An Investment Bank Is A Bad Place To Find Out You're Sexually Attractive

A Tale of Class And Alienation

On my way inside the gallery, I admired how the steel blue of a stranger’s suit complemented his eyes. If only all men were as handsome, I thought to myself as I took an empty seat in front of the rowed audience. Tonight was a celebration of Theaster Gates and his phenomenology through music. A renowned artist of great importance to the Black artistic canon, I sat in anticipation of what I would hear him say. Looking back, I don’t remember much. Just a line that rings true as I now reflect on how it is I became so obsessed with beauty and all its manifestations: “We have to be able to pivot trauma…and if we can pivot traumas long enough, we might be able to hold our shit [together] long enough to get over it.” If I’m being honest with you, I don’t think I ever got over it—the distress of discovering that an investment bank is a bad place to find out you’re sexually attractive.

“In The End, I Learned How To Be Strong, And Alone.”

The story doesn’t start the day I joined my investment banking analyst class in the Avenue of the Americas. Nor did it begin the day I accepted my full-time job offer during COVID. This story has its roots in a tiny Colorado town, situated on top of the Rocky Mountains. Despite being 45 minutes away from Denver, the town retained a rural atmosphere that brought a sense of camaraderie to its townsfolk and descended like a mist in this majority-white, insular, and quiet place that became an adopted Cameroonian girl’s home. Cruising the cliffed roads, I’d speed to visit friends in the moments I found in between homework assignments and demanding extracurriculars. The presence of conifer and evergreen trees infused a sense of calm amongst teenage debauchery: smoking, eating Sonic, and the incestuous nature of teenage co-ed friendships. I was likeable enough to be close to the action, but my cultural differences always kept me at a safe distance. My mother didn’t allow sleepovers, and if it wasn’t that, then perhaps my invitation to the endless house parties my friends hosted simply got lost in the mail. They were kind enough to discuss their ragers with me the day after. I figured that’s how high school would always be. Me, buried in my books while my classmates had all the fun. Then I attended a Sadie Hawkins dance, and a senior asked me to dance. Some days later, a classmate asked if he and I were together. “What do you mean?” I replied. “All we did was dance,” I told her. “At the dance, he told my brother you were pretty and my brother told him to go after you. So, are you two together?” Just like that, I was in. Still on the periphery, but in. As we continued to talk, another curious thought emerged in me: When did I become pretty?

When he graduated, I went back to being the studious but largely invisible immigrant girl. It’s not so much that my prettiness left with him, but that in his absence, it never really came up. My prettiness was still foreign to me. A fact I mistook not for fiction, but a figment that only arrived in the most discerning of minds. My college boyfriend had such a mind. By the time I stumbled upon him, standing six foot five inches tall outside the ornate, ironclad brass of Winthrop Gate, I had the confidence of a pretty girl who had pretty friends, so I told myself he’d be mine by the end of the fall. Sensing the budding connection between the two of us, my friends giggled and escorted me away—we had elsewhere to be. By my birthday, some short weeks later, he and I were officially together. In the end, our relationship cost me my friend group, and the stress of that alone cost me the relationship. The social crash was sudden, but its aftermath simmered well after the personal mishap with my former friends. By the spring, I couldn’t understand why things hadn’t gone back to normal with them after they had accused me of being a gold digger, as the co-ed who had first heralded those remarks to them had since recanted his accusation. He had been upset and jealous that I hadn’t chosen him, and in venting to our close mutual friend, a brewing resentment found the perfect vehicle to take me out of the group—spearheaded by a friend who I would learn harboured secret feelings for him. That was the strange game played on my New England campus: everyone was looking for people who looked like they had something to offer, but when the Black, foreign, admittedly poor girl ends up in a relationship with the CEO’s son, she’s the only one held to task. At the time, the irony was lost on me. What stuck was a feeling of ostracization that stunted me socially. If I had felt betrayed that they simply didn’t speak to me about how I had been acting, they had felt duped, as I wasn’t what they had expected me to be: a rich girl like them. I never lied about my lack of finances. We gravitated toward each other due to an intoxicating mix of beauty and aura, but mine was based not on my bank account but the spiritual authority I earned in completing the decade-long journey it took to get into Harvard, sans parental legacy or familial wealth. My aura had nothing to do with my social standing; it was the result of pure, unadulterated Cameroonian audacity and work ethic. My beauty made it seem like Daddy paid the bills, but I, like many other financial aid recipients, got by thanks to the generosity of Harvard’s endowment. By the end of my freshman year, I felt neither pretty nor in further possession of that special aura that attracted people to me. I was just alone.

