Marnell. (Courtesy Patrick McMullan)

At last night’s Housing Works panel on the legacy of the late Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, Vice columnist Cat Marnell stood out. Wearing a tight, translucent white dress and leather jacket, she snapped her gum, played with her hair and  alternately stared wide-eyed at the audience or down at her phone.

“I hate Gloria Steinem,” she announced at one point. “She’s boring and plain. My kind of feminism is that you want to be hot and awesome.”

Ms. Marnell was one of three panelists, along with Jezebel founding editor Moe Tkacik and Hairpin editor Edith Zimmerman, who gathered to discuss Gurley Brown and her efforts to help “mouseburgers” like herself have not only great sex, but all the money, recognition, authority and respect they deserved. At the panel, moderated by woman's magazine vet Alison Brower, Ms. Tkacik addressed her political leanings: “Before I was a Marxist, I was a slut.”

Ms. Zimmerman, seated between two voluble speakers, was more reserved, but she spoke with authority on the balancing act that comes with a career in gendered media, noting that while The Hairpin tried to escape the anti-feminist tropes of women’s magazines, its founders at The Awl network knew “There’s money to be made from advertising to females.”

Ms. Zimmerman, who wrote about the international Cosmo conference in Madrid for The New York Times, also noted how while, in the U.S., Cosmo “is sort of a punch line,” it has a stronger influence today in countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan where it’s still “the only source for female issues and relationship issues.”

Which is a well-taken point, but somehow this didn’t register quite as strongly on the Richter scale of provocation as the volley that followed between Ms. Tkacik and Ms. Marnell, with the former Jezebel blogger noting that women in the Middle East would not be liberated by Cosmopolitan, and the Vice blogger suggesting that at least the magazine would show them how to have "sex in a doghouse."

And while Ms. Zimmerman was ambivalent about the role that kowtowing to advertisers played in women’s media, Ms. Marnell saw a role for traditional beauty products, with a saucy twist: “I think that money’s awesome. That’s what drives things.” She had sabotaged a $250,000 deal with Proctor and Gamble for a piece on “lipstick that won’t come off on a dick.”

The spirit of Ms. Brown lives on in some form, it would seem, though Ms. Marnell is more interested in a male pioneer. “My publishing idol is Larry Flynt," she said only to be one-upped by Ms. Tkacik who jumped in with her own anecdote about the girly mag publisher.

"One time," she said, "Larry Flynt offered Gloria Steinem $1 million if she posed open pussy.”

She didn’t do it. For this generation, that makes her a mouseburger.

Update: This post has been updated from the original. Ms. Tkacik made the statement about Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt. Not Ms. Marnell.

The decision comes close on the heels of a Twitter-documented (but what isn't?) disagreement between Tkacik, her commenters, and her editor.

Late last night Tkacik posted an essay about the American media's handling of rape allegations against Julian Assange, contrasted with American courts' handling of rape cases and Swedish sexual culture. According to the Cutline, Tkacik usually self-publishes and is back-read by editors, therefore no one read the post before it went up. Some commenters took issue with Tkacik's use of Assange's accusers' names.

Omitting the names of rape victims and accusers is a standard newspaper policy, but Tkacik told Cutline, "Since I had been seeing [their names and faces] on Twitter feeds and all over the Internet, I didn't have a second thought about publishing them." One commenter asked Managing Editor Mike Madden to take the piece down.

Madden consented, and later reposted it with this message:

Because of the subject matter, we unpublished it so we could review it. The post originally named the women who Julian Assange is accused of raping. Their names have been deleted. City Paper does not have a formal, blanket policy on whether to name victims of alleged sexual assaults, but in this case, it was inappropriate, and editors should have been consulted before the post was published. An update responding to critics of publishing the names has also been deleted.

Madden told FishbowlDC that Tkacik's departure has nothing to do with last night.

"Moe is leaving the paper, but we've asked her to continue to write for us as a contributing writer," said WCP Managing Editor Mike Madden. "That decision is the result of conversations that started well before this post was published."

