Wag’s Revue was conceived by three twenty-one-year-olds nearly four years ago. Math says we’re now in our mid-twenties, though our staff has grown to include not only disgruntled men in their early thirties and some interns who are mere lambs, but our web guy who is a full-blown dad. We have never kept secret our relative youth. Nor have we hidden the fact of our uniform whiteness and middle- to upper-middle-classness. We have been clear about our liberal bias, our elite educations, and our overwhelming physical attractiveness. (We've all totally had sex.) That said, we have left one fact about our editorial makeup unaddressed: our overwhelming maleness.

After we released our last issue, one fan of the magazine wrote, bringing this up: “Just a shout out for women -- an annoying reminder to think of women as featured writers.” She asked, “Are any women on the editorial staff?”

She’s pretty on point. Our last issue—most of our issues for that matter—featured more words produced by men than by women. Overall, more of our pages, more of our interviewees, more of our visual artists have been men. Our editorial staff is made nearly entirely out of men, with one grand exception: me.

I co-founded this magazine and am now its managing editor. I am the one who wakes in the night worried the thing will not live another week. I decide it will live another week and then I threaten the other editors until they do their jobs. I also handle annoying tasks like paying people and not evading taxes and, it so happens, managing the “The Editors” inbox. So when I received this email I laughed and then I got pissed and then totally defensive. Because while I knew I was a woman—I’ve seen the parts—and therefore she was wrong, I also knew she was also pretty right. We'd never put a conscious effort into featuring a greater portion of women. I wondered, was this some sort of additional responsibility I should have?

This came as lots of Republicans were making lots of rapey comments and I was spending several hours a day in the bathtub reading Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman. I’d bought the book because I wanted to be able to rant about how dumb it was. Instead I was charmed and then utterly persuaded by it.