardrobe I&amp;#039;ve brought from New York. There&amp;#039;s no time for luxuriating; I&amp;#039;m here to do battle, and suddenly my armor seems pitifully lacking. In an hour I&amp;#039;ll be at Guy Savoy, one of the city&amp;#039;s most imposing restaurants, alone in a private dining room with nine men in bespoke suits and attitudes to match, each of whom I need to interrogate during a brief cocktail hour. You know how to do this, I tell myself, you&amp;#039;ve done it a hundred times.  But that was a long time ago, the small voice inside whispers back; what if everything has changed, if I&amp;#039;ve changed too much to pull it off? Maybe I shouldn&amp;#039;t have been pulling it off in the first place.... There&amp;#039;s no time for this. I pick a not-quite-transparent Dolce &amp;amp;amp; Gabbana silk blouse, a slim black skirt, and a pair of Gucci sandals. My makeup is on the vanity table, arrayed like surgical instruments. Showtime, I think, ready or not.  For more than a decade, I spent my working hours in a strange pursuit: making many of the world&amp;#039;s most powerful men uneasy. As a business journalist, I traveled thousands of miles a year to interview CEOs, grilling them about the way they ran their companies and their lives, confronting them about financial results, looking them dead in the eye and inquiring what they might say to a shareholder who had seen his life savings evaporate.  It was strangely pleasurable on many levels. What could be better than making men 20 years older and infinitely richer stutter and sweat? They&amp;#039;d grown up in an earlier era, one in which women were uniformly powerless; the only females in their lives were wives, daughters, mistresses, secretaries. And there I was, seated across from them with a pad and a tape recorder, asking questions that in any other context would have been intrusive or rude. Sometimes I felt as if they wanted to strike me, yet they had no choice but to offer a forced smile. It was utterly thrilling. I knew the power of my unusual looks, and I made the most of it. I was young, tall, and angular, with dark exotic features. I dressed to undermine: &amp;quot;appropriate,&amp;quot; but never bending to corporate convention. In an era when women hoping to infiltrate the ranks stuck to boxy dressed-for-success suits with floppy bows at the neck, I wore a vintage Yves Saint Laurent le smoking or a trim indigo Chanel suit. Jewelry was verboten in the corporate training manuals, but I always wore a little: a thin gold bangle, a long rope of pearls, a platinum skull pinkie ring.  To me, the approach seemed the ultimate in modern feminism; the idea was not to titillate but to disarm. My presence stood as a reminder that unlike their wives and mistresses and the gals in the steno pool, I wasn&amp;#039;t on their payroll. Once we started talking, I carried myself as an equal, challenging the obsequiousness that they, like rock stars, were accustomed to. I did my best to make the interview a real conversation, eschewing a prepared list of questions; I may have been part shark, but the way their minds worked genuinely intrigued me. If they perceived as sexy my interest in their business and the depth of my understanding of it, that was their problem, not mine. In any case, most of them opened up under my ministrations like clams on a buffet. A few got gloriously carried away. One guy, head of a multinational automaker, confessed that to calm his nerves before he got up to address shareholders, he imagined that the bitchy girl from high school\u2014the one who called him Dr. Loser\u2014was in the audience. Another, a Wall Street wunderkind, told me that his dream was to buy an island in the South Pacific where he&amp;#039;d live out his early retirement with his trusty black Lab and a string of models, each of whom would be replaced when they reached 20. A third guy told me about his not-yet-public plan to take over a competitor; the details came out as he rhapsodized about how proud of him his late father would have been. The men I wrote about were sometimes aghast that they&amp;#039;d let so much of their true selves show after they read the published pieces. Or so I heard through back channels; they never called to complain. How could they? They were big boys and I&amp;#039;d made clear from the beginning what I was there for, regardless of what their egos, as meaty as their paychecks, might have let them believe. Despite the seeming calculation of all this, the best part was that while I was getting them to be themselves, I was being myself too. My conversational style wasn&amp;#039;t a tactic; it&amp;#039;s the way I am. (I can&amp;#039;t get out of a taxi without learning the driver&amp;#039;s life story.) Nor did I \u00ADundergo a Superman transformation from frump to virago just to get a rise out of them. I may not wear four-inch heels to run to the corner for half-and-half, but even in a turtleneck and jeans, I&amp;#039;ve always had a sultry look, never innocent, not even as a teenager. Writing profiles of CEOs turned out to be the perfect way to marry my fascination with the psyche of people in power to my unshakable bad-girl vibe. If my career had a soundtrack, it was the clack of my well-shod feet exiting the marble lobby of yet another multinational corporation, my notebook filled with hard-won