today’s essay about No More Nice Girls is by Nicole Cliffe, known elsewhere on the internet as Lazy Book Reviews. We don’t find her lazy in the slightest.
A friend who’s involved with Law Students for Reproductive Justice recently lamented to me with an air of shame that she finds herself deeply envious of the gay rights movement. Not simply because of the emerging generational consensus that gays and lesbians are here to stay, and we’d best get used to the idea, but because they have such marvelously effective poster children: the elderly lesbians finally getting their day at City Hall, the out-and-proud teens, the same-sex parents pushing their adorable babies in double-wide strollers.
“And what do we have?” she asked. It’s a fair question, and a frustrating one. The anti-choice movement has the fetus posters, the toddlers in the “My Mommy Chose Life” shirts, the Tim Tebows. On the left, we have anonymous girls who didn’t drop out of high school, who finished college, who were able to afford to feed their existing kids because they didn’t have to carry an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy to term. Each generation of young people, of young women, are further removed, historically and emotionally, from what Patricia Miller dubbed “The Worst of Times,” the pre-Roe calamities of perforated uteri and shame and infection and college roommates who didn’t make it (including Mitt Romney’s own cousin, dead at 21). Ellen Willis, for her part, refers to this time period, which was quite real in her memory, as “forced marriages, illegal abortions, virginity fetishism, sexual guilt and panic and disgrace.”
Reading Ellen Willis, herself a poster child for the sort of career and (later) family an abortion can help foster, is a revelation, especially in 2011. It’s unbearably aggravating to delve into the old “those were REAL feminists, not like these NEW feminists” fight, which is over-simplified and does no one any good. If you’re unfamiliar with Ellen Willis, who died of cancer in 2006 at the unacceptable age of 64, she was both a feminist, a polemicist, and a rock journalist - the first journalist to cover pop music for The New Yorker.
Ellen Willis was about coming to New York to do things, then doing them, and writing about those things with a clear and vicious eye. It’s all the same shit, year in and year out. Sub out Dan Quayle and the constant, almost amusingly cartoonish image of Ronald Reagan in her work with Rick Santorum, and bingo, these 25 year old essays could have been written yesterday. When Willis goes head to head with the critics who took her generation to task for their obsession with sexuality, their tentative embrace of pornography, and their openness to drugs, you know it’s their present-day analogues who needle us for our overly-confessional blogging, our rush to the meme, and our bizarre inability to use the telephone or go door-to-door for our causes. When she talks about hunkering down on the border between New York and America, who doesn’t think we’re still mediating that fence?
It would be overly pat, of course, to claim that Willis is timeless, or infalliable. There are entire paragraphs of weird pseudo-Freudian meditations on how children are raised to process sexuality that do more than raise an eyebrow. She’s not sure about men, yet, in these essays: especially fathers (cold, distant, threatening), occasionally lovers (distracting, possessive). Most readers will bristle instinctively, as well, at her casual invocation of a universal Muslim oppression of women, while others on both sides of the issue will find her uneasy relationship with Zionism difficult to parse.
The essays are what you want. She’s angry, she’s amused, she’s funny. Making Larry Flynt your target, she tells us, is a luxury you have when the liberals are in power. When Falwell’s in charge (oh, honey, you ain’t seen nothing yet), we have bigger fish to fry. Priorities! Some of her pieces are exercises in cute dystopian premise (“The Last Unmarried Person in America”), some are ruthless exposures of well-meaning hypocrisy (“The Greening of Betty Friedan”), some are impassioned works of outrage against then-topical flashpoints (“From Forced Pregnancy to Forced Surgery”) which ring completely true when applied to our current medical frontiers. The second half of the collection (“Exile on Main Street”) is a crazy quilt of cultural pieces (Warhol, Picasso, AIDS, men behaving badly on film, the war on drugs, the space program - already elegaic fifteen years before our last shuttle mission), and more personal meditations. Her piece on Salman Rushdie could stand with any critical look at the Danish cartoon scandal of more recent years.
It’s in the introspection surrounding the movement, more specifically in “Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism,” but also in the totality of these essays, that Willis is most like us. The concerns about balancing a certain-amount of navel-gazing and self-reproach in light of the (seemingly) united front posed by the right, the care taken to remember that black women can be lesbians, that lesbians can be mothers, that mothers can seek abortions, that men can be allies, class divisions. And how else to frame the ongoing discussion of choose-your-choice-feminism (it’s not a new thing, my friends!) than her questions: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?
The most personal, and perhaps the most representative of the essays in this collection, “Escape From New York,” is that uniquely American journalistic (or musical) formulation: the cross-country bus trip saga, in which Willis reacquaints herself with past friends and lovers, struggling with those who’ve made surprisingly reactionary choices, amused by those who are still getting high (with greater regularity), aggravated by come-ons and cons from fellow passengers, dispirited, finally, by the lover who lets the answering machine pick up her homecoming message as she pulls back into Port Authority. For those of us who are, ourselves, poster children for safe and legal abortion, for the consciousness-raising of our mothers (and fathers), for the ongoing attempt to find the correct balance between the personal, the political, and the literary, Willis offers something to try.
