For those of you who are professional women, or who interact with women in a professional capacity:
In what way do you think it's acceptable, useful or productive for a woman to express her sexuality at work?
I don't mean leaving the top button of her blouse undone. I mean "what's the feminine equivalent of virility?"
When you see a man closing a deal, winning something, beating the competition, there's a kind of celebratory flush which merges nicely with his self-conception as a productive, happy, sexual human. Adrenaline, pheremones, the slight sweat and the broad grin of success -- these are not overtly sexual but they're all things which will make a man walk into a bar afterwards with a broad grin on his face, making him an order of magnitude more attractive. (And his colleagues will doubtless find this flush, this attention, natural and even endearing.)
Now, some people might stop here, arguing that society already conflates success and sexual potency in men. Actually, what I'm describing is a little more subtle. I think it's normal for there to be a certain connection of creative energy, competitive energy, sexual energy, etc -- for men and women -- but the way this gets expressed can be radically different. We don't need to collapse these different energies into one, but my question is getting at the edges of where they blur together.
Empirically, I'd like to understand, for instance: in what sense does success at work "naturally" make women feel more sexually potent, attractive or powerful? In what sense does it lead them to be perceived this way by others? In what sense can they "actually" (successfully) express it?
