Well, while we're on this topic ...

Having a women's section and a men's section seems to me like it would buy into a couple of problematic ways of looking into gender. First, it treats gender as a binary, when in fact there are many people who cross gender lines (transsexuals, inter-sexed individuals, e.g.). Looking at the world in terms of "women's" issues and "men's" issues propagates the false notion that the two are separable; that, for example, it is only women who suffer when women are oppressed, and that issues important to women are only interesting to a niche group of interested parties. It often seems to ghettoize issues important to women rather than give them the attention they deserve (I wonder, for example, if some of the topics that wind up on Broadsheet seemingly under-researched might have been better served as full-length, fully sourced articles but never went that route because "women's" issues go into the "women's" blog). It also often has the effect of ignoring the complicity of women in our own oppression as well as the extremely harmful consequences of gender roles on men.

More importantly, I think, the way Broadsheet works right now, we really seem to get very little critical thought about how race, class, generation, age, sexual orientation, and other aspects of peoples' lives intersect with their experiences of gender. Occasionally I see a bit more diversity reflected in Broadsheet's posts, but often I get the sense that there is one primary "gendered" lens being used to interpret the news, when in fact there are as many lenses (and as many ways of experiencing gender) as there are individuals.

I think that it would be better, if you are going to have a blog focusing on issues of gender (which I believe is important, but which also begs the question, why gender? why not race? why not class?), to have one single blog for gender in general rather than a women's and a men's blog, because every issue that is a "women's" issue is also a "men's" issue, and visa versa. And more diverse voices (including many more male posters) would be good too. More posters who have different approaches to feminism and gender studies and different outlooks on the same issues. More debate, less pedantry. More posters who come from something other than a U.S. middle class white female pov. And, as many other people have said, more engagement with the letters section. I know that the tone in many of the letters can feel vile (and it's made me lose my cool on many an occasion), but there is also much there to learn from.

I am not trying to bash the authors you already have. I know that they are fighting an uphill battle with that blog. But there are times when the blog seems to shoot itself in the foot by jumping to conclusions without researching a topic more fully. And there really does seem to be a singular vision of gender which gets tiresome when repeated over and over again. Sometimes it feels like a bit of a cookie-cutter.

I work with actual people who have these disorders every day. Every single one of them -- even the ones with the most severe cognitive impairments, even the ones with the most deeply ingrained personality disorders, and even the ones who are actively delusional on a regular basis -- are quite evidently real and whole people first. Their disorders are secondary to who they are.

One of the main problems with a lot of television characterization, especially when it explicitly involves a mental illness but also when it's just left unsaid, is that the characters' disorders are the foundation for who they are. The rest is secondary. In other words, their writers put the clinical cart before the human horse. This is what makes the characters seem hollow and repetitive over time.

When I was a bit younger and engaged regularly in roleplaying (of the tabletop and live action variety), there was a system we used that involved a class of people who were all supposed to have a mental illness. These were the worst characters anyone ever created, because everyone would go "oh oh, I wanna play someone with multiple personalities" or "I wanna play someone who sees things that aren't there!" ... then they'd try to slap together a character on the basis of that flimsy premise. But of course that's not how it actually works in the real world. In the real world, we start out as people and the illnesses get slapped on us down the road by physical and social circumstance.

I would join the chorus of people objecting to the slang used for mental illnesses in this piece, if it weren't for the fact that the "mentally ill" Ms. Havrilesky is referring too are of the wacky made-for-tv fake as hell kind. These characters are, in fact, "nuts" and ready for the "loony bin," in all of it's stereotyped and one-dimensional glory. They don't have mental illnesses, they have nutty quirks. So I guess the terms just seem to fit. The people who are really doing us a disservice are the ones who are writing these one-dimensional characters and perpetuating the notion that we are, in fact, our diagnoses.