I'm not even sure Uncle Vince wanted to be mayor. I suspect that his friends, such as Lorraine Green and Vernon Hawkins, might have pushed him to run. What I know to be true is that challenging Adrian Fenty was not Gray's idea. A deliberative and conciliatory sort, he was happy as council chairman. Vince Gray had no burning desire to lead the District of Columbia.

As for the bossy Ms. Green, she joined other strong women such as Jerry Mason Hall and Judy Banks to build the Gray government by hiring friends, family members and the now famous Sulaimon Brown, the erstwhile mayoral candidate now at the center of a federal investigation into Gray's own campaign. Did Gray know his personnel aides were stuffing their kin in the government? That his campaign aides were allegedly paying off Brown to badmouth Fenty? A strong man in charge would have known.

In two grafs, Jaffe emasculates Mayor Gray and then insinuates that a mayor who's a "strong man" would keep the women-folk in line. Because only women are corrupt, only the most masculine of men can take care of business.

Okay, got it.

The American workplace’s storied glass ceiling is in pretty bad shape. Female workers are on the fast track to conquering the upper echelons of all sectors of industry, including the nation’s highest office. But what about that unsung other half of our nation’s workforce: men? In 2008, what workplaces may truly call themselves manly?

In order to find D.C.'s remaining manly strongholds, The Sexist is pleased to announce D.C.'s Manliest Workplace Competition! Beginning next week, The Sexist will run 64 D.C. workplaces in eight industries through a highly unsophisticated algorithm to assess each organization’s manliness. In order to determine manliness, the Sexist will take the top 10 positions in each organization, ascertain which positions are staffed by men, then assign a point value to each male staffer. A man in the highest-ranking position (i.e., president, CEO, publisher) will earn 10 points; one in the 10th-most-powerful spot will receive one point. The manliest workplace—one that employs all men, all the time, in the most powerful and well-paid positions—can score as high as 55 on the Manly Index. The least manly workplace—one that employs no men, none of the time, in any position—will receive a zero.*

Who’s manlier—the National Cathedral or the Founding Church of Scientology? The Supreme Court or the U.S. Postal Service? Stay tuned with The Sexist as the tournament continues to see which workplaces are manly enough to ignore all those pesky cracks in the glass ceiling. Also stay tuned for Crack Watch!—where we tally the number of women we find creeping into the org. charts of D.C. institutions.

Think you know manly from mannish? Fill out a bracket by Monday, Oct. 20, to be submitted in our contest. The entrant with the bracket that most closely resembles the Sexist’s findings will win a City Paper prize pack!

* Note: The Sexist reserves right to base assumptions on hasty once-over of workplace’s org chart. If a workplace’s chart does not have clearly ranked positions, the Sexist will arbitrarily assign rank. If a workplace employs fewer than 10 people in total, the Sexist will improvise.

Read more about the tournament on The Sexist, the City Paper's sex and gender blog.