These questions go together, and both have serious implications for how editors, and other purveyors of valuable cultural capital, ought to allocate it. On the question of outspokenness, I have no particular wish to see people I care about harmed by the ugly speech of others. I know first-hand that calling out shockingly blunt speech like Derbyshire’s—or on a much lesser level, Lee Aronsohn’s—can be a terrific traffic driver. But hearing it and feeling that outrage is also mentally exhausting. The argument is, however, that such unadulterated, un-prettified speech gives us an opportunity to see racism, sexism, and homophobia as it truly is, an experience that I imagine is more of an education for straight, white dudes than for women, people of color, or gay folks. But it’s true that there are a lot of straight, white men in positions of cultural authority. I’m not immune to the idea that it’s good for them to be exposed to moments of uncomfortable clarity that require them to draw firm lines in the sand about what ideas they are and aren’t willing to be associated with, and what people they are and aren’t willing to credential.

The problem is that suggesting that such authority figures need those shocking moments absolves them of responsibility to constantly be thinking about these kinds of questions. Sure, the requirement that racists, sexists, and homophobes pretty up their ugly thoughts—whether via Charles Murray-like stabs at scientific legitimation or pretentions of concern—may make those sentiments less immediately obvious in prose. But isn’t that precisely the kind of thing that we hire magazine editors to detect through deep and perceptive readings? You shouldn’t get credit for elucidating the line when the lack of one is causing you discomfort. You should get credit for weeding out noxious ideas precisely when it would be less convenient for you to do so, but because you feel it’s important to make clear the damage that those roots are doing below the soil.

It’s easy to feel frustrated with the results, which have roots further back in the pieces editors choose to commission in the first place and the categories in which editors choose to submit entries. But in an extended conversation with ThinkProgress, Holt laid out the process by which ASME assembles its judging pools, and described the organization’s debates about issues ranging from attaching bylines to pieces in the judging process to the existence of the Women’s Magazines category.

243 judges participated in the selection process for this year’s print National Magazine Awards, of whom 118, or 48.5 percent, were women. 40 percent of the judges are editors in chief of magazines, 20 percent come from places other than New York, and 25 percent hadn’t judged the previous year. Of the 20 judging groups, 8 were lead by women—the original plan would have had 9 women group leaders, but one dropped out and was replaced by a man. Holt said his goal is to put together judging pools that won’t produce easily predictable results. “There’s no specific guideline, there’s x number of women or x number of men,” he explained, “but there have to be more than a couple of women or men” in any given pool.

Each initial submission is evaluated by two readers, usually a man and a woman, though Holt said the process emphasizes diversity of background so “It’s not two women service editors. If it’s a man and a woman, it’s not a man from a sports magazine and a woman from a sports magazine.” Those readers initially evaluate the pieces by reading them as PDFs that are uploaded to a website. When submissions move to the judging pool, judges read the stories again in the physical magazines which they appeared, so everything from the paper to the byline is the same. Holt said there have been debates about stripping bylines from pieces, but that certain magazines—like the New Yorker—and certain pieces that are so widely circulated that it wouldn’t make sense to attempt to disguise who their authors are.

Holt acknowledged that the Women’s Magazines category remained the subject of debate, but said it grew out of larger changes when ASME decided to abandon categories in the General Excellence awards that sorted magazines by circulation, which prevented magazines with similar content and ambitions from being judged against each other. “There clearly are men’s magazines, but the number of men’s magazine doesn’t justify having a separate category for men’s magazines,” he said. “We did the general excellence categories for years based on circulation…There was a perception, and it was a reality, that women’s magazines weren’t recognized. So we specifically created a category for women’s magazines to recognize women’s magazines…It was a specific problem, and there are women editors who liked it the other way. We were trying to address an issue in which magazines that competed for readers and for advertisers were competing against one another. It was a system that made sense from a magazine perspective and wasn’t entirely arbitrary.”

And Holt said he recognized the difficulties of a system and a market where magazines with service sections aimed only at men—but with feature wells that aim to compete with publications like the New Yorker—ended up in the General Interest category while Women’s Magazines are separated out. “Putting GQ and Esquire in a category called General Interest, I realize that is problematic,” he said. “That’s a practical solution to sort of an organizational problem.”