Sadly this whole debacle only serves to prove Tkacik's most salient point in the piece:

Forcing some sort of dogmatic equivalence upon every action that technically conforms to the legal definition of "rape" seems guaranteed only to condemn the discourse to an eternal rhetorical circle jerk of slut-shaming/finger-wagging/conspiracy theorizing/etc.

Tkacik wrote about the Bronfman sisters in The New York Observer in August. The piece was one of Longreads' Top 10 Long Reads for 2010.

 @kstoeffel | kstoeffel@observer.com

Ms. Tkacik is taking a job with the Washington City Paper and moving down to DC. She said the City Paper is trying to "remake" itself.

"They want me to do a blog and cover stories basically," she added. "Like 'more hit pieces' and 'be meaner' and 'remind people of the totally insane shit that happened during the Bush administration' and maybe an anti-Geithner jihad," she wrote on gchat. "You know that stuff."

Ms. Tkacik hadn't yet decided on a name for her blog. "For awhile I was going to start a blog called Das Krapital on my own so maybe this could be Das Crapitol or something," she said, "but I will brainstorm about this a bit later." She also wasn't sure what her job title was.

Editor Erik Wemple left the paper in March to start a local blog, TBD. He was replaced by Mike Schaffer in April. Mr. Schaffer is a friend! Ms. Tkacik introduced Mr. Schaffer to Mike Madden — an old friend of Ms. Tkacik from their days working at the Penn student newspaper — and Mr. Schaffer eventually hired Mr. Madden to become his no. 2. Then they asked Ms. Tkacik if she would work for them.

"I was in town for my brother's wedding and we had lunch and they were like 'You wouldn't think of ...moving would you?' And I was like 'Huh! It has been a really miserable summer in New York in my house and I need a job with air conditioning so maybe,'" she explained.

"I'm viewing it as a sabbatical definitely because it's traumatizing to think about leaving here [New York]," Ms. Tkacik said. "I get carded there more now than I did when I was 17, which tells you something about the place."

Ms. Tkacik has been working as a freelancer lately (she is currently on assignment for The Observer). She said she has been thinking about taking a more stable job in financial journalism. But, she said, "they're always a little freaked out by Marxists and the idea of working with people I like was appealing."

What was that about being a Marxist?

"Seriously though, no I am not explicitly anything, I am not really an extremist, but these are extreme times we're living in," she said. "I basically don't think anyone should be allowed to accumulate more than $50 million. There should just be a cap, and everything beyond that goes to the abortion fund."

"That's not really socialism, by my definition," she added, "but you know, we don't live in particularly rational times."

Towards the end of our chat with Ms. Tkacik we got an email from a reader who told us we had an error in our earlier post about Ms. Tkacik: We wrote that she was the founding editor of Jezebel. The reader said that wasn't true.

We checked with Ms. Tkacik.

"Anna and I basically founded it although we also had a fashion editor," she said, adding that she is happy that Anna Holmes is getting a break from blogging. Jessica Coen replaced Ms. Holmes at the end of June. We asked Ms. Tkacik if the blog was changing. "It's been different for a long time," she said. "In the beginning, it was just a different thing. It was really fun. I don't know quite when or why or to what extent it's changed though. It was just smaller and less serious then."

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft

Asks the flack:

The spread features staffers from Hearst's shuttered CosmoGirl drinking at the questionably named (at least for a teen magazine) Lolita Bar; a handful of ex-Radar employees sharing a few at Marshall Stack; and Urbane Tomboy and one-time Gawker writer Moe Tkacik endorsing Scratcher.

Let's hope there's room at those bars, since this town is suddenly full of unemployed media workers, some of whom might even be owed a check or two by Time Out: In September, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan wondered Can Time Out New York Pay Its Bills?

Her first day is on August 18. She's also the latest alumnus of Gawker Media to join the magazine: in addition to Mr. Balk, Ana Marie Cox recently signed a contract to serve as Radar's Washington editor.