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The Essential Ellen Willis
Out of the Vinyl Deeps , published in 2011, introduced a new generation to the incisive, witty, and merciless voice of Ellen Willis through her pioneering rock music criticism. In the years that followed, Willis’s daring insights went beyond popular music, taking on such issues as pornography, religion, feminism, war, and drugs. The Essential Ellen Willis gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable political and cultural battles. Whether addressing the women’s movement, sex and abortion, race and class, or war and terrorism, Willis brought to each a distinctive attitude—passionate yet ironic, clear-sighted yet hopeful. Offering a compelling and cohesive narrative of Willis’s liberationist “transcendence politics,” the essays—among them previously unpublished and uncollected pieces—are organized by decade from the 1960s to the 2000s, with each section introduced by young writers who share Willis’s intellectual bravery, curiosity, and Irin Carmon, Spencer Ackerman, Cord Jefferson, Ann Friedman, and Sara Marcus. The Essential Ellen Willis concludes with excerpts from Willis’s unfinished book about politics and the cultural unconscious, introduced by her longtime partner, Stanley Aronowitz. An invaluable reckoning of American society since the 1960s, this volume is a testament to an iconoclastic and fiercely original voice.
536 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 1, 2014
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About the author
Ellen Willis
24 books61 followersEllen Jane Willis was an American left-wing political essayist, journalist, and pop music critic.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 13, 2014
How did I miss out on the legendary Ellen Willis? I'm embarrassed to admit that before reading this stunning, provocative, erudite, fun, challenging, witty, dire, brave, and above all incisive collection of her journalism and essays, I was unaware of one of the great feminist writers on the politics and culture of our times. Intelligently edited by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, The Essential Ellen Willis is a riveting chronicle of the U.S. from the sixties to post 9/11 as seen through the perspective of a radical feminist. In her analysis of everything from Bob Dylan to the Velvet Underground, from Woodstock to Clarence Thomas's sexual harassment of Anita Hill, from Tom Wolfe to The Sopranos, from bell hooks to the Million Man March, from Monica Lewinsky to The Bell Curve, from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq, in her pieces on abortion, childcare, marriage, sex, the family, rape, and pornography Willis never fails, while presenting the many sides of an issue, event, or person, to surprise, amuse, and above all, elucidate. Astonishingly, little of Willis's work feels dated, much of it as polemical and relevant as ever.
Born in 1941 to a middle-class Jewish family, Willis grew up in Queens. She studied English at Barnard, got married, and moved to Berkeley, where she embarked upon a PhD in comparative literature. By twenty-four, she'd dropped out of graduate school, divorced, and was living in the East Village, convinced she wanted to write for a living. She became a staff writer at Fact magazine and wrote freelance for various publications. In 1967, her trenchant assessment of Bob Dylan in Cheetah was noticed by William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker; he hired her to report on rock music and counterculture. She left The New Yorker in 1975 for the Village Voice, a publication more in keeping with her political and social views. Deeply involved with feminist activism, Willis founded the radical feminist group Redstockings with Shulamith Firestone in 1969 and in the mid-1970s formed the pro-choice street theater protest group No More Nice Girls. She eventually became a professor at NYU's journalism school and established the Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism.
The first piece in the book, "Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal" relates how Willis became a radical feminist. A girl intuits early on, she says, who are the rulers and who are the ruled -- how she then responds to patriarchy and male dominance is at the heart of feminism. A stringent, wondrous feminist inquiry underlies everything Willis writes. Coming of age in the fifties, she "followed all the rules -- build up their egos, don't be aggressive, don't flaunt your brains, be charming, diet..." By 1964, she'd joined the Civil Rights movement. Based on her readings of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, she began to form her own ideas about patriarchal sexual repression as social control, particularly of women.
The "liberated woman," like the "free world," is a fiction that obscures real power relations and defuses revolution. How can women, subordinate in every other sphere, be free and equal in bed? Men want us to be a little free -- it's more exciting that way. But women who really take them at their word make them up-tight and they show it -- by