I had a very good time -- exactly the kind of time my male colleagues were having. Unlike them, however, I paid a price -- in the sly winks, missed assignments and overall disrespect I received from certain members of the journalistic brotherhood. I was a young woman, a "babe" covering war. They were "the boys." And war, they reminded me, was their game.

I've had many more foreign assignments since then. I've also learned how to "handle" myself on the road -- a directive applied to women's behavior, not to men's. It involves embracing the danger, the adventure, the loneliness and, occasionally (and discreetly), the photographers or other roguish types who might come your way. It also involves playing by the rules, the primary one being: What happens on the road stays on the road.

Women journalists have come a long way since the days of Martha Gellhorn and Margaret Bourke-White, but after all is said and done, war is still a boys' game. Despite the successes of women such as Deborah Amos, Christiane Amanpour, Corinne Dufka and Susan Meiselas, women still constitute less than 10 percent of the foreign press corps; among combat photographers, only a handful are female. It's a hard, often dangerous and tremendously exciting life, and there is quite a lot to be said by, and about, the women who choose to live it. Unfortunately, it's also one of the last true "boys clubs" in the media -- or any other -- business, and while the annals of journalistic nonfiction bulge with "cowboy" memoirs, very few have been written by women.

Perhaps the first "cowgirl" memoir was Leslie Cockburn's "Looking for Trouble," a reflection of her highs (and occasional lows) over 25 years as a foreign correspondent and television producer. While filled with amusing insights, Cockburn's book, with chapter heads such as "Dinner With Drug Lords" and "Lunch With the Ayatollahs," rubbed many critics the wrong way. It suggested a blue-blood Yale graduate waltzing around war zones in designer bush-wear.

Now comes "Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War," Deborah Copaken Kogan's memoir about her life as a roving war photographer. It's an unfortunate title, but I was willing to give the book a shot given how rare young female war photographers are -- let alone those who write about the experience. Alas, "Shutterbabe" is not so much a cowgirl memoir as a "bang-bang" memoir: a self-aggrandizing story of the lusts and yearnings of a bored, post-feminist bad girl with a hankering to "see war."

"Shutterbabe" is not about war, nor is it about photojournalism. It's about sex -- or, rather, sex as sport, an integral part of boys-club culture that Kogan, a Harvard graduate, embraces as just as much her privilege as theirs. She finds abundant outlets for her passion over her brief, four-year career in photojournalism -- a whirlwind ride from Paris to Israel, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Romania and, finally, Russia. Between 1988 and 1992, she dodges a few bullets, faces down a tank or two and screws half the foreign press corps along the way.

Brava. Men in her position do it all the time; why shouldn't she? She has even done them one better and broken the sacred code and named names. (She uses first names, but those in the know might recognize a few.)

Still, it must be said that Kogan's brief experiences offer little premise for a book. Journalists who write about their lives generally have, like Cockburn, made some kind of a dent in the field; at a minimum they've had experiences that qualify them to speak authoritatively. Kogan was a minor player in photojournalism, barely remembered by the major photographers of that era. She began her career at age 22; at 26, she'd quit the business. A memoir written by an unknown young male photographer with an abbreviated, and unremarkable, résumé would never have made it past an agent's first read. That he screwed his way through a couple of wars would make it even more unappealing. Men boast of their conquests around the bar, but no serious male journalist would ever write about his affairs in such detail.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"