Critics From The United States

"The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint — that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the "feminine" aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed."

"Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with "usefulness" and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems."

"By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling against "reality," even when its limitations are clearly perceived, is always difficult. It means deciding things can be different and ought to be different; that your own perceptions are right and the experts and authorities wrong; that your discontent is legitimate and not merely evidence of selfishness, failure or refusal to grow up. Recognizing that "reality" is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences — rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness: People are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy."

"Today the changes that are generating enormous inequality, progressively destroying "real jobs" with security and benefits, demanding longer and longer hours and at least two incomes per household as prerequisites for a minimally middle-class existence, and depriving people of control over their work even in the professional classes are taking place in the absence of any credible opposition to the free-market dogma that rules the day. On the contrary, the capitalist triumphalists are riding high on a wave of "prosperity" that has enriched a minority of the population while obscuring the long-term slippage of our standard of living and our quality of life."

"Despite its numerical insignificance, the anti-abortion left epitomizes the hypocrisy of the right-to-life crusade. Its need to wrap misogyny in the rhetoric of social conscience and even feminism is actually a perverse tribute to the women’s movement; it is no longer acceptable to declare openly that women deserve to suffer for the sin of Eve. I suppose that’s progress — not that it does the victims of the Hyde Amendment much good."

"Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people "must" behave."

"More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism. We might be better off today if it had never happened, and we had had to continue a state-by-state political fight. Roe vs. Wade resulted in a lot of women declaring victory and going home. In the meantime we have been losing abortion rights on the ground, both in terms of access and funding and on the ideological and psychological levels."

"The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human needs, interests and desires, and therefore will be persuasive to many and ultimately most people. But this is a very different matter from deciding to put forward only those ideas presumed (accurately or not) to be compatible with what most people already believe."

"Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers. The pleasure of eating an ice cream cone may be minor compared to the pleasure of meaningful, autonomous work, but the former is easily available and the latter is not. A poor family would undoubtedly rather have a decent apartment than a new TV, but since they are unlikely to get the apartment, what is to be gained by not getting the TV?"

"There is a persistent myth that a wife has control over her husband’s money because she gets to spend it. Actually, she does not have much more financial authority than the employee of a corporation who is delegated to buy office furniture or supplies. The husband, especially if he is rich, may allow his wife wide latitude in spending — he may reason that since she has to work in the home she is entitled to furnish it to her taste, or he may simply not want to bother with domestic details — but he retains the ultimate veto power. If he doesn’t like the way his wife handles his money, she will hear about it."

"Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But hopefully he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators."

"A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law."

"If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist."

"Like other eminent polemical writers, Willis has always had the knack of turning radical ideas into common sense."

"Ellen Willis was one of the few great critics of her generation. She was theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and courageous in her commitment to freedom. Her prose was lyrical and melodic, and she was always unsettling!"

"Through brilliant, often polemical, writings, the feminist and educator Ellen Willis, who has died of lung cancer aged 64, was central to the cultural debates and political controversies of the United States over nearly four decades...Willis brought lucidity and style to the most controversial and baffling cultural issues—her thought was a beacon of clarity. For those of us fortunate enough to have been her comrades, anticipating her insights was part of what kept us returning to meetings month after month, year after year."

"Fearless, sweet reason, exacting style, and an unbounded sensuous spirit make Ellen Willis's radical essays among the finest that America has ever produced."

"The name Ellen Willis is synonymous with political intelligence. Her cultural criticism is lucid, unerring, and important. The down-to-earth logic with which she argues a left-libertarian position is, in the final analysis, something visionary."

