Everything about Ellen Willis totally explained
Ellen Jane Willis (
December 14,
1941 –
November 9,
2006) was an
American political
essayist,
journalist, and
pop music critic.
Biography
Willis was born in
Manhattan, and grew up in the boroughs of
the Bronx and
Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the
New York City Police Department. She lived in
Queens with her husband
Stanley Aronowitz and her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. On
November 9,
2006, she died of
lung cancer. She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was by and large a male-dominated field. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of
anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual
puritanism and moral
authoritarianism, as well as its threat to
free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement. Her 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "
pro-sex feminism". She was also a strong supporter of women's
abortion rights, and in the early 1980s was a founding member of the
pro-choice street theater and protest group
No More Nice Girls.
A self-described
anti-authoritarian democratic socialist, she was very critical of what she viewed as
social conservatism and
authoritarianism on both the political
right and
left. In cultural politics, she was equally opposed to the idea that cultural issues are politically unimportant, as well as to strong forms of
identity politics and their manifestation as
political correctness. In several essays and interviews written since the
September 11 attacks, she was cautiously supportive of the idea of
humanitarian intervention and, while opposed to the
US invasion of Iraq, she was critical of certain aspects of the
anti-war movement.
Coming from a
Jewish background, Willis also wrote a number of essays on
anti-Semitism, and was particularly critical of
left anti-Semitism. Occasionally she wrote about
Judaism itself, penning a particularly notable essay about her brother's spiritual journey as a
Baal Teshuva for
Rolling Stone in 1977.
Willis saw political authoritarianism and sexual repression as closely linked, an idea first advanced by psychologist
Wilhelm Reich; much of Willis' writing advances a Reichian or radical
Freudian analysis of such phenomena. In 2006 she was working on a book on the importance of radical
psychoanalytic thought to current social and political issues.
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