Boston
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS isn't typically my bag. Not that I'm self-centered, but thinking about oppressed peoples of the world takes away from valuable me-time. Every now and then, however, one's sense of justice is so violated when witnessing freedoms so ruthlessly trampled, that there is no choice but to loosen the shackles, to storm the barricades, and to do other things that sound like Pete Seeger lyrics.

A few days ago, I received a call from the Atlantic Monthly's Joshua Green. Josh is typically a sunny guy. The world loves him, he loves it right back. But the troubled voice on the other end of the line wasn't the Josh I knew. This Josh, it seemed, was nursing an injury: he had hit his head on a glass ceiling.

In the walk-up to the Democratic convention, Josh had received a call from a staffer at EMILY's List, the political interest group that helps elect pro-choice Democratic women to office. Their working philosophy is perhaps best captured in their acronym: Early Money Is Like Yeast. The staffer wanted to know if any female writers from his magazine would be attending their "Women to Women Coffee," billed as an "informal breakfast for women in the news and women of the news."

Well anyone who knows Josh knows that he loves women. And he also loves coffee. Put women and coffee together, Josh is one happy camper. So he said he'd cover it. But EMILY's List said he couldn't. Not because Josh wasn't in/of the news. Nor because they hadn't made enough coffee. The reason Josh was proscribed from plying the trade he so loves, was for no other reason than that he was not a woman.

"Can you imagine if we tried to keep them out of something?" (By "we," Josh meant men--the hunters and gatherers. By "them," he meant "women"--the Oprah-watchers). Josh said he hadn't felt this lousy since "once in fourth grade, when I wasn't picked for kickball." I had heard enough. Every now and then, you realize that our business occasionally affords the opportunity to right a grievous wrong. I had to take a shot.

I immediately approached a female colleague at my magazine, Emily Ripp, and told her I needed her to make arrangements. Not only does she, coincidentally, have the same name as the group I was trying to infiltrate, but her phone voice is like a soft, summer wind--all female. At my behest, she called and RSVP'ed for the breakfast as "M. Labash."

EMILY's List communications director Ramona Oliver welcomed her/me, sister to sister. She told my collaborator that she didn't need an invitation, all she had to do was RSVP and she'd be on the list. Then she told the estrogenized version of me, that though we'd never spoken on the phone, she liked my work in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. "Love your work," of course, is the polite lie we all exchange like business cards at political conventions. But if Ramona had ever bothered to read my work, particularly on our website, where an unflattering caricature depicts me as a five-o'clock shadowed Serbian war criminal, she would know that I am all man.