"Ellen Willis, who died in November at the age of 64, was such a unique and wonderful set of contradictions—or seeming contradictions. She was a staunchly radical feminist who believed in pleasure, happiness, and freedom. She was a fierce polemicist on the page who, in person, was often painfully shy. She loved long nineteenth-century novels, but was an ardent reader of the tabloids. She was one of the most instinctively ethical people I have ever known, and yet she hated any hint of sanctimony or self-righteousness. She was a dyed-in-the-wool bohemian who was obsessed with real estate—which is to say, she was a true New Yorker. And for me, part of the fun, and the adventure, of being Ellen’s friend and colleague was discovering that these disparate characteristics weren’t really contradictions at all: that somehow, in her inimitable way, she had put all the pieces together…Much has been written about the merging of high and low culture, but Ellen really lived that mix. She approached just about everything—George Eliot and The Sopranos, Herbert Marcuse and Lou Reed—with equal thoughtfulness, seriousness, dignity, and care. Ellen lacked both pretense and condescension. Her writings on pop culture weren’t a form of slumming; she genuinely—though not naively—believed in the emancipatory possibilities of the demotic, because she had experienced them herself. And though Ellen, like so many of us, was increasingly alienated from the culture in which she lived, she never became a mandarin. (In a 2005 piece, she chided Susan Sontag as a “curmudgeon” with a “free-floating animus” toward pop.) Up until almost the moment of Ellen’s death, the world, and its possibilities, held her interest…"

"Ellen Willis has always been one of the sharpest political writers on the left...one of the most profound as well."

"In the 1980s, Ellen Willis led the so-called pro-sex radical feminists in their heated challenge to the antipornography movement. Countering the arguments of Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and others that "sexual liberation is a male supremacist plot, Willis proclaimed that sexual liberation was the keystone of broader social and cultural change."

"Ellen Willis is the single most important exponent of cultural radicalism in America today. I agree with her; I disagree with her; I am always stimulated."

"For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral."

"One of the last times I saw Ellen, she gave me a copy of Beginning to See the Light, with an inscription on the title page. It reads “To sex, hope, and rock and roll and whatever that means today.” The modesty of this simple quote is indicative of the breadth of her influence as a writer. She knew what sex, hope and rock and roll was today, but she wanted me to find out for myself."

"Her essays combine passion and moral clarity, anger and a steady commitment to having fun. Best of all, she channels the secret ecstatic undercurrents of late twentieth century American popular culture, which we need now more than ever."

"The amount of people that are struggling out there because of these fucking billionaires, and they got us all arguing liberal and conservative. We gotta stop doing that, like I am so tired of hearing about people going to bed worried about what’s going to happen next week. There is so much fucking money in this country, and there is so much work being done. And if you work a whole fucking week at a job, you should be able to pay your fucking rent. You shouldn’t have to go out and get another fucking job and still be struggling. It’s bad for the country 'cause the kids don’t see their parents and they’re not getting the upbringing they need. These fucking billionaires! They need to be put down, you know? Like fucking rabid dogs They’re rabid with fucking greed, and just going out and just dividing everybody."

"I get sick of people making excuses for her. She blew it. Look, you lost to a guy who said three things a week that would torpedo anybody else's campaign. How do you do that? That's like you're playing a football game and the other team throws twenty interceptions, and you still figure out how to blow it. At what point do you take responsibility? ... You blew it. You. Blew it. You put the wrong team around you, you didn't generate enough excitement to beat this guy who (was just) tripping over one coffee table after another..."

"Bankers get bonuses... the upper echelon get anywhere from ten million up to a hundred million, and the President of the United States makes like four hundred grand a year. So right there. I've watched enough wrestling to see a rigged game... There's like people with Youtube channels making as much as the leader of the free world. So I just think he's set up to be bribed, and, uh, you act accordingly. So basically anybody who comes at me going, you know, "The conservative right or these liberals..." like, I just zone out. I can't even talk to you if you're actually looking at it like those are two (separate) choices that you're getting. You're not... Once you get past a certain level, it just seems like... you've jumped in the river and you act accordingly or you get that convertible ride in Dallas."

"That's what killed me, when Bruce became Caitlin, that was like, a national news story, like at a ridiculous level. There's like, baby seals washing up on the beach cause there's no fish left, and they're talking to this... lady, you know, like, "So Bruce, can your Olympic back handle a D cup or you gonna go with something a little more perky?"... I miss that guy. I miss him already. He should've told us. He should've given us a chance to say goodbye. I watched him on the Olympics. I watched him on Chips. I watched him on that horrible show my wife watched where he just walks around in the background... And then you couldn't react, you couldn't on any level, you couldn't (be like) "What the f(uck)?" on any level. You couldn't say that or you were automatically homophobic. Like, dude, I didn't hear your inner thoughts. I didn't know what you were doing... You shave your beard off, people are like "Oh my God, that's your chin? Wow!" This guy walked out a dude, came back a woman, and you're just supposed to be like, "Oh yeah, so anyways, Caitlin, (as I was saying)...""