revelations. But after a decade in the game, I grew tired. Girding for combat with men of that stature became enervating; their evasions grew routine, my prose recycled. I wanted to stay closer to home, to write about other things. I had a new marriage and a baby, and I found myself more interested in watching my daughter grow up than in gauging the expression on the face of yet another corporate chieftain when I walked into his cavernous office in Prada slingbacks and canary yellow raincoat, armed with a tape recorder and a Mona Lisa smile. I planted a garden, wore Crocs, and for several years worried somewhat less about dirt under my nails. Then, a few months ago, I got an offer to return to the fray, the clarion call that brought me to this moment at the Crillon. My daughter was in school, and images beckoned of jetting across the ocean in business class with a dossier on my lap and a game plan percolating in my brain.  But I hadn&amp;#039;t bargained on how complicated it would be to come back. What it would be like to gaze at my wardrobe hanging forlornly in the closet on this chilly night in Paris. How I would dread the brief cocktail hour ahead at which I must grill nine top executives about my &amp;quot;victim,&amp;quot; the CEO of a powerful luxury conglomerate. Years ago, such a challenge would have sent me into a state of divine autopilot. Like a Zen warrior, I would have laid out my costume, pored over my facts one last time, and savored the idea that tonight foie gras and champagne would be the tools of my trade. But, dammit, I just can&amp;#039;t reach that exalted plane this time. My mind keeps snagging on doubts that never before intervened, a tangle of questions about women, work, age, and sex. I feel conflicted about my method, which has always worked so smoothly, and wary of the frisson that has been the payoff of my job. Or am I simply worried that I can&amp;#039;t pull it off anymore? At this moment, I do not feel integrated. Not one bit. And without that, I am nothing.  No matter what generation we belong to, we bear the weight of the messages we heard growing up, the ones about &amp;quot;using what you&amp;#039;ve got&amp;quot; to get ahead in a career\u2014or choosing not to. The content of those messages has changed over the years, of course, as more and more women have entered the workforce, but the basic conundrum of whether there is a healthy place for sexuality on the job has hung in the refiltered air as long as women have been coming into the office. Recently, I went through a stash of correspondence my mother kept in a huge white Bonwit Teller box at the top of her closet. I found a telegram, dated December 1953, when she was in her twenties and working at a nonprofit foundation after \u00ADdivorcing a wastrel starter husband.  Even Hell is a lonely place without you. Am returning immediately, it read. It was signed &amp;quot;A Friend.&amp;quot; When I ask her about it, she is matter- of-fact, even flip. The sender was the boss, who chased her for years (unsuccessfully, she insists), even long after she left the job. &amp;quot;I never led him on,&amp;quot; she tells me, &amp;quot;which I think had the inadvertent effect of making him pursue me harder.&amp;quot; In a framed black-and-white photo of her from then, which I&amp;#039;ve had on my dresser for years, my mother, a fine-boned brunette in a flared Claire McCardell dress, stares down the lens with a look that is, like her, both brainy and knowing and not a bit coquettish. The picture, she says now, was taken on the day she found out she&amp;#039;d gotten the fellowship for which that boss had written a recommendation. &amp;quot;I was utterly qualified,&amp;quot; she adds, without a whiff of uncertainty.  Early feminists instructed us to flatly reject the male gaze. The \u00ADoffice, they said, can only be equitable when it is neutered. Among their points was that in sexual power struggles, women would always lose, and in most cases, my feisty mother notwithstanding, they were demonstrably right. But half a century later, with nearly 46 percent of the workforce female, dress codes no longer rigid, and women steadily making inroads into the centers of power, such absolutes seem to many of us unnecessary, impractical, and just plain boring. The modern media don&amp;#039;t help clarify things; instead they reduce the entire issue to two well-worn themes: sexual harassment and \u00ADoffice romances. But to those of us who&amp;#039;ve spent much of our working lives faced with the enigma of eros on the job\u2014that is, most of us\u2014this is laughably simplistic. At this point, aren&amp;#039;t we all united against the former and case by case on the latter, end of story?  