I carried that feeling of alienation throughout college. It made me sensitive to my preppy milieu and how socially aware everyone was of each other. How easily people made friends with those they secretly didn’t like if they thought it could take them far—or, at the very least, an invitation to the parents’ home in the Hamptons. I was chastised for nothing, I began to think to myself whenever I reminisced on my freshman year. Sophomore fall is the moment everyone’s true social standing on campus is revealed through their invitation to join select clubs. Secretive, with histories leading back to United States Presidents, these Final Clubs meant everything to a lot of people. It was here I learned there existed an even more elite group of people than the billionaire heiresses and socially anxious rich kids that surrounded me—those who simply couldn’t be bothered to play this game. Either due to the high status of their birth or the indignation of their deposition, these people simply couldn’t be bothered to fake the funk. They needed neither invitation nor approval as they were already “in.” I admired their seemingly rebellious nature. Their complete lack of desire to debase themselves for social approval. I learned their rules early enough to apply them for the rest of my life: anything that has not earned spiritual authority in your life has no place deciding your worth for you. By the end of sophomore year, this mantra saved my confidence from the depths of the social ostracization it had plunged me into the year prior, but my prettiness took longer to come back to me. Even at the tailend of my time at Harvard as a graduating senior, I only saw it again in a photo taken with a friend celebrating our upcoming commencement. Even then, I remarked how faint, yet distinctly present, it was. Cheekbones, almond eyes, and lush lips. I found myself asking for the first time since high school: When did I become pretty?

“…To Appear Unambitous Amongst The Ambitious Is To Incite Loathing Or Fear. To Be In The Game, But Not Playing With Intent To Win, Is To Be The Enemy.”

When I entered the corporate world in 2022, a 22-year-old still riddled with feelings of social alienation and a distance between myself and my prettiness, I wasn’t aware of my surroundings nor attuned to people’s projections of me. I was aware, while listening to a senior female banker speak during our weeks-long training on the 64th floor, that women in this industry built their careers by submitting to the hierarchical nature of the beast. That much was clear. I was a lot less clear on whether I was willing to do the same. At the same time, I desperately wanted to make friends with my analyst class. Friends are very, very important to one’s ability to ease into the social hierarchy of an institution. That was another important lesson from Harvard. Despite my best efforts to make myself visible during our training by asking both the instructors and invited speakers questions—those I felt were pertinent to everyone in the room—I noticed how none of my fellow analysts would approach me during our breaks. They’d get up from their seats, huddle together near the windows, and admire the Manhattan skyline at this level and speak amongst themselves. At an evening dinner with a fellow Black analyst, who was set to leave for another office once training was over, I asked him if he noticed it too: “The others don’t speak to me. They’ll get up and speak to each other, but they seem to avoid me,” I told him. He had no clue what I was talking about. During a break the next day, I noticed they didn’t ignore him. He was always included in conversation. Curious that, I thought to myself. It was like a scene from my high school days: me, sitting alone with my head in my book, surrounded by classmates socializing over—and around—me.

