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 recall a conversation that carried on between three of four people on a thread about mental health that found all of us writing in at least four or five times. It was an extremely constructive experience, at least for me. And since we don't have a way of contacting or identifying one another that would allow the conversation to continue in another forum, it would have just come to a dead stop if there was a limit on the times we could contribute to the thread. It wasn't rancourous at all, just an exchange of experiences and ideas.

I would hate to see the opportunity for those types of extended conversations to go by the wayside because sometimes we are less constructive with our multiple posts. After all, it is in the back-and-forth that we actually get to respond to one another and demonstrate how our thinking is being affected by other letter writers, which is exactly what makes this something other than an echo-chamber on occasion.