E. Willis

SFJ: Willis had an interesting story about why and how she shifted. She was writing for other magazines about other stuff and she wrote about a rape case for Rolling Stone.

SM: “The Trial of Arlene Hunt,” which is in Beginning to See the Light. A knockout of an essay.

SFJ: It’s pretty intense. When it came out, [New Yorker] editor William Shawn saw her in the hallway and said, “That was a fantastic piece. Of course, we could never run anything like that, but it was great.” She said she went back to her office and thought about it for an hour and then packed up her things and left. She said she realized then that that’s what she had wanted to do.

SM: He was the one who originally asked her if she would mind writing as E. Willis, right, so that she wasn’t Ellen in print? She said, no, I would mind. I want to be Ellen Willis in print.

Is The Personal Blog Post Political?

by Nozlee Samadzadeh

Ellen Willis and her cohort struggled for their rights; our generation inherited them. The liberties that women devoted their lives to winning and protecting are now largely taken for granted – Roe v. Wade was decided more than a decade before I was born, no-fault divorces are a fact of life, and it’s unlikely that I’ll lose the right to vote. In the essay “Looking for Mr. Good Dad,” Willis describes the difficulty of communicating with a generation that’s “too young … to remember what women’s lives were like before the libertarian ferment of the 60s.” I can’t imagine how it feels to fight for one’s beliefs and see them normalized in the same lifetime.

But while the vocabulary of Willis’ feminism has trickled into mainstream (read: internet) writing and thinking, the structural changes that she calls for are dissociated from individual responsibility and action.

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I Like Fucking/I Hate Danger

by Arianna Stern

Reading “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” by Ellen Willis made me feel, for the first time in my life, that another writer understood and had articulated what I want – not just domestically, or politically, but sexually. Like: during actual sex.

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Getting It

“All this stuff about the Ellen Willis book is so vague,” a friend of mine wrote to me last night. “Because I’m not a chick I’ve only read her rock criticism, which I love. Could you have someone post a summary of some kind of the book and perhaps a piece going negative on it. Right now all I’m getting is rah rah rah.”

 I found this obnoxious but fair, to some extent, so I decided to address it here.

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The Courage of Someone Else’s Convictions

by Elizabeth Gumport

When people write about Ellen Willis, they tend to write in the first person. A friend pointed this out last week, after listening to me complain about trying to write about No More Nice Girls. It was so good, I told her, I felt like anything I wrote wouldn’t be on its level, wouldn’t capture the complexity of the arguments Willis—radical feminist, visionary cultural critic, revolutionary intellectual and intellectual revolutionary—makes  so lucidly and hilariously and persuasively. How to say anything about someone who said everything, and so well? And so I was having a hard time—harder than the usual time, which is always hard, and inevitably reminds me that I’m stuck in here for good, sentenced to a life inside myself, with nobody coming to release or replace me. Maybe this was why people keep resorting to memoir: there was only one Ellen Willis, the rest of us are ourselves, and so the best we can do is report, from the inside, what it feels like to encounter Ellen Willis.

 But even that seemed sort of futile, like when we try to explain to strangers—or even our friends—what makes the people we love lovable: she’s so funny — he has the best smile — she makes such good arguments about abortion and pleasure and marriage and liberty and America at the end of the 20th century. No matter how thorough the list, it always feels incomplete, providing all the measurements but never a sense of what is being measured.

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Not The Border But The Space

by Zan Romanoff

For many years I did not consider myself a feminist. If you had asked me I would have denied that I was one; I would have equivocated about “not being sure what that meant,” about equal rights vs. exceptionalism, about the various particular feminists I’d met or read and disagreed with. The quibbles themselves were more and less legitimate, but it would be a long time before I learned that picking holes in the argument and finding a nuanced little isle of opinion for myself wasn’t the point: if I couldn’t admit to being part of that messy, difficult, and yes, sometimes humorless tribe in the first place, all of my equivocating added up to very little: I was refining myself right out of the conversation by pretending that my voice didn’t belong there in the first place. I still wouldn’t want a place in Feminism as I imagined it (somehow both monolithic and incoherent), but that was an edifice I constructed out of whole cloth because I found feminism compelling but embarrassing and I wanted a smart way out of it, thanks.

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