NEW YORK — A few months ago, GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman and Mother Jones editors-in-chief Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein went out to dinner in San Francisco. It was, in Jeffery’s words, a “very womanly dinner.”

Once the waitress came around to take drink orders, Friedman made the great faux pas of ordering a whiskey.

“I was like ‘Girl! What? You want that straight?’” said Jeffery, who ordered a margarita with salt.

Sh-t talk began. Bauerlein had ordered a white wine.

“We were giving Ann a hard time because she wanted a, quote-unquote, ‘serious man-drink’ to start off the meal,” Bauerlein said with a giggle. “She got a lot of grief from us.”

Just a night of ladies being ladies, gals being gals, but there’s a lot of this going around West Coast media these days. In fact, you don’t have to look farther than the youngish, stylish, literate and street-jargoned top editors at GOOD and Mother Jones. They’re ladies; they’re editors. Ladies and dudes, meet the lady-editors.

They are gals who preach a certain carefree editorial attitude — or, as Friedman put it, “You can work hard and play hard, but if you're a woman, mostly work hard.” These are all ladies who don’t exactly reflect the tightly wound, hyper-neurotic editor of yesteryear. They aren’t Newsweek editor Tina Brown with her stiff coif and British affect, or ... well, honestly there aren't that many lady-editors of yesteryear, but had they been around, they would have most certainly been uptight feminist killjoys.

In one respect, Bauerlein, Jeffery, and Friedman— all hired to their posts at general-interest magazines in the last 5 years — are the first group that could realistically be described as a "crop" of lady-editors, all of them in their 30s and 40s. They’ve been brought in to reinvent general-interest magazines at a time when these magazines need reinvention.

“They’re the next generation,” said a crusty old dude-itor. “I think they’re great editors. They’re not the future — they’re the present. They will be the ladies who will figure everything out. Or not.”

And they definitely are a new generation. “I had never even heard of them until this month,” said one of the dozens of male editors-in-chief. "But that's actually due to a medical condition I have called vagina-blindness."

Doctor! You’ve got to be fooling.

“Well, what convinced Mother Jones to hire to two women to edit a national magazine that has a large men’s readership?” said Friedman.

Great question, woman!

Two of the three lady-editors have kids and are married—but all three project a certain aura of feminine confidence, a swagger that’s in demand these days, a generational cool. Publishers and business side folks need an editor who can see the present, the past and the future. Lady-editors can do that — they’re girls, they’re women, they’re literary, they’re digital. They are ladies who might keep a bottle of Jameson in the bottom drawer with the tampons and the moisturizer—which Friedman does.

“If I can be frank: If you work in this industry, especially national thought-leader magazines, there are a lot of straight white men,” said Jeffery. “The notion of being some women's lib-type working in this business is not very realistic. It's threatening. No disrespect to my friends who are feminists!”

“Of course, she was a feminist at Carleton College,” said Bauerlein, of Jeffery.

Girl, keep it down!

“What I’m surprised at is that the persona that Ann had as a feminist blogger is pretty much the same persona she has as the editor of GOOD,” said Jeffery, who once hired Friedman as an intern. “Certainly you would not think that type would be allowed to run any kind of magazine, let alone one that's not explicitly for women."

Then there’s Jeffery’s attire. “Jeans and a cardigan,” said one Mother Jones staffer. “She never is in a skirt and heels. It’s very un-EIC!”

Ladies are digital. Jeffery and Bauerlein made motherjones.com into something of a machine and Friedman is not afraid to express her interest in woman stuff on the Web. Sample Friedman tweet: “Office snaxx @GOOD today: garlic pea crostini, asparagus parmesan tarts, berry pavlova, and lavender shortbread." Or Jeffery on Washington's sartorial failings: "Georgetown ≠ fashionable, no matter what Sally Quinn says."

So what is it about 2011 that’s appealing about a lady-editor at a general-interest magazine?

“There’s an appeal to editors who have a ton of estrogen but are  still smart and confident,” said some lady-editor stuck in a traditional women's-mag ghetto. “Lady-swagger — low maintenance lady-swagger — is having a moment.”

** Inspired by this. This is the second post (first here) in what promises to be an ongoing series...