Ellen Willis Quotes
December 14, 1941 – November 9, 2006
More Ellen Willis Quotes
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?
Ellen Willis— "Women and the Myth of Consumerism", Ramparts (1969)
In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to "What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic."
Ellen Willis— "Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography" (1979), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order.
Ellen Willis— "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" (1981), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)
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.
Ellen Willis— "Hell No, I Won't Go: End the War on Drugs", The Village Voice (19 September 1989)
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.
Ellen Willis— Letter to The New York Times (27 February 1997)
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.
Ellen Willis— "We Need a Radical Left", The Nation (29 June 1998)
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.
Ellen Willis— "How Now, Iron Johns?", The Nation (13 December 1999)
The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the "legitimate" votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the "real" Americans the Democrats must pursue.
Ellen Willis— "The Democrats and Left Masochism", New Politics, Vol. 8, No. 3, issue #31 (Summer 2001)
A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate "efficiency" and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.
Ellen Willis— "Dreaming of War", The Nation (15 October 2001)
The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair.
Ellen Willis— Review of Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman, Salon (25 March 2003)
To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.
Ellen Willis— "Historical Analysis", Dissent (Winter 2005)
Individuals bearing witness do not change history; only movements that understand their social world can do that. Movements encourage solidarity; the moral individual is likely, all unwittingly, to do the opposite, for bearing witness is lonely: it breeds feelings of superiority and moralistic anger against those who are not doing the same.
Ellen Willis— "Three Elegies for Susan Sontag", New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3
Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.
Ellen Willis— "Three Elegies for Susan Sontag," New Politics (Summer 2005), Vol. X, No. 3
Some conservatives have expressed outrage that the views of professors are at odds with the views of students, as if ideas were entitled to be represented in proportion to their popularity and students were entitled to professors who share their political or social values. One of the more important functions of college that it exposes young people to ideas and arguments they have not encountered at home is redefined as a problem.
Ellen Willis— "The Pernicious Concept of 'Balance'", The Chronicle of Higher Education (9 September 2005)
The public's continuing ambivalence about cultural matters is all the more striking given that the political conversation on these issues has for 30 years been dominated by an aggressive, radical right-wing insurgency that has achieved an influence far out of proportion to its numbers. Its potent secret weapon has been the guilt and anxiety about desire that inform the character of Americans regardless of ideology; appealing to those largely unconscious emotions, the right has disarmed, intimidated, paralyzed its opposition.
Ellen Willis— "Escape from Freedom", Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)
The goal of the right is not to stop abortion but to demonize it, punish it and make it as difficult and traumatic as possible. All this it has accomplished fairly well, even without overturning Roe v. Wade .
Ellen Willis— "Escape from Freedom," Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, Vol 1, No 2 (2006)
Take back the night? How can women take back the night when they've never had it?
Ellen Willis— From a conversation with Alice Echols, quoted by Echols in "Ellen Willis, 1941-2006", The Nation (10 November 2006)
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Ellen Willis— "Tom Wolfe's Failed Optimism" (1977), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. 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…
Ellen Willis— "Introduction", Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