By the time I joined my investment banking team, I had settled on making friends outside the firm. There’s something about me that’s not resonating with the people, I thought to myself, and left things at that. I did here what I had done in previous moments of social alienation: I retreated inwards. This time, I had money to ease the pain. I thought back to that photo from senior year, and an interesting thought emerged: That faint beauty I saw, could I enhance it and make it into a skin I wear every day? It was April 2023 when I discovered the power of a side part. I’ve struck gold, I thought to myself. The beauty that was previously faint had emerged from a simple reframing of my hair. It struck me, only for a minute, that it would be strange that I left the office at 9 p.m. last night with 16 inches “growing” from my head to walk in the next day with 22 inches, but I thought to myself, surely they have more important things to focus on than me. After all, these were all-important people executing all-important transactions. I was constantly reminded of this when the 33-year-old Vice President had no time to explain his model assumptions to me, or when the 24-year-old second-year analyst berated me endlessly when I made my “silly little mistakes”. “Sometimes, [Diouana Woman], I think you don’t think when you send me things.” I remember him telling me, mouth full of firm-sponsored Thai food, in the conference room we’d eat our dinners in. In observing the senior bankers within my group, I realized this behavior was silently expected. They’d been cultivated in environments much tougher than our group. Their group heads, blind in their stress, had thrown phones, hurled insults, anything that got the point across that they weren’t doing enough. Our lot, spoiled with WFH mandates and a generational distaste for “hard work,” were spineless compared to them. I had it easy, it seemed. A little emotional torment was nothing compared to what they dealt with. “Is the money not enough?” a mentor, who worked outside my group, asked me when I voiced my growing disillusionment with my job. His question hinted at a disapproval of my inability to take things on the chin. Be tougher, he advised. When I told him of the behavior of one female colleague in particular, he smiled and said, “I think she thinks you think you’re special.” She thinks I’m stupid, I thought to myself. My six-figure salary should have made me blind to the glaring disrespect I was receiving from my team, but it didn’t. “Mutiny is always an option on a ship with low morale,” I told him before returning to my desk. Prepared, once more, for endless emotional torment.

Beauty became a way out. A distraction from my growing hopelessness and constant alienation. I hit rock bottom the night I dialed a hotline number. The woman who answered had a warm, perky voice. Much like my own, although mine was more sullen these days. “What’s causing you distress?” she inquired. “My job,” I said; the words coming out, a gulp muddled in between tears. I didn’t find it funny when she asked me if I could just quit. “You don’t get it,” I said. Before I could explain, our 15 minutes were up. I drifted into sleep as I continued to cry. Alone, like always, on a pitiful Tuesday night. The next day was brighter. My new dress had arrived. I had it made by a seamstress in London who knew her way around the female figure, so her creation melted into my shape. Electric blue and above the knee. You’ve outdone yourself, I thought as I looked at myself in the mirror moments before leaving to catch the F train. The looks came the moment the elevator opened to the 63rd floor. An executive assistant, known to come to our side of the floor to chat with her friend, mouthed to me, ‘You look good,’ as we passed each other. A glimpse of female solidarity in what had always been a rather hostile crew. As I rounded the corner to my desk, two of our executive assistants saw me and smiled in approval. The older one came to me, leaning in and whispered, “You really shouldn’t be here. Who looks like a model coming to work? You’re young. Leave while you can.” It would all come crashing down shortly after. It was a blessing in disguise, as there was no other way for that chapter to end. If I hadn’t ended up killing myself, I’m sure the emotional distress would have found a way to, anyway. Like a toxin left to rot the body from the inside out. Looking back, I was never programmed for a place that demanded full emotional submission at the expense of self-respect. Even Harvard, as cruel as the social hierarchy could be, had pockets of people who insisted on self-respect above all else. Even at the expense of money and social standing. Besides, the money was never appealing. It wasn’t nearly enough to tolerate being disrespected by people who didn’t see the spiritual decay they had created by allowing even the lowliest of analysts to run completely unchecked. That night, I went out to my favorite nightclub near Bond Street. I wasn’t born to be an investment banker, I thought to myself as I danced to a song that would follow me all the way to the South of France.

“…Your Life Is Built Through Whispers, Resonance, Soft Doors…”

Africans are a prideful bunch. Not even colonization excised that spirit out of us. In the aftermath of my social exile from New York City’s high finance society, I returned to my mother’s home in the land of cowboys and stoners. Lounging in her bathtub, I thought of all the African women who had come before me. I began with my mother. Hardworking and unrelenting in pursuit of her ambitions. She’d never let something like this happen to her, I thought to myself. America has made me weak, I thought as I submerged my head in water. Eyes closed, my mind drifted to a Senegalese woman I read of long ago. Diouana. The African maid who had killed herself in her employer’s bathtub. Lifting my head above the water, I rested my neck on the edge of the marble and traced the contours of Diouana’s story, stunned at how neatly it mirrored my own.

