Over at Women and Hollywood, Melissa Silverstein responds to the exclusion of movies by female directors from the main competition at Cannes with a call for more transparency about the process by which films make the cut. I’m of two minds about this.

I think there are certain kinds of transparency that are valuable. When the National Magazine Awards came out this year and people were dismayed, I think the American Society of Magazine Editors did themselves a favor when they gave journalists some insights into the makeup of the pools that produced the nominations. Being transparent ended up dispelling the sense that a secret cabal of dude editors had systematically shut women out of the running and refocused the conversation on thornier questions like the differences between magazines aimed at men and women, or how to improve the pool of women who are writing magazine features on things that aren’t women’s issues. I’m all for exposing cabals if they exist, but they shouldn’t become a distraction from things that are much harder to address.

But there’s no question that some kinds of transparency can become a rabbit hole. If festivals or awards start explaining why they accept or reject every single movie or piece, they’re not likely to satisfy anyone. The Pulitzer’s one-line citations of nominees and eventual winners are a nice bit of economy, but explanations like that open the door to lengthy justifications of what got in and what didn’t, offered up to folks who want to champion a movie, or a show, or a piece that resonates with them. Ultimately, nominations and awards are always going to be products of their judging pools, rather than of popular votes, and opinions in those pools will always be subjective and brokered.

Better to know who the judges are than to try to get reasoning for their preferences out of them. It might even be interesting to see judges write statements about their preferences and the things that get them excited, and for competitions to try to put together balanced pools based on those as well. It’s not like putting Kathryn Bigelow on your jury will tilt it towards sympathy for carefully observed domestic stories about the inner lives of women. The basic facts and figures on who makes up judging pools is a good form of transparency that should be standard, along with the numbers on whose represented in initial submissions. But transparency is only the start: the decisions people make much earlier back in their careers are much murkier to fathom, and equally important.

Yesterday, I was wrapping things up at the office when one of my best friends gchatted me to say “This Is What A General Interest Magazine Looks Like,” and included a link to this picture:

Now, Sofia Vergara is an estimable, talented, and very funny woman. But it’s not just her presence on this cover in lingerie that suggests that this magazine isn’t for women. The facts in text around her are all about men: “10% of men don’t believe that oral sex counts as ‘sex’,” “52% of men have sex less than once a week,’ ’80% of men have never used Viagra,” “34% of men in a committed relationship have cheated,” “14% of married men say they have had sex with a guy,” and so on. All of them appear under the headline “What’s Normal Now”—the issue’s meant to be a kind of measuring stick against which men can metaphorically whip it out and measure it. But perhaps in a general interest sense, ladies, who, judging by the magazines aimed at us, are meant to be constantly boning up on our Sex Knowledge, are meant to swing by as well to have this arsenal of information at our disposal to go along with our Cosmopolitan-provided “50 Things Guys Wish You Knew” or “1000 True Sex Confessions.”

When I talked to Sid Holt, who runs the National Magazine Awards, a couple of weeks ago, I asked him about why there’s a women’s magazine category while men’s magazine are judged as general interest. He explained that “There clearly are men’s magazines, but the number of men’s magazine doesn’t justify having a separate category for men’s magazines…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.” That may be true, but it doesn’t prevent things like this from being funny and sad, and making the category breakdown look silly.

Meanwhile, people like the estimable Kevin Fallon have been pushed to write pieces with titles like “Can Guys Watch ‘Girls’?” A commenter on that piece huffed “Many would be insulted if women were told they can enjoy male comedies,” but it’s a question I got from readers who I think are entirely people of good will*. We live in a world that constantly reinforces that looking at Sofia Vergara’s breasts is a broadly engaging pastime but that men have nothing to learn from the women of Sex and the City‘s conversations about what men do to their bodies and how it feels. It’s not irrational, given that environment, to ask if shows or movies with female leads and about female problems is the exception to the rule that women are niche and men are general interest.

*More to come on this, but Girls is definitely not for everyone even though I love it, and I have thoughts on how it can be a lever for things that speak to other audiences.

When the nominations for the National Magazine Awards were announced yesterday, they sparked a spirited debate about gender and representation among the nominees. Liliana Segura found that the finalists included no women in the Reporting, Features, Profiles, Essays or Columns categories, though as I noted, they netted four out of the five nominations for Public Interest reporting. Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein spoke with Erin Belieu, the co-founder of VIDA, which monitors women’s bylines in magazine journalism, about the breakdown. And Sid Holt, the chief executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors, which administers the National Magazine Awards, mounted a spirited defense of the nominations, and of the existence of a Women’s Magazine category in the competition, though there is no Men’s Magazine category.

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.”

Liliana Segura ran the numbers and found out that the finalists for the National Magazine Awards, which were announced today, include no women in the Reporting, Features, Profiles, Essays or Columns categories. Women did, however, dominate the nominations in the Public Interest category. Four out of five of those nominations went to women: Natasha Gardner for “Direct Fail,” about sentencing children as adults in 5280; Kathy Dobie for “Tiny Little Laws” about sexual assaults in Indian country in Harper’s; Lea Goldman for “The Big Business of Breast Cancer” about pink branding and profiteering in Marie Claire; and Sarah Stillman for “The Invisible Army,” a look at the fate of foreign workers on U.S. bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, in the New Yorker—the piece also just won a Hillman Award.

It’s fantastic to see women clean up in this space, but I wonder if the paucity of female nominees in other spaces is due to the fact that there is a National Magazine Award General Excellence category for Women’s Magazines, which “Honors women’s magazines, including health and fitness magazines and family-centric publications,” while men’s magazines like Esquire and GQ are counted as General Interest publications. Now, Esquire and GQ aren’t truly general-interest publications: their style, health, and lifestyle sections aren’t designed to be accessible to someone like me, and that’s fine. But the division in General Excellence creates an incentive for women’s magazines to genuinely specialize their coverage across the board, while men’s magazines have incentives to commission features and criticism that compete with publications like the New Yorker and The Atlantic.

I think women’s magazines could stand to be a lot more ambitious in their criticism, and in the way they structure their profiles in particular, in ways that would challenge the idea that they’re not aimed at a general audience. Just because an actress is a woman, and a profile of her is appearing in a women’s magazine, doesn’t mean it has to be family and weight first and craft and artistic impact second. But the existence of the Women’s Magazine category, and the grouping of women’s magazine in with subjects that tend to be considered second-tier in comparison to the subjects that tend to win National Magazine Awards—heath and family versus national security, national tragedies, national media phenomena and the people who handle all three—isn’t helpful. It’s worthwhile to consider whether judges have biases. But it’s also worth interrogating whether the categories the National Magazine Awards uses aren’t set up to elevate the best in journalism, whatever its subject matter is. It’s not clear why Glamour’s “The Secret That Kills Four Women a Day” on relationship violence is in personal service rather than straight features unless the editors who submitted it felt they had a better chance of it being recognized as Helpful Tips for Women rather than an issue that should be part of the national conversation across gender lines.