Ellen Willis

"I think it makes sense to look on violence as a tragic last resort, to ask of any violent act that it be necessary to prevent physical destruction or soul-destroying violation, and that it be directed as narrowly as possible to those most responsible for the conflict. I'm glad the French resistance used terror against the Germans-and I think our bombing of Dresden was a war crime. (“Ministries of Fear” 1985)"

"the remedy is not to apologize for Rushdie's book, or qualify the protests. It's to keep emphasizing that the struggle against our own brand of fundamentalism is far from won-ask any American librarian, science teacher, or abortion clinic head-and that the virulence of Khomeini's attack on Rushdie reflects, among other things, conflict between fundamentalists and modernists within the Moslem world. (“In Defense of Offense” 1989)"

"There were secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in Iran before Khomeini killed or exiled them; there are secularists, democrats, liberals, and feminists in other Islamic countries; and there are immigrants like Salman Rushdie, who have voted with their feet for a freer life. Are they all tools of Western imperialism, poisoned by Satan, as the ayatollah would say? (“In Defense of Offense”)"

"Most of us felt about the sexual revolution what Gandhi reputedly thought of Western civilization-that it would be a good idea. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)"

"The point of drugs, for me, was always the eternal moment when you felt like Jesus's son (and gender be damned); when you found your center, which is another word for sanity or, I assume, sobriety as Faith understands it. But I never found a drug that would guarantee me that moment, or even a more vulgar euphoria: acid, grass, speed, coke, even Quaaludes (I've never tried heroin), all were unpredictable, potentially treacherous, as likely to concentrate anxiety as to blow it away. Context was all-important-set and setting, as they called it in those days. My emotional state, amplified or undercut by the collective emotional atmosphere, made the difference between a good trip, a bad trip, or no trip at all. For me, the ability to get high (I don't mean only on drugs) flourished in the atmosphere of abandon that defined the '60s-that pervasive cultural invitation to leap boundaries, challenge limits, try anything, want everything, overload the senses, let go. (“Coming Down Again” 1989)"

"The drug war has nothing to do with making communities livable or creating a decent future for black kids. On the contrary, prohibition is directly responsible for the power of crack dealers to terrorize whole neighborhoods. And every cent spent on the cops, investigators, bureaucrats, courts, jails, weapons, and tests required to feed the drug-war machine is a cent not spent on reversing the social policies that have destroyed the cities, nourished racism, and laid the groundwork for crack culture. ("Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs" 1989)"

"The centerpiece of the cultural counterrevolution is the snowballing campaign for a "drug-free workplace" — a euphemism for "drug-free workforce," since urine testing also picks up for off-duty indulgence. The purpose of this '80s version of the loyalty oath is less to deter drug use than to make people undergo a humiliating ritual of subordination: "When I say pee, you pee." The idea is to reinforce the principle that one must forfeit one's dignity and privacy to earn a living, and bring back the good old days when employers had the unquestioned right to demand that their workers' appearance and behavior, on or off the job, meet management's standards. ("Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs" 1989)"

"Pleasure. Does it sound like a dirty word to you? No wonder, given how relentlessly it's been attacked not only by puritanical conservatives but by liberals who uncritically accept the Reaganite equation of pleasure with greed and callousness. (I think, for instance, of a recent newspaper article that described our society as a snake pit of "crime, violence, poverty and hedonism.") Yet life without pleasure-without spontaneity and playfulness, sexuality and sensuality, esthetic experience, surprise, excitement, ecstasy-is a kind of death. People deprived of pleasure don't get kinder and gentler but meaner and nastier. Indeed, it's not an excess of pleasure but pleasure-starvation on a mass scale that we have to thank for the rampant piggishness and urban violence that plague us. (Epilogue: The Neo-Guilt Trip)"

"For my generation, formed equally by the liberating exuberance of rock and roll and the imperial brutality of Vietnam, the question of where we stood on America was inescapable. Was this nation (it!) the enemy, tyrannical abroad, hopelessly racist at home, and in the process of choking to death on a glut of consumer goods? Or were we (we!), however corrupted by various forms of power, still the source of a vital democratic impulse that fed cultural dissidence and subverted authoritarian values all over the world? I took the latter position, and through the '6os and '7os, exploring its paradoxes was a central concern of my writing."

"the cultural right has redefined the American project as closing the frontier. Frustrated that their political power has not translated into cultural hegemony, conservatives are methodically attacking cultural institutions-particularly the universities and the arts--Ostensibly for being subverted by radicals, but actually for their persistent liberalism, especially that mushy pluralistic habit of allowing cultural dissidents on the premises. The right, very simply, wants us out of America's public life: the First Amendment may protect our right to rant, but only if we can do it without money and without space."