In Ousmane Sembène’s seminal work, Diouana meets her future employers in Dakar. Polite and unassuming, they offer her employment working as their au pair in their Côte d’Azur abode. France! How exciting, she thinks. Upon arrival, she quickly realizes she’d been led into a trap. Physically confined with never-ending work, her dreams of glamorous weekend sojourns throughout the South of France are quickly diminished as her employers refuse to give her time off, or even petty rest. “Back in Dakar they must be saying, ‘Diouana is happy in France, she has a good life.’ For me, France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, and my bedroom.” She laments, shocked at how easily she’d been deceived by those who had promised safe, stable employment and social mobility. Back in Manhattan, New York was the 63rd floor of an imposing building in Midtown and my studio apartment in the East Village. An arm and a leg, the rent cost me. My job took everything else. Despite being born in a former slave-trading city, Diouana knew she was never destined to be enslaved. “Never will I be a slave. I did not come here for the apron or the money. Never will she see me again. Never will she scold me again. Never will I see them again,” Diouana declares before taking her own life. I read Diouana’s story during my junior year at Harvard, while studying post-colonial literature. Her story, and its end, reminded me of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Both of these texts left a lingering question: What does it mean to assert your humanity within a system, and to people, hell-bent on denying it? For Diouana, it meant to perish, but remaining defiant in her choice to never be subjugated to degradation ever again. For me, it meant I had to return to New York. That city doesn’t solely belong to investment bankers, I thought to myself as I stepped out of the bathtub. Drying myself off, I booked a return ticket to Manhattan. Don’t let them say they were successful in killing you, I thought to myself as I told my mother I’d be leaving within a week.

By the time I visited the French Riviera for the first time, I had been successful in pivoting all of my accumulated trauma. Although my relationship to beauty had begun as a way out of spiritual decay, it became my calling card. During a visit to London to attend Theaster Gates’ opening of 1965: Malcom in Winter: A Translation Exercise at White Cube in London, I had stopped by Dr. Catherine Hakim’s home to conduct a podcast interview. A sociologist of erotic capital, she told me, “It drips off you.” I smiled in mutual acknowledgement as I set up our microphones. Catherine and I were in agreement that few took beauty as seriously as it deserves to be taken. Not the mere presence of it, but the cultivation of it. The discipline and commitment it takes to become “beautiful.” “[It’s because] no one takes what women do seriously,” she said. I nodded in agreement. Maybe that was it. It was bad enough I hadn’t been the best at my job; maybe if I had been ugly, they’d have left me alone in my supposed incompetence, I thought to myself as I connected what the British sociologist who had introduced the concept of erotic capital as a fourth personal capital—alongside social, economic, and cultural capital—was saying to my own lived experience. Maybe the quality that brings me closer to women like Catherine and allows me an ease of passage through certain doors is what added to the projections my colleagues had of me, I thought as I listened to her speak. Then I remembered the words of my former mentor: “I think she thinks you think you’re special.” I smiled at the memory. What’s so special about a woman born in a small village in Cameroon, raised in the mountains of Colorado, and who arrived at Harvard with neither family name or familial wealth? Maybe he was on to something, I thought as I asked Catherine my next question.