And then there’s the content itself, in, say, this wildly outdated piece about Glee:

Conservatives have to wonder what’s “quirky and sweet” about a show in which half the teenagers are sexually confused and the other half are sleeping around, or how ridiculing conservative principles and figures equals a “nonpartisan funfest.”…In between the songs and the jokes, “Glee’s” audience is treated to homosexuality, underage drinking, hookups and teen pregnancy. The production numbers themselves are often smutty (smutty: obscene, indecent), as when the character of “Rachel” wore a belly-showing, bra-bearing shirt and an extremely short skirt, channeling Britney Spears’ infamous Catholic school-girl outfit when she performed the hit “Baby One More Time” in a Spears tribute episode.

Rachel Berry’s midriff is coming for your children, and if you can’t convince them to resist it, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

Mac McClelland is a female reporter, who is more than capable of doing the same work as her male counterparts.

1. Mac McClelland: I said it last year, and I’ll say it again. Someone should send Mother Jones’ awesome investigative reporter out on the road with a dude movie star to send back awesome—and non-flirtatious—reports from the road. That, or ship her off to a war zone. Either way, McClelland would turn in an account that’s deeply reportered and wildly entertaining to read.

2. Irin Carmon: The Salon reporter’s turned in everything from ferocious reports on the wide array of measures conservative lawmakers have been pushing to limit women’s access to reproductive health care to seminal essays on the enduring cultural legacy of Dirty Dancing. And she’s proven she can do everything from Jezebel-style blogging to substantial reporting, which is all editors who need to fill the front of the book, the back of the book, and the feature well should need to know.

3. Amanda Hess and Tracy Clark-Flory: Periodically, a major magazine will decide it wants to get a little edgy and profile a porn star or a porn entrepreneur. Sometimes, they’ll even assign a woman to do it, like when Vanessa Grigoriadis hung out with Sasha Grey at the beginning of her transition from pornography to mainstream movies for a Rolling Stone profile. But she’s not the only woman who can write these kinds of pieces. Magazines who want to get erudite about the adult industry should consider Hess and Clark-Flory, both of whom cover porn as a core part of their beats.

4. Willa Paskin: Okay, she already shows up in the pages of New York Magazine, so it’s not like Paskin’s a stranger to the national magazine circuit. But more publications should be putting her gimlet eye for pop culture and ability to break down why a show or movie works—or just as often, doesn’t—on a large scale. Maybe a weekend in Los Angeles with the Sisters Deschanel? Just sayin’.

5. Charlie Jane Anders: The only writer on this list who could write for the fiction section of your magazine as well as turn in reviews, the managing editor of io9 should be your go-to gal for all things science and science fiction. And because she runs the San Francisco-based Writers With Drinks series, she could probably hook you up with a whole other range of talented writers to fill your pages.

6. Dana Goldstein: Judaism. Education policy. Great book reviews like this one. Goldstein came up in the Washington, DC journalism community that values deep dives and expertise in subject material, honed her skills as a Daily Beast editor, and now is working on an education policy book and churning out essays. New York Review of Books—snap this one up.

7. Sarah Jaffe: This Alternet editor polishes and writes some of the great labor journalism America’s major publications have, with a few minor exceptions, largely abandoned. She was one of the first people to seriously cover the Occupy movement on the ground. And she also knows a whole bunch about comics. Your nerd readers and your economic policy readers will thank you.

8. Kate Sheppard: Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time, so why not hire a reporter deeply versed in the politics of our approach to it? Oh, and while you’re at it, you might want to take a look at Mother Jones, the place that currently employes both Sheppard and McClelland and see what you can do to find and develop outstanding female reporters as well as Editor in Chief Clara Jeffrey has.

9. Kashmir Hill: Want your magazine content to flourish on the web? Hill has an incredible eye for what details make a story pop, and she’s great at framing technology stories in particular. As personal tech and all the privacy issues that come with it become increasingly important, magazines could differentiate themselves from the dude-heavy tech writer crew by hiring Hill.

