"My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect." -- Ellen Willis
Ellen Jane Willis (December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006) was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.
"By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.""In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to: What turns me on is erotica; what turns you on is pornographic.""Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.""On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with."
Willis was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx and Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied comparative literature for a semester but left graduate school shortly afterwards. In the late 1960s and 1970s, she was the first pop music critic for The New Yorker, and later wrote for, among others, the Village Voice, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Salon, as well as Dissent, where she was also on the editorial board. She was the author of several books of collected essays. At the time of her death, she was a professor in the journalism department of New York University and the head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. She lived in Queens with her husband Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. On November 9, 2006, she died of lung cancer.
She is also known for her feminist politics and was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings. She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was by and large a male-dominated field. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement. Her 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism". She was also a strong supporter of women's abortion rights, and in the early 1980s was a founding member of the pro-choice street theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.
A self-described anti-authoritarian democratic socialist, she was very critical of what she viewed as social conservatism and authoritarianism on both the political right and left. In cultural politics, she was equally opposed to the idea that cultural issues are politically unimportant, as well as to strong forms of identity politics and their manifestation as political correctness. In several essays and interviews written since the September 11 attacks, she was cautiously supportive of the idea of humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the US invasion of Iraq, she was critical of certain aspects of the anti-war movement.
Coming from a Jewish background, Willis also wrote a number of essays on anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of left anti-Semitism. Occasionally she wrote about Judaism itself, penning a particularly notable essay about her brother's spiritual journey as a Baal Teshuva for Rolling Stone in 1977.
Willis saw political authoritarianism and sexual repression as closely linked, an idea first advanced by psychologist Wilhelm Reich; much of Willis' writing advances a Reichian or radical Freudian analysis of such phenomena. In 2006 she was working on a book on the importance of radical psychoanalytic thought to current social and political issues.
Willis wrote the foreword to a book by Alice Echols
Essays by Ellen Willis
Ellen Willis Tumblr Page - large collection of Willis's writings.
Ellen Willis NYU homepage — includes links to numerous essays.
"We Remember Ellen Willis", Dissent, Fall 2006. — links to her essays for Dissent.
"Ellen Willis's Reply", 1968.
"Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts, 1969.
"Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs", Village Voice, September 19, 1989.
"We Need a Radical Left", The Nation, June 29, 1998.
"Monica and Barbara and Primal Concerns", New York Times, March 14, 1999.
"Vote for Ralph Nader!", Salon, November 6, 2000.
"The Democrats and Left Masochism", New Politics #31 (new series), Summer, 2001.
"The Realities of War" (A response to Elaine Scarry's “Citizenship in Emergency”), Boston Review, October/November 2002.
"Can Marriage Be Saved?: A Forum" (II), The Nation, June 17, 2004.
"The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance'", The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 9, 2005. Note: scroll down page.
"Commentary on Maxine Greene's The Dialectic of Freedom"
Reviews and critiques of Ellen Willis
Review of Beginning to See the Light by Liza Featherstone, The Nation, August 8, 2002.
Review of Don't Think, Smile! by Eugene McCarraher, Commonweal, October 22, 1999.
Review of Don't Think, Smile! and interview with Ellen Willis by Michael Bronski, Weekly Wire, November 29, 1999.
Review of Don't Think, Smile! by Marcy Sheiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 29, 2000.
Bully in the Pulpit? (Discussion of Ellen Willis " Freedom From Religion"), The Nation, February 22, 2001.
"Open Letter to Ellen Willis" by Louis Proyect, PEN-L (internet mailing list), March 25, 2003.
Interviews
"Ellen Willis, Feminist and Writer", Fresh Air, November 10, 2006 (originally broadcast February 14, 1989). (page links to RealAudio audio file)
Interview with Ellen Willis and others on Implicating Empire by Doug Henwood, Left Business Observer (radio), March 27, 2003. (page links to MP3 audio)