"(on whether motherhood is the world's most difficult job) Dude, any job that you can do in your pajamas is not a difficult job, alright? You're 35 years old playing hide and go seek... you're living the dream! No time card, no taxes... you're off the fucking grid!"

"Rub one out like a man, it's the champagne of victory."

"(on whether motherhood is the world's most difficult job) I did roofing in the middle of July as a redhead. I thought that THAT was difficult. But these mothers are bending over at the waist, putting DVDs into DVD players... I don't know how they do it!"

"Realize that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse? Sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you're not really in love with but for some reason married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You'll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There's no risk when you go after a dream. There's a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe."

"There's a critical point, when you've stayed single too long, that your brain switches from "No, don't say that" to "Eh, fuck it. Say it, see what happens.""

"I am so pro-swine flu it's ridiculous. We need a plague. It's gotta happen. And don't worry, it's only gonna kill the weak. Seriously. Put on a sweater, take some vitamins, you're gonna be fine! We gotta let mother nature do her thing, man. She keeps trying to help us out and we won't let her do it."

"First of all, getting mad at a politician is like getting mad at Jennifer Aniston cause it's bad episode of Friends. They don't write it."

"Women are just constantly patting themselves on the back about how difficult their lives are and no one corrects 'em cause they wanna fuck 'em."

"Seriously, any other town you go to there's this little devil and a little angel on your shoulder. A little good advice, a little bad advice. – You go to Las Vegas, there's like a devil and a devil and they're just battling it out the whole time. It's like, "Smoke some crack!" "Get a hooker!" And then I go, "YEA! Yea, this is a good town. Smoke some crack and get a hooker! Alright!""

"Oh look, an ATM! Ok, here we go! I lost all my money, now what do I do? Get a gun! Rob a casino! Good idea! Look at all the lights! This is beautiful."

"I'm not a big fan of Steve Jobs, personally. I dunno, I just don't understand what the big deal was with that guy... I don't get it. (on whether Jobs personally invented the iPhone) But did he? Did he? Did he sit down, "I'm gonna invent the iPhone!" and then he sits there soldering, possibly welding... didn't he have like a crew of guys helping him out? Then why when he went to those nerd fests didn't he have like a chorus of scientists behind him who helped him out, too? He walked out like he was Tesla... I think he just kinda, like, told people what to invent. Like he just kinda came in like, "I want my whole music collection in that phone. GET ON IT." And then all these nameless, faceless guys made it happen and then they have the big nerd concert and he goes out there by himself. No belt, you know, sneakers on... I just didn't buy it."

"The new education has as its purpose the development of a new kind of person, one who — as a result of internalizing a different series of concepts — is an actively inquiring, flexible, creative, innovative, tolerant, liberal personality who can face uncertainty and ambiguity without disorientation, who can formulate viable new meanings to meet changes in the environment which threaten individual and mutual survival. The new education, in sum, is new because it consists of having students use the concepts most appropriate to the world in which we all must live. All of these concepts constitute the dynamics of the quest-questioning, meaning-making process that can be called "learning how to learn.""

"As technical people, we are apt to be preoccupied with scores, not competence..."