I saw him looking at me. Typical, I thought to myself as I turned my head, closed my eyes, and continued moving my body to the beat of the music. Shfting my waist and turning my hips, I watched him be denied by the bouncer, then proceeded to round the perimeter of the dance floor until he slowly made his way to me. Determined. I like that, I thought to myself. It wasn’t until we sat down in the lounge area hidden in the front of the club that I found out he had graduated from the same alma mater as I did. Harvard Business School to my Harvard College. We were only five minutes into our conversation when I found out he advised start-ups for a living. “I have a start-up,” I blurted without much thought. “Oh?” He said, and then proceeded to spend the next three hours listening intently, as I walked him through how Diouana Womanomics came to be: “Beauty means everything to me, and it means a lot to other women, too. My dream is to showcase how women use their beauty as an asset class in their lives. How beauty creates tangible wealth for women, depending on the room they find themselves in,” I said, launching into my elevator pitch. Throughout the four hours we spent at that cave club, he advised me, like he would any of his other clients, on how to transform my passion into a proper company. The next day, I met up with him and his business school friends at a beach club filled with beautiful women and handsome men. I watched how the women hiked their six inch heels on top of the wooden tables and bent down to the music, taking the glances of the men with them. I watched men in linen shirts and pressed shorts grab each other by the shoulders, exhilarated by the atmosphere of sex appeal and sonic boom. During a dance break, my Harvard Business School counterpart signaled for me to follow him. Passing security guards, he introduced me to people he was impressed by and said, “She’s an entrepreneur, too. Doing interesting stuff with beauty.” Hugs were given, smiles exchanged, selfies taken, and promises of future conversations given. Walking back to our section, I said to him, “You called me an entrepreneur.” “That’s what you are. You’re serious about what you’re doing, and it’s impressive,” He said back. “That man told me he’d introduce me to the Editor in Chief of Essence,” I said. “Did he now?” He smiled back. I spent my last Saturday in Saint Tropez crafting a pitch deck about Diouana Womanomics. Never one to waste opportune timing, I texted it to him, “if you get a chance to see your friend today, show him this.” I wrote. By that point in the trip, I’d run out of money—a circumstance spearheaded by my lack of approval over the trip’s itinerary. “I can’t go out in Paris with you when we return. I ran out of money,” I told my friend, and organizer of the trip, over dinner. “Oh? I have to watch what I’m spending, too.” She said. I smiled. Amused at how far I’d come. In college, I would have died if this had happened publicly. Those girls would have made me feel so poor, I thought to myself. Those thoughts were interrupted later in the evening when my friend asked me to hop next door with her. “I like the DJ here better. I want to stay.” I told her. “I paid for the entire trip,” she said. There it is, I thought to myself. She’d offered free lodging as a stipulation of her last-minute offer for me joining her on this trip. “I’m staying here,” I said. When she returned after discovering the party was indeed better here, we acted as if nothing had happened. Typical, I thought to myself as I moved to the music, looking forward to the paycheck waiting for me when I returned to Manhattan.

New York is a city ashamed of its shadow. The only thing worse than being poor here is appearing vain. Shallow. Short in substance, and long in vanity. To be young, female, with limited financial resources in a city like this requires a resourcefulness that people do not expect of you upon first glance. The city’s high finance culture proved spiritually dead, and any creative job paid assuming someone else was fronting the majority of your bills. My new office building was right next to Central Park, and instead of executing M&A transactions, I was helping source deals. I’ve moved up in the world, I thought on my first day. I quickly learned there’s no perfect job in America. The cycle of hostility from my investment banking days continued. There’s something about me that doesn’t resonate well with Corporate America, I thought to myself the day I made the commitment to take my fascination with beauty, and all its manifestations, even more seriously than I’d done in the past. By this point, I’d been writing about what it means to be young, beautiful, and unaware of yourself to an audience of young women who felt similarly for a year and a half, but I wanted to advance the conversation and not just relitigate it under a pseudonym. “This is research,” Catherine had told me in our conversation around erotic capital. Research, I liked the way it sounded. The rigor it implied. No one will dismiss what I have to say if I can prove, empirically, that what happened to me, and continues to happen to others, is real, I thought as I prepared my graduate application. In many ways, I became obsessed with beauty because I couldn’t let go of the trauma of what happened to me. How badly some of the supposedly brightest minds this country has to offer had acted towards an idiotic 22-year-old, unaware of her presence. Would they have left me alone in my supposed incompetence had I been ugly? I’ve thought from time to time. Maybe. Trouble is, I’ve always been beautiful, and my lack of understanding of that fact didn’t change that reality. Nor did it make people act better than their upbringings, social standing, and job titles should have implied.

In the end, I’ve chosen the path of erotic capital because I’ve been a refugee of my own beauty. In returning home to it, I’ve chosen to become an authority on what it means for women to create wealth through their beauty, depending on the rooms they find themselves in, through building a proprietary dataset on women’s beauty behavior. Is anyone else better suited to become the erotic capital economist? The leading researcher on what it means for women to build wealth through their investments in beauty? I think not. It’s one thing to be beautiful, another to not know it, a third to be punished for it, and a fourth to have lived a life where you’re capable of bringing a perspective to women who’ve experienced similar truths. If it’s true that no one takes seriously what women do, I like to think that advancing this conversation to the level of research is my attempt at rectifying that fact.

Sweet dreams,
A Diouana Woman

A Nightcap Before You Go…

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Our Next Rendezvous…

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