Obviously there remain a few clear boundaries: It&amp;#039;s tacky to flash cleavage at work, and sleeping your way to the top is demeaning and fraught with peril. But in an era when displaying \u00ADfemininity is no longer automatically dismissed as a sign of weakness, surely that&amp;#039;s not all there is to say. My particular job may not be a good one to generalize from\u2014having a bully pulpit gives me more power and therefore more freedom than most women will have in a lifetime of dealing with men\u2014but I&amp;#039;m convinced that these days I&amp;#039;m not alone in wrestling with some sophisticated questions. Is it always inherently wrong to exploit sexual attention for your own gain? In such a situation, who is controlling whom? If you leverage your gender in even the subtlest, most elegant way, are you hurting female colleagues who may have your talent but not your &amp;quot;gifts&amp;quot;? Where is the border between making the most of who you are and manipulation, and how close to the edge are you willing to dance? What if your sexiness is without intent, if it&amp;#039;s simply integral to your personality\u2014are you morally bound to suppress it? And what of the future, when you&amp;#039;re no longer a babe, when half the battle can&amp;#039;t be won simply by walking into the room wrapped in a smile? There are no how-to books on these tricky topics. So I consult Mireille Guiliano, the former CEO at Champagne maker Veuve Clicquot, who wrote the best-selling French Women Don&amp;#039;t Get Fat. Petite, elegant, and defiantly feminine, she ping-ponged between France and the U.S. for a decade, sure-footedly negotiating the \u00ADcorporate shoals. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not an easy line to walk,&amp;quot; she says, drawing in a long breath. I&amp;#039;d hoped she&amp;#039;d tell me that French women had cracked the code, effortlessly melding their feline chic with a fierce \u00ADprofessional determination, but she has bad news: Women lag miserably behind their male colleagues in her native country. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s at least 15 years behind the U.S.,&amp;quot; she concedes, &amp;quot;which is probably a result of a deeply embedded male culture and \u00ADwomen&amp;#039;s willingness to stay happily in their traditional roles.&amp;quot; Still, ambitious young French women aren&amp;#039;t likely to try to remedy the \u00ADiniquity by butching it up, she says. &amp;quot;Carrying yourself with a sense of femininity is very deeply part of us.&amp;quot;  The good news is that Guiliano believes American women are in a far better position than their French counterparts to succeed while still preserving their joie de vivre. &amp;quot;[In the U.S.] women often dress more manly than they have to and aren&amp;#039;t comfortable with their sexuality,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;They have this idea that to get ahead they have to wear a suit or be very drab or be one of the guys. But that isn&amp;#039;t true any longer in most jobs. You wouldn&amp;#039;t want to be a flirt or show your d\u00E9colletage, but there are things they can take from the way French women handle themselves. If you&amp;#039;re relaxed with being a woman, you can be treated with a great deal of respect.&amp;quot; But Judith Warner, who spent five years in France (more than two of those as a Newsweek correspondent) and in 2005 published Perfect Madness, a critique of overanxious American parenting, says women should be cautious in taking too many lessons from their French counterparts. French women obsess over their looks and embrace the ethos of &amp;quot;vive la difference,&amp;quot; but ultimately, they&amp;#039;re trapped in what she calls the &amp;quot;tyranny of seduction.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;There are lots of good things about remaining clearly female in the workplace,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It sets a stage for generous benefits and equitable child leave policies. But it can also work to marginalize women and make it impossible for them to be taken seriously.&amp;quot;  In my heart, I know Warner is right\u2014that the workplace is still fraught with inequality and that raising the specter of sexuality likely will end up penalizing women. But like Guiliano, I am depressed by the idea of operating in a completely androgynous environment. Maybe I&amp;#039;m a Pollyanna, but I don&amp;#039;t feel disadvantaged by being \u00ADfemale; on the contrary, married to my intellect, my gender seems like a potent weapon in the male-dominated arena in which I work.  To seal her argument, though, Warner fights dirty: &amp;quot;What happens when you get too old?&amp;quot; she asks. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;ve made your looks and your presentation so much a part of your message, what happens when that no longer works?&amp;quot; I have no answer. The subject of aging is the wrinkled elephant in the conference room during discussions of gender politics at work. Even if we find a way to preserve our professionalism without stifling our pheromones, the years are cruel. What seems graceful and effortless at 30 may seem embarrassing by 45.  My friend Lee (her middle name) and I talk about this all the time. A tenured professor at a high-powered graduate school who has the alabaster skin of Ava Gardner and the demeanor of Gracie Allen, she favors short skirts and deep red lipstick. She stands out like a neon sign against the gray wall of academia.  &amp;quot;This is just who I am, who I&amp;#039;ve always been,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s part of my rebellion, my way of not disappearing into the world of what I teach.&amp;quot; She acknowledges that her erotic appeal may have helped her over the years in her male-dominated department, but &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s hurt me just as much. Some of the men probably thought I was a bimbo, and the older women on the faculty hated me.