I went to a cocktail party tonight, and all anyone could talk about was Rosanna Arquette's new movie on Showtime "Searching for Debra Winger." It's about women aging in Hollywood and what they have to go through to get parts.

I hope it comes out on video because I'd like to see it, since I don't have Showtime.

Apparently there's a scene in the movie where the actresses say that when an actress leaves an audition, which is usually run by men, the guys then go around and say to each other "she was good, but would you have sex with her?"

This scene reminded me of something one of my exec type corporate boyfriends told me. Corporate director boyfriend said that the guys in upper management would talk about, when women weren't present of course, the physical attributes of all of the women in the corporation. And one of the questions that always came up about women executives was, "would you have sex with her?"

Corporate director boyfriend said they would go around the table and offer their "two cents" about the desirability of the woman executive.

I used to think that corporate director boyfriend was making all of this stuff up, and I used to just listen to his stories and think nothing of it. But maybe he was telling the truth, because the Hollywood guys do it too. And if the Hollywood guys behave that way with actresses, they probably treat female writers the same way.

I've worked with corporate america upper management most of my working life, so I'm no stranger to the way guys in corporate america treat women. But maybe this is a good thing because I'll be familiar with how I'll get treated and I'll know how to react. I've definitely had to play that game before. I don't like it, but I know how to operate in the game.

It's ill, very ill I know. But sadly, it really does seem that way. And the higher up you go on the corporate ladder, the worse it gets. You just get used to it, and you adjust, and you learn to use the rules of their game to your own advantage.

I remember going into a difficult meeting with a corporate controller, where I had to talk about why my group was over our department. He was not a happy camper about our expenses that month.

I made sure I wore a very tight sweater to the the meeting just to make sure that I had every advantage. Not sure if it worked, but the meeting went better than expected and I managed to calm him down and we figured out a way to show that my group really wasn't doing that much damage to the corporate bottom line.

I got what I wanted, but I did get sick of the "hooter jokes" that he kept making. I figured it was a small price to pay to calm the poor man down and to keep my group out of trouble. And after that incident, my boss promoted me and gave me a big fat raise.

Hollywood can't be that much worse than what I've had to go through in the halls of publicly traded corporate american executive management.