Dear Carrie McLaren,

Regarding your review of The Baffler (April/May 1994):

First, you have our permission to reprint anything you want from The Baffler. We copyright things to avoid being ripped off by the big magazines (this has happened before - you'd be surprised how many times).

Secondly, I think it's a terrible mistake to say our critique is somehow inherently masculine. It arises from our understanding of a society and economy that, if anything recognizes exactly how contingent gender identities are. Both femininity and masculi nity have been made and unmade time and again at the whim of economic necessity. The aesthetic that we embrace in response to these facts turns on outrage, which I refuse to believe is an exclusively masculine reaction. Your ad satires, for example, deriv e from the same impulse. And while I do indeed point to the music of Big Black and New Bomb Turks as an embodiment of the aesthetic, you will note that I also take one of my section titles from Blood Sausage.

I am willing to recognize that I don't deal with women's issues head-on. This is not because I don't think they need to be dealt with, but because I don't feel competent to do so. I recognize that my article on Sassy is thus just a start; hopefully somebo dy will take up the argument someday and do it more fully.

While our authors may sometimes be ignorant of women's issues, this is their own shortcoming, not that of the critique.

Lois was in quotation marks because at the time I didn't know who she was.

Third, we want to remedy the gender imbalance you have noted. The Baffler was started by a group of (male) friends and it has taken us a long time to branch out and find outside writers. So why don't you send us something? The enclosed flyers describe wha t we're looking for and we always encourage people to write about any subject they want.

Tom Frank
Editor, The Baffler
Chicago, IL

Dear Tom,
I don't recall arguing any sort of essentialist gender identity in my review, but whatever. Certainly masculinity and femininity are social constructions; and outrage is not the exclusive domain of either. My problem with your critique is where it falls s hort in locating outrage outside of a narrow, "masculine" (however you choose to define it) aesthetic.

No one's asking you to "deal with women's issues head-on," but writing a six-page attack on Sassy without even once mentioning how its consumerist slant is part of society's grossly disproportionate focus on women's physical appearance is flat-out avoidin g them.

SF!, you may note, also has a paltry number of women in our ranks. We, too, hope to change that.

- Carrie