(Because, face it: It's one thing to want a Versace gown or an Armani tuxedo. It's another to actually have to wear it 24/7.) Plus, as with any shopping spree, we've got to be open to those offbeat possibilities, to the orange feather boa that actually looks fabulous with the old brown jacket.

"Love is like shopping," says my friend Suzy, who's developed elaborate theories about the subject. "It's like if you have to buy a dress for a fancy party. You usually look for something slinky and black, because that's what you're expected to wear, right? But then, as you're browsing, maybe you'll see this pink angora sweater on the sale rack. It's not what you're looking for, but you figure, 'What the h.e.l.l, I'll try it on.' And it looks great, so you buy it.

"Well, by the time the party rolls around, you still haven't found a slinky black dress. So you wear the pink sweater. You dress it up with a string of pearls, and it's just fine. In fact, you feel more comfortable and special in that sweater than you would in some tight black number. And soon that pink sweater becomes your favorite thing in your closet. You can dress it up, dress it down, and you always feel good in it. Maybe your mother will say to you, 'That's what you're wearing?' But so what. It's what's best for you."

Well, the same holds true for finding a partner, she says. Sure, we may think a slinky black dress is our best bet. But the truth of the matter is, we may get far more mileage-and happiness-out of a fuzzy pink sweater.

So enough with those shopworn feminist theories that claim women will acquire power by acting like men. Enough with those pa.s.se a.s.sertions that women will acquire power by acting like earth mothers or s.e.x G.o.ddesses. The real deal is this: Women will acquire power by acting like shoppers. Whether we're dealing with our careers, our fortunes, or our love lives, I'm telling you: Live like a bargain hunter, rule like an Amazon.

Chapter 17.

Career Advice and Nail Polish If women can sleep their way to

the top, how come they aren't there?

There must be an epidemic of

insomnia out there.

-ELLEN GOODMAN Last year I got a call from my very hip younger cousin, Gail, out in San Francisco. She's the co-director of a pilot program for the homeless.

"I need some smart career advice, Cuz," she said. (Yeah, we really do call each other "Cuz." We're dorks.) "I'm meeting with the mayor's office tomorrow to see about securing an eighty-thousand-dollar grant for our program and, well, I'm just not sure about something-"

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"Well, do I remove my blue nail polish, or can I keep it on?"

"This is the career advice you want?" I said.

"Well, what else am I supposed to ask?" she said.

Zoiks. These days, sound career advice for young women is harder to come by than a bra that actually fits. Ironically, while we females are constantly bombarded with pointers on stuff like how to give a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b or get rock-hard abs just like Gwyneth's ("Just do six hundred stomach crunches a day! Weigh down your feet with cans of cling peaches!"), real Working Girl wisdom is so rare, some of us don't even know what it looks like.

Yeah, there are the inevitably pedantic relatives offering such gems as: "I'm telling you, learn data processing. Any idiot can do it." (Meanwhile their kids are still programming their VCRs for them.) There are career counselors who, by virtue of the fact that they themselves have made a career out of career counseling, inspire Zero confidence whatsoever.

And then there are the "career" pages in women's magazines-which are terribly helpful if you want to know whether it's okay to have s.e.x with a co-worker on top of the photocopier.

On some level, it's as if our culture sill regards women's careers as hobbies-as slightly narcissistic diversions that we chicks take up in vain attempts to be "just like men" or to shirk our responsibilities as mothers. Some people are still giving lip service to that demented Harvard study from over a decade ago that erroneously said women over thirty-five were more likely to be killed by terrorists than to get married ("Like there's a difference?" says one married friend). But they've conveniently developed amnesia about the study released in the late nineties that found career women are often more fulfilled than homemakers-and that their kids benefit from this. It's as if the culture still refuses to take us seriously, as if it's saying subconsciously, "For G.o.d's sake, let's not encourage the broads!"

Plus, unfortunately, careers are one area in which being a blue nail polish-wearing, fabulously tatooed, beautifully att.i.tudinal SmartMouth G.o.ddess is not automatically self-empowering. To the majority of bosses, "att.i.tude" is something that usually goes hand in hand with the word problem.

So, if you're a righteous babe just starting out on a career path, how might you navigate the terrain?

Since my friends and I have finally moved beyond entry-level positions, allow us to share some words of wisdom, straight from the cubicles, copiers, and corporate boardrooms...

a First and foremost, remember: The twenties basically suck. Lots of people will tell you that the twenties are the best years of your life. Do not believe them. They are either s.a.d.i.s.ts or morons.