"Though self-definition is the necessary starting point for any liberation movement, it can take us only so far. The most obvious drawback of identity politics is its logic of fragmentation into ever smaller and more particularist groups: the fracturing of the radical feminist movement along class and gay-straight lines (the racial divide having kept most black women out of the movement to begin with) is the sobering paradigm. What's at stake here, however, is not only the pragmatic question (crucial as it is) of how to avoid being divided and conquered, but our understanding of what it means to be a principled radical...Almost from the beginning, second wave feminism was a study in the limits of the identity politics it did so much to promote."

"radicals need to recreate a politics that emphasizes our common humanity, to base our social theory and practice on principles that apply to us all."

"Optimism of the will and, if possible, the intellect as well-is the engine of emancipation. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")"

"Globalism erodes national and cultural boundaries at both the top and the bottom of the class hierarchy, encouraging the formation of a multiracial, multi-cultural, cosmopolitan elite as well as a multiracial, multicultural, migratory labor force. ("Race and the Ordeal of Liberal Optimism")"

"the real divide between the "politically correct" and their antagonists on the right is not free speech but equality. Heavily invested in a conception of freedom as a property right, including the right to fight for or maintain dominance in social hierarchies, conservatives have historically viewed any form of government-mandated social equality as tyranny. As the anti-P.C. shock troops see it, the right to engage in what others might call verbal bigotry is not only freedom of speech, but the substance of freedom itself, and so they often cross the line between merely defending its legality and tacitly or openly encouraging it. ("Freedom, Power, and Speech")"

"At its core, feminism is about freedom: seeking women's self-determination in private as well as public life; asserting women's individual human subjecthood against the pervasive social understanding of woman as a natural resource that exists for the benefit of men and children. Radical feminists, asking what impeded that freedom, developed an analysis of men's collective power over women. As the critique of male power is increasingly unmoored from a commitment to women's freedom-and used instead to "protect," that is, control us - it is easy to forget that these concerns once merged to create the most dynamic cultural radical movement in modern history. In one generation, feminism irreversibly shattered the culture's common sense about sex and gender. We called that process consciousness-raising. What we meant, first of all, was that we had found our voices, seized our freedom-and our power-of speech. ("Freedom, Power, and Speech")"

"American left politics, when successful, has generally worked this way: as radical ideas gain currency beyond their original advocates, they mutate into multiple forms. Groups representing different class, racial, ethnic, political, and cultural constituencies respond to the new movement with varying degrees of support or criticism and end up adapting its ideas to their own agendas. With these modifications, the movement's popularity spreads, putting pressure on existing power relations. Liberal reformers then mediate the process of dilution, containment, and "co-optation" whereby radical ideas that won't go away are incorporated into the system through new laws, policies, and court decisions. The essential dynamic here is a good cop/bad cop routine in which the liberals dismiss the radicals as impractical sectarian extremists, promote their own "responsible" proposals as an alternative, and take the credit for whatever change results. The good news is that this process does bring about significant change. The bad news is that by denying the legitimacy of radicalism it misleads people about how change takes place, rewrites history, and obliterates memory. It also leaves people sadly unprepared for the inevitable backlash. Once the radicals who were a real threat to the existing order have been marginalized, the right sees its opportunity to fight back. Conservatives in their turn become the insurgent minority, winning support by appealing to the still potent influence of the old "reality," decrying the tensions and disruptions that accompany social change, and promoting their own vision of prosperity and social order. Instead of seriously contesting their ideas, liberals try to placate them and cut deals, which only incites them to push further. Desperate to avoid isolation, the liberal left keeps retreating, moving its goal post toward the center, where "ordinary people" supposedly reside; but as yesterday's center becomes today's left, the entire debate shifts to the right. And in the end, despite all their efforts to stay "relevant," the liberals are themselves hopelessly marginalized. This has been our sorry situation since 1994."

"No mass left-wing movement has ever been built on a majoritarian strategy. On the contrary, every such movement-socialism, populism, labor, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, ecology-has begun with a visionary minority whose ideas were at first decried as impractical, ridiculous, crazy, dangerous, and/or immoral."

"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."

"The perceived conflict between class and cultural politics arises not because they are intrinsically incompatible but because majoritarian leftists have uncritically equated the cultural values of workers and "ordinary people" with their historically dominant voices: white, straight, male, and morally conservative."

"the weight of my experience leads me to suspect that in my desire for a freer, saner, and more pleasurable way of life, I am not so different from most people, American or otherwise, as it might presently appear. It is this hopeful suspicion that keeps me writing."

"What can "American democracy" mean when no one even bothers to hide the fact that economic policy is made, not by elected officials accountable to their constituencies, but by the croupiers of global capital's floating crap game?"

"On a world scale, militant nationalism has followed economic globalism as surely as it once followed colonialism; but while it has served as an outlet for strong and deadly emotions, it has never solved the economic and social problems that provoked it."

"Only movements with particular social visions and practical goals can give faith a concrete, real-world shape"

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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!"

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