Michelle Goldberg on how Ellen Willis' cultural libertarianism allowed her to navigate the feminist sex wars of the 1980s with a grace and good sense that still stands up.
It rarely occurs to me anymore to pick up The Village Voice, but when I was growing up the paper had talismanic powers. I was stuck in a grim suburb, miserable and alienated in ways that were no less painful for being completely cliché; the Voice was my window into the scintillating downtown of my dreams, a promise of a future life worth living. (This was before the Internet made bohemia accessible to everyone.) My favorite writer was Ellen Willis, though I didn't know enough to understand how original she was. I just knew that everything she wrote made a powerful sort of sense and that she was who I wanted to be when I grew up.
Willis, who died in 2006, should be a lot more famous than she is. The first rock critic at The New Yorker, she wrote with equal passion about politics, sex, and pop culture. As a strong, principled feminist who reveled in the often-sexist and satiric counterculture, she was always cognizant of the way our desires can detour from our political ideals. She was alive to tragic ironies but still held fast to a vision of a much better world. As she once wrote, riffing on Antonio Gramsci, "Optimism -- of the will and, if possible, the intellect as well -- is the engine of emancipation."
Her two most fundamental commitments were to democracy and pleasure. In the introduction to her 1992 collection No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays, she laid out a kind of credo: "Democracy, as I envision it, assumes that the purpose of community is to foster individual happiness and self-development; that the meaning of life lies in our capacity to experience and enjoy it fully; that freedom and eros are fundamentally intertwined; and that a genuine sense of responsibility to other human beings flows from the desire for connection, not subordination to family, Caesar, or God."