&amp;quot; To blunt the effect a few years in, she adopted a look she calls the &amp;quot;slightly deranged librarian&amp;quot;\u2014twinset, knee-length pencil skirt, and hair in a messy bun, sometimes with an actual pencil through it\u2014but her madcap sexuality shone through. Of course, her scholar\u00ADship was watertight. &amp;quot;My life would have been easier if I&amp;#039;d surrendered my sexuality entirely,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I couldn&amp;#039;t have survived; it&amp;#039;s so much a part of me. If you do that, you risk denying your fullness as a person. You have to ask yourself how much your sexuality is integral to your very being. And you have to be willing to take the blows if being true to that holds you back in your career.&amp;quot; Now in her forties, Lee knows that at some point she&amp;#039;ll have to tone down her act or risk seeming like a caricature. I have promised I will tell her when that time comes. But thus far, the transition from ingenue to mature leading lady has been surprisingly smooth, she says. &amp;quot;Unexpectedly, it&amp;#039;s been freeing. I&amp;#039;m established. I&amp;#039;m married. I have kids. I wear a lot of short skirts these days, but looking sexy has a different meaning now. It gets attention, but more in the way of `She&amp;#039;s well dressed and attractive.&amp;#039; The irony is I couldn&amp;#039;t have done it when I was younger, better looking, and less powerful.&amp;quot; What Lee says makes me think: Maybe the key to figuring out how much of your sexuality should find its way into your work is to monitor honestly where your mojo is coming from. When eros overwhelms intelligence and becomes a tool of manipulation (and let&amp;#039;s face it, ladies, we know when that is), that&amp;#039;s when things seem to go awry. As long as sexuality is an organic by-product of self-confidence, not the other way around, it may be a force for good, outlasting youth and its accompanying self-doubt and inexperience. At least, that&amp;#039;s what I tell myself as the light grows dim in my hotel room. I glance in the hallway mirror: My skirt is a bit longer than it would have been five years ago, my hair less wild, my lipstick closer to brown than red. But I&amp;#039;m still here, largely intact. On the way out, the concierge nods at me almost imperceptibly\u2014the Frenchman&amp;#039;s semaphore signaling that my efforts haven&amp;#039;t gone \u00ADunnoticed. Judith Warner may be right about the French tyranny of seduction, but at this moment I am grateful to be in a country that doesn&amp;#039;t fetishize the young. As the taxi bumps through the streets, a familiar flood of \u00ADexcitement returns, the rush of adrenaline bringing my skills into alignment. I know just how to handle these guys. It&amp;#039;s part of me. These men are the lions, and I am the lion tamer.  When I arrive at the restaurant, they&amp;#039;re there, all nine of them, gathered in the private back room eating foie gras and tossing back flutes of champagne. &amp;quot;Gentlemen,&amp;quot; I say in French when they look up. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m the woman who&amp;#039;s come to intrude on your good time.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Mais non,&amp;quot; says the man closest to me, the head of a huge African subsidiary, not missing a beat, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;ve all been breathlessly waiting for you.&amp;quot; I can&amp;#039;t tell if he&amp;#039;s being sarcastic or just French. &amp;quot;Enchant\u00E9,&amp;quot; I answer, deciding to be pleased, or at least act that way. And so it goes, for the hour they&amp;#039;ve allotted me. I move from man to man, hoping to cajole him into revealing a juicy anecdote about his boss. They flirt and evade like pros, conscious not to say anything they could get in trouble for, yet eager to have me hang on their words. I confront, poke fun, challenge; they seem alternately charmed and baffled by how much I know about their businesses. They keep my champagne glass full; the room buzzes with high-end testosterone. By the time the hour ends, I have culled two or three decent quotes and a couple of meaningful insights\u2014what I came here for. With a less playful approach, I would have come away with nothing; that seems obvious to me now. One guy is frowning to himself in a Jean-Paul Belmondo way, clearly worried that he said too much. Good. One of the others walks me to the door of the restaurant, leading me by the hand. Diners stare. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re very good at what you do,&amp;quot; he says, helping me with my coat.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been writing about this sort of thing for a long time,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not what I meant,&amp;quot; he says, locking eyes with me as he opens the door to let me out. &amp;quot;Yes, I know that,&amp;quot; I answer as I slide past, not looking back.  Outside, I pat the notepad in my pocket and start thinking of what I&amp;#039;ll write. My heels tap a symphony on the cobblestones. It&amp;#039;s a "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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