someone’s pissed

I recently received this email from a guy about the apparent exclusiveness of women’s magazines:

It really pxxxxs me off when I see contemporary publications calling for submissions of work from exclusively female contributors!
Haven’t you (the female gender) got over your precious fragility sufficiently to allow your work to stand on its own merits yet??

I mean, come on! Aren’t you interested in seeing what the other 50 percent of the population might have to contribute to your magazine?

This was my response:

I agree with you completely. In striving for equality it often happens that women exclude the very gender they aim to be equal with.

That being said, have you actually ever picked up a copy of lip? lip’s main goal is to provide an alternative to women’s magazines such as Dolly and Cosmo, and yes, we are a feminist publication. As such, the content is obviously going to be directed towards women and therefore the contributors are mostly likely going to be women, and we do encourage that.

However, we do not exclude men from having their work published in lip. We have male writers and columnists, our fashion editor is male, and until recently we had a male artist on the staff. I am currently looking to fill that gap, and am interviewing a guy next week to join the art team.

I will take your comments on board, and ensure that all future call-outs for submissions do not come across as exclusively female-only.

So the questions I pose now are: how do our readers feel about this? Do you want to see more male content, that is, written and artistic contributions from guys, or are you happy with the current content? Are we being too exclusive? Or is this guy being a bit unreasonable?