A couple of days ago, in another forum, I compared Salon's makeover to the strategy of a radio station that had changed ownership and format. Often, when such was the case, the new radio station would broadcast gibberish for several days in order to scrub its old listener base in favor of the new audience they hoped to attract. At the time, I was being ironic.

Now, after days and days of ever-more-aggressively trivial lead articles, displayed with ever more-cutesy graphics, cumulating in this latest headache-inducing pink monstrosity, I'm beginning to think that getting rid of us is exactly the current editorial strategy.

And my puzzled dismay has distilled into rage: at the increasingly moronic content, the ill-conceived layout, and the fact that the only editorial response after days of vociferous reader protests has been to diminish actual content still further until all that's left is this current garish pink-festooned self-parody.

I do not want a women's blog. If I did, I certainly wouldn't want it to be pink and full of smirky, self-congratulatory titles, snippets of gossip and half-evolved thought. I would, as many others have said here, want real coverage of real news of real interest to real women above the age of 12.

I am not sure what I find most appalling: the apparently wilful destruction of a once respectable, intellectually satisfying web publication, or the apparently escalating attempts to offend loyal readers.

Nonesuch argues, implicitly, that anger is pathological, political outrage is equivalent to ideological repression, and that colors are devoid of social coding, and have nothing whatever to do with gender (regardless of what even the most casual shopping experience for items as seemingly neutral as appropriate clothing for a newborn or a schoolchild might indicate to the contrary).

Perhaps people also object to the pink simply because it clashes so violently with the predominant red color scheme and hurts people's eyes? Color theory, good design principles, established editorial policies and responsive customer service are themselves fairly neutral principles, nonesuch, based in sound business practice. A large part of the reader outrage being expressed here is based on the sense that those principles, at the least, have been abandoned.

Nonesuch, the intensity of your response, and the degree of anxiety you express, in turn puzzles me.

Perhaps the opinion nonesuch expresses is representative of the new demographic Salon hopes to attract with its new editorial policies?

Not sure if mailing Joan Walsh would be effective or not.

Her response about an hour ago to the firestorm of criticism on Table Talk was so utterly contemptuous and condescending I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Basic message: readers who don't like Broadsheet are missing the point of it. She and the other editors like it, therefore it stays.

I like this piece. Traister's placement of this current popular genre within the tradition of women's writing represents the sort of provocative, well-researched and well-articulated argument I was hoping for on this topic.

In my estimation, however, the conclusion falls somewhat sort of the overall argument. What I'd like to have seen is Traister's moving from her well-founded historical placement of "chick lit" within a long tradition of 'women's literature' to an analysis of what the emergence of such a genre tells us about women at this moment in history.

Rather, her discussion sidetracked into a less interesting, and less well-founded defense of the genre's legitimacy. It's one thing to suggest that recoiling from "chick lit" is based on the rejection of that which culture perceives as "feminine," quite another to conclude that this is definitively the case, as Traister does in stating that "the urge to condemn chick lit is also born of a shame about our own femininity, a desire to distance ourselves not just from bad writing, but from retailed versions of womanhood that might affect the way we are perceived by men and by each other."

My own disdain is based on the fact that such literature codes 'femininity' in such narrow terms. I don't believe that to be feminine is to be insecure, self-absorbed, obsessed with footwear, preoccupied with my relationship status and fundamentally neurotic. Neither do I believe that such coding is any solution to traditional definitions of femininity as self-sacrificing adjuncts to husband and family. The truth is more complex, and it is the job of literature--real literature, to explore those more complex, more uncomfortable dimension of human experience, not just to glibly reassert comfortable truisms.

I'm not sure those complex realms of female experience have ever been adequately explored without lapsing into stereotype, myth or polemic. The fact that this topic is both so very charged and so very unsettled strongly indicates that this exploration is well-worth pursuing. I hope the dialog continues.

More than any other columnist in Salon, I used to read Cary Tennis daily and voraciously. I like his style: thoughtful, literary, almost meditative rather than simply directive. He seems to think hard about the queries he receives, and he always seems to wish the writer well.

Now anybody can write in, and say whatever judgmental, unthinking, uncaring thing that comes into their head, about people's very real problems, without the burden of proposing anything like either a solution or even so much as a kindly, listening ear.

I find some of the right-wing, vitriolic, outright bigoted responses to this particular query to be, well, more revealing than appalling. Salon has become just another form of talk radio, people's problems another form of mass spectacle, and Cary a slightly more literate Dr. Phil.