"The BASIC FUNCTION of all education, even in the most traditional sense, is to increase the survival prospects of the group. If this function is fulfilled, the group survives. If not, it doesn't. There have been times when this function was not fulfilled, and groups (some of them we even call "civilizations") disappeared. Generally, this resulted from changes in the kind of threats the group faced. The threats changed, but the education did not, and so the group, in a way, "disappeared itself" (to use a phrase from Catch-22). The tendency seems to be for most "educational" systems, from patterns of training in "primitive" tribal societies to school systems in technological societies, to fall imperceptibly into a role devoted exclusively to the conservation of old ideas, concepts, attitudes, skills, and perceptions. This happens largely because of the unconsciously held belief that these old ways of thinking and doing are necessary to the survival of the group. …Survival in a stable environment depends almost entirely on remembering the strategies for survival that have been developed in the past, and so the conservation and transmission of these becomes the primary mission of education. But, a paradoxical situation develops when change becomes the primary characteristic of the environment. Then the task turns inside out — survival in a rapidly changing environment depends almost entirely upon being able to identify which of the old concepts are relevant to the demands imposed by the new threats to survival, and which are not. Then a new educational task becomes critical: getting the group to unlearn (to "forget") the irrelevant concepts as a prior condition of learning. What we are saying is that the "selective forgetting" is necessary for survival."

"The way to be liberated from the constraining effects of any medium is to develop a perspective on it — how it works and what it does. Being illiterate in the processes of any medium (language) leaves one at the mercy of those who control it. The new media — these new languages — then are among the most important "subjects" to be studied in the interests of survival. But they must be studied in a new way if they are to be understood, they must be studied as mediators of perception. Indeed, for any "subject" or "discipline" to be understood it must be studied this way."

"You cannot avoid making judgements but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it. Which means, among other things, that we behave in response to our judgements rather than to that to which is being judged. People and things are processes. Judgements convert them into fixed states. This is one reason that judgements are often self-fulfilling. If a boy, for example, is judged as being "dumb" and a "nonreader" early in his school career, that judgement sets into motion a series of teacher behaviors that cause the judgement to become self-fulfilling. What we need to do then, if we are seriously interested in helping students to become good learners, is to suspend or delay judgements about them. One manifestation of this is the ungraded elementary school. But you can practice suspending judgement yourself tomorrow. It doesn't require any major changes in anything in the school except your own behavior."

"We do not know nearly as much as we should about how children learn language, but if there is one thing we can say with assurance it is that knowledge of grammatical nomenclature and skill in sentence-parsing have no bearing whatsoever on the process."

"Print, in even more revolutionary ways than writing, changed the very form of civilization. ...the Protestant Revolution was contemporaneous with the invention of moving type. ...the printing and distribution of millions of Bibles made possible a more personal religion, as the Word of God rested on each man's kitchen table. The book, by isolating the reader and his responses, tended to separate him from the powerful oral influences of his family, teacher, and priest. Print thus created a new conception of self as well as of self-interest. At the same time, the printing press provided the wide circulation necessary to create national literatures and intense pride in one's native language. Print thus promoted individualism on one hand and nationalism on the other."

"Print also created new literary forms and altered ideas of literary style. Medieval poetry was conceived for the ear, and each poem had to stand the test of recitation. In addition, medieval audiences were not always interested in the poet himself, since his work was known to them only through the interpretations of minstrels, who frequently rephrased poems to suit their own image and images. The printed page changed these conditions. Slowly, the printed poet came into a new relationship with his reader. He learned not to be so repetitive as his predecessors since a reader could be depended upon to return as often as needed to uncompromised passages. ...After the flowering of dramatic poetry during the Elizabethan Age, the printed page substituted for the theater, and millions of children came to know Shakespeare only through this form."

"About the last place any of us can expect to learn anything important about the realities we have to cope with in our wistful pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is a classroom. If we decided that schools must do whatever is necessary to help students to learn the concepts and skills relevant to the nuclear space age, we wouldn't spend much time sitting inside of small boxes inside of boxes — even with all the fancy hardware being developed to jazz up the Trivia contest. It's probably true that most of what we all know we didn't learn in school anyway. Moreover, developments in electronic information processing make the school as it presently exists unnecessary. ..the "new education." Its purpose is to produce people who can cope effectively with change. To date, none of the new "educational technology" has that as its purpose. Remember Santayana's line: Fanaticism consists of redoubling efforts after having forgotten one's aim. The developments in "educational technology" are intended to do all of the old school stuff better... but that's not the aim of the new education."

"Of all things to be learned, in school or out, languaging, as I prefer to call the process, is least like a mechanical skill. It is, in fact, the most intimate, integrated, emotion-laden learning we do. At no point can we separate what we know and what we are from how our linguistic powers develop..."