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

Because really, the only answer here is not that these publications can’t find women. It’s that they don’t really care if they do or not. These numbers, and the annual discussion of them, seem to have succeeded in making a lot of female journalists and readers angry and frustrated, but they don’t appear to have made editors feel ashamed, much less called to action. And I’m not quite sure what it would take to persuade them to shake off their lethargy and acceptance of the status quo, which really means accepting sexism. Do we really have to educate editors that women can bring new perspectives on major stories, and not just to stories about living as a single woman or going through a divorce? What level of evidence would it take to persuade folks that while Katherine Boo and Marie Colvin are and were utterly extraordinary, they are not the only women who can go into profoundly difficult settings and win sources’ trust? Because at this point, I would like to know what it would take to humiliate or convince editors at the major magazines to think more creatively about story assignments and recruiting pitches. Numbers clearly aren’t doing the trick.

And second, she says if I concede that women write a bunch of different things for the magazine, then my question, “If the only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing?” is unfair. I’ve thought about this, and while yes, women may make it into GQ and its ilk in other ways, that doesn’t mean that assignments like these don’t pose a dilemma if a magazine like this comes to you and asks you to write a celebrity profile on the heels of a profile like Jessica Pressler’s camping trip like Channing Tatum.

The importance of magazines like GQ and Esquire to women writers comes in part from the fact that there simply isn’t an equivalent among magazines aimed at women. As I was thinking about this, I looked through the American Society of Magazine Editors’ database of National Magazine Award nominees and winners. If you count Vanity Fair as a general interest magazine rather than a women’s magazine, which I do, a women’s magazine hasn’t published a nominee for a Feature Writing prize in the last twenty years. Unless the interior design magazine Nest counts, no women’s magazine has ever produced a nominee for profile writing in the two categories that have existed to recognize that form. If we count Self, six Public Interest award nominees have come from women’s magazines in the last twenty years: two in that magazine, one in Golf for Women, one in Redbook, one in Glamour, one in Family Circle. Between 1991 and 2001, no women’s magazine has produced a winner or a nominee in the Reporting category.

It’s weird and hugely frustrating that women’s magazines have made such totally different choices. That’s not to say that all women’s magazines should be high-end bastions of literary journalism—certainly all men’s magazines aren’t that way—but certainly we should be able to support one or two publications that tell us about hot accessories and do groundbreaking, beautifully-written reporting. That kind of committment would both make women’s publications better, and provide material support for the kind of empowerment places like Marie Claire are ostensibly supposed to supply along with beauty advice. But they just don’t do it. And because there isn’t a parallel infrastructure for great reporting, profiles, and public service journalism among women’s magazines, access to assignments at the high-end men’s magazines, and to the amazing editing and resources that come with those assignments, and that produce major awards, is incredibly precious.

Sometimes those kinds of assignments don’t come with difficult choices, like deciding what physical risks you’re willing to face especially in circumstances where it might be more dangerous to be a woman, or whether you’re comfortable putting yourself out there in a One Crazy Night profile. But sometimes they do. Acknowledging that those kinds of choices exist and aren’t easy, especially when it seems like prestige magazines are expressing preferences for certain things, needs to be part of the conversation if we want more women writing more kinds of stories for more magazines.

If GQ wants to get more women’s voices in the magazine, that’s a great thing, and I really hope they keep doing it! But the point of Ann Friedman’s work on Lady Journos, and of running the numbers on what magazines actually publish by women is not to convince magazines to run “girly” stories, or to get one woman in the door one time. If the relevant information the profile is supposed to deliver is anything other than Lady Writer Potentially Slept With Hottie, there are other ways to obtain that information, and other ways to frame the story — the revelation that Famous Dudes Drink is the equivalent of the newsflash that Famous Ladies Eat Truffle Fries. And women can do that reporting, and that framing. I’m pretty sure that Mac McClelland could go out, get glassed with Sean Bean, and find some way to use her experiences as a reporter in Burma to get him to tell her cool stuff about Game of Thrones.

I don’t know what the solution is here. If the way only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing? If you’re a GQ editor trying to get more women in your magazine, and you feel like the only way you can sell that goal to your higher-ups, is it worth it?