The early twenties can be a real shocker, especially if you've been in school all your life. All the prescriptive ground rules of high school and college that everyone spent years b.i.t.c.hing about are suddenly gone, leaving you in free-fall. Suddenly, just when you're legally old enough to drink, you have to pay rent and taxes. Student loans come due. You're no longer surrounded by cohorts who are happy to stay up until 4:00 A.M. discussing Alice Walker and drinking Jell-O shots. The Big Three L's of adulthood-labor, love, and location-loom as a giant question mark.

If you're gay, you've got to deal with whether to come out to a whole new set of questionably intelligent and questionably progressive people. If you're straight, suddenly everyone's trying to fix you up with their dumb-a.s.s nephew and telling you that if you don't hurry up and settle down, you'll be bitter and lonely by the time you're thirty.

In the middle of all of this, you're expected to map out your future.

Is it any wonder that people in their twenties often have nervous breakdowns, develop hypochondria, get married too young to the wrong people, or voluntarily apply for interminable Ph.D. programs?

Look, since your twenties are basically going to be chaos anyway, do as my grandma said to do: Take advantage of them and use the time to get some real life experiences. Travel, if you can. Try a new city. Suffer through a bunch of humiliating entry-level positions in the name of "comparison shopping."

Waitress in a sc.u.mmy bar while you take voice lessons during the day or pursue your painting. Work for n.o.ble causes and nonprofits you believe in; chances are, like most do-gooder organizations, they'll pay you c.r.a.p, treat you like s.h.i.t, and work you to death, but hey! It beats becoming a corporate weenie at twenty-three and working eighty-hour weeks for some crypto-fascist corporation that leaves you with zilch for a soul.

Now is the time when you can afford to experiment. For never again will you think it's kind of groovy to share an apartment with two other girls in the meat-packing district and eat dinner every night at bars that serve free ravioli and nachos during happy hour.

a At the same time, don't be an idiot. Being a ballerina is not a viable career if you have enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The rent does have to be paid. It wouldn't kill you to waitress.

a Watch out for law school. Be forewarned: Go to law school without a pa.s.sion for it and prepare to have a midlife crisis by age thirty. The most professionally miserable people I know are lawyers who went to law school because they had delusions of "security" and didn't know what the h.e.l.l else to do. Sure, you can always "do something" with a law degree. Like hang it on your wall while you go to work for a Web-design firm, run for Congress, or move to Berkeley to practice colonic irrigation (similar to law, actually).

a Watch out for Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts. Unless you are truly dying for a career in academia-that is, if you love to teach and research using phrases like "postmodernist deconstructive valuations of the neocolonial hierarchy" and get paid thirty-two thousand a year to use them in places like Toadsuck, Arkansas (I'm not making that up)-do not, under any circ.u.mstance, go to Ph.D. programs in the liberal arts.

a Treat a career like a lover. Ideally, a career should get you hot and bothered. Why commit to doing something you hate? Like a marriage, it won't last if you're miserable. If you had a lover who lay around the house for years doing nothing but watching Star Trek reruns and drinking Mountain Dew, draining you of precious time and energy, you'd haul his sorry a.s.s to the curb. Well, ditto for any job like that.

a At the same time, stop whining. Everyone has to start somewhere. Recently, I met an eighteen-year-old girl who'd gotten a plum internship with the State Department. "It's okay for now," she informed me, "but I don't want to work there. I mean, I don't want some entry-level job or something."

Or something? Honey, I wanted to say: you're eighteen. What do you think they should hire you as-the amba.s.sador to Burkina Faso?

Entry-level positions are crummy but inevitable. Most employers know that you only need the IQ of soap to make copies and change the toner cartridge. Although some will hire you because they actually derive pleasure from insulting your intelligence, others actually hire you with an eye toward grooming you for bigger and better things, provided you prove your mettle.

Either way, there's stuff to be learned by paying your dues. Arrogance, however, is not one of them. Sure, you might be able to design a Web site or make foreign policy better than the twits upstairs, but employers want to make sure you're a known quant.i.ty and a "team player" before they hand you the keys to the company Cadillac or set you up in your own emba.s.sy.

a Overnight sensations have a terrible track record. Don't beat yourself up if you're not a wunderkind. Everybody hates a prodigy. Unless you're an athlete, actress, or physicist, you'll actually do better in your field if you're not stratospherically successful by age twenty-seven. If you reach your peak early on, where is there to go but down? Better to be like a fine wine than a flavor-of-the-month.

a Connections, connections, connections. Getting a job is rarely based on pure merit alone. Equally important, sometimes, is "who you know and who you blow," as my dad once so delicately put it. The privileged dips.h.i.ts who oppose affirmative action conveniently overlook this.

Case in point: One year, I taught writing at the University of Michigan. During a cla.s.s discussion, a bunch of guys (all wealthy, white eighteen-year-olds: big surprise) complained to me about the "reverse discrimination" of affirmative action. So I asked students to go around the room and list every job they had ever worked and how they'd gotten it. Out of approximately one hundred students, ninety-eight percent had gotten their jobs through their school or someone they knew-whether they were scooping ice cream or interning at a white-glove law firm.

Such cronyism would be a dirty little secret of the American meritocracy, except that we practice it very openly, aggressively, and proudly through a.s.sorted networking parties, alumni functions, and professional a.s.sociations. It's common knowledge that, if you're looking for a job, the first thing you should do is get on the horn and contact every single person you've so much as blinked at.

Similarly, when people look to hire someone, they tend to go to the wells that are most familiar to them: alumni a.s.sociations, sororities and fraternities, professional organizations, social clubs, and friends. And professionals know this. Which is why they play golf and care about sending their kids to Dartmouth instead of community college. And which is why, incidently, all the people who argue that affirmative action is discriminatory, and "true merit" is all you need, are clearly full of s.h.i.t. They have got to know that if someone helps open a door for you, frankly, it's easier to get your foot in.

So don't expect that a degree, an experience, or a great job evaluation alone will necessarily take you where you want to go. Whether you're looking for your first job or your fifth, get on the phone and work it, Girls. Don't be shy: Call everyone you know-friends, alums, former employers. Tell 'em you're looking. Ask them whom they'd recommend to do an informational interview with you. Network like maniacs. Since women are accused of being talkaholics anyway, use it to your advantage. Consider it your own little form of self-affirmative action. Really, it pays to be brazen.

a a.s.sess, then impress. This is the hardest lesson my friends and I have had to learn starting out in a new job. Luckily, another woman who's also had problems with it is Hillary Clinton.

When Hillary came to Washington as the First Lady way back in 1993, she didn't bother to learn the lay of the land. She dove headlong into overhauling the national health-care system, oblivious to the work environment and politics around her. As a result, she might as well have done a swan dive off an overpa.s.s.

Sometimes, we gals feel we have to prove ourselves twice as much as the boys. We come into a new job like gangbusters, without taking the time to develop an understanding of the office culture. And so our good intentions boomerang. People experience us as loose cannons and mavericks.

Sometimes it's better to hang back for a little while, size up your new situation, and then turn up your wattage full blast. Because remember: When someone new comes on board, people don't worry that she's incompetent nearly so much as they worry she'll step on their turf and hog the good stapler.

a You may be able to have it all. You just might not be able to have it all at once. Most of us fabulous femmes do not parlay our own hip-hop record label into a multimillion-dollar empire while cooking for our own restaurant, designing our own Chinese silk handbags, managing a stock portfolio, teaching scuba to underprivileged children, traveling with our anthropologist husband to Togo, and home schooling four exquisite kids in a house that would make Martha Stewart or B. Smith cream.

Like supermodels, the three working women in the world who may actually have achieved this are freaks of nature. And like supermodels, they have a lot of people behind the scenes working to help them succeed. Instead of personal trainers, stylists, and dieticians, they have personal a.s.sistants, nannies, and servants. Trying to be just like them will only make you insane.

a Finally, if you do have to ask some bigwig for money, remove the blue nail polish. Ditto for the tongue rings, miniskirts, and body glitter. Your older sisters know these things are the bomb, but chances are it may remind many power brokers of the drunken teenagers who once drove a dune buggy through the plate-gla.s.s window of their vacation home. Play it cool by playing it down.

Chapter 18.

Never Mind a p.e.n.i.s,

We'll Take a Bigger Paycheck

I've been rich and I've been poor.

Rich is better.

-SOPHIE TUCKER Recently, a young feminist headmistress of a prestigious private school confessed to me that she pays her male teachers more than her female teachers. Why?

"Because the men ask," she said. "They negotiate their salaries better and demand more money than the women do. They also lobby for raises, which the women don't."

Uh-oh.

Soon after this conversation, I attended an annual women's networking dinner in Washington, DC. When I repeated this story, the room fell silent for a moment as a wave of self-recognition swept over the guests. Some were power brokers, others were wannabes. But their reactions were the same.

"Oh, my G.o.d. I am terrible about negotiating my own money!" said a woman who heads a multimillion-dollar foundation. "Every time I've been asked to name my salary, I've completely low-balled myself."

A woman who'd spent years as a foreign bureau chief for the Washington Post confessed, "As a journalist, I can ask Idi Amin about terrorism or Saddam Hussein about the Kurds. But ask my boss for a raise? Forget it."

"Anytime I walk into a job interview and they tell me what the position pays, I just feel grateful that they want to hire me," admitted a cable-television producer.

No wonder we gals are the cheapest dates on the job market! Certainly, employers get us at a bargain. And while the inferior size of our paychecks isn't our fault (thank you, patriarchy), our please-kind-Sir-might-I have-a-bit-more-gruel att.i.tude ain't exactly helping, either.

"Women always undersell themselves. It almost seems like a biological imperative," my own boss, Kate, has observed.

Of course, this is no big surprise. Traditionally, money has "happened" to women. And despite feminism, many of us have gotten a lot of old-fashioned ideas about money almost by osmosis: A lot of gals still believe on some level that wealth is a "guy thing"; that guys are threatened by women who earn big bucks; and that, ultimately, a man should "take care"of us.

It's no wonder that women are the fastest-growing group of gamblers in America! We have a long history of investing in fairy tales and having our fortunes determined by luck.

Ironically, in a culture where it's No Big Deal to tell TV audiences about a threesome we had with our best friend and her stepbrother, discussing money is still curiously taboo. The Great Green G.o.ddess today is like what s.e.x was back in the 1950s; plenty of gals are gettin' it, but n.o.body's talking. It occurs to me that over the years my friends and I have taught each other how to use tampons, how to give a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b, how to put a condom on a guy using our mouth, and so forth. But how to manage money? The topic has almost never come up. You'd think we were all heiresses who didn't have to worry-you know, heiresses who just happened to like working at Kinko's.

If we ask older, well-heeled women about money, they often look at us as if they've just smelled a fart. Darling, they say, that's tacky.

The only female financial "role models" many of us have been exposed to on a regular basis are: (1) celebrities who pull down enormous paychecks and buy million-dollar digs in Beverly Hills while wearing three thousand dollars' worth of Prada and holding a Chihuahua, (2) struggling single mothers paying for Mac 'n' cheese with their laundry quarters, or (3) Betty and Wilma, running through the stores of Bedrock with Fred and Barney's credit cards, shouting, "Charge it!"

How delightfully, er, Stone Age.

It doesn't help either that, in the past, feminists condemned capitalism as patriarchal and exploitive. Yeah, well. Whatever. These women obviously never tried to buy tampons in Communist China in 1986.

Money is a power tool, and we material girls know it. Even Ms. magazine has finally learned that it's great to have some Sugar Mommies around: Recently, the magazine almost folded until it was rescued by a band of wealthy women. So Gloria and the gang can tell us: If girls are rich enough to pick up our own tab, we don't have to be beholden to anyone-be they men or corporate advertisers who want us to pimp feminine deodorant spray on our editorial pages.

How do we learn to bring home the big bucks, plump our portfolios, and foster a sense of ent.i.tlement? How do we transform ourselves from the Divas of Diddly into the High Priestesses of Higher Pay? From Minimum-Wage Mamas into Matriarchs of Moolah?

Well, for starters, we've got to cash in any outmoded att.i.tudes we may have about money and gender. Poverty ain't pink, and greenbacks ain't blue. There's nothing feminine about being scatterbrained about money, and there's nothing masculine about earning it. This sounds silly and patronizing (excuse me, matronizing) in print, but as Lillian Vernon, the CEO of her own corporation, once observed, "The one thing I think women sometimes have a real problem with is making money. They consider that unfeminine."

Yeah, well, there's unfeminine, and then there's unconscious. Any woman living on welfare, trapped in a trailer park, or eking out an existence on Social Security will agree: There is no feminine glory in not being able to create options for ourselves.

Besides, it's one thing to want a guy who's financially capable of standing on his own two feet. n.o.body wants to date a barnacle. But it's another to expect men to support us financially till death do us part. This isn't a matter of feminism but realism: There are all sorts of curveb.a.l.l.s awaiting us in life. And like good Girl Scouts, we've got to be prepared. Even squirrels have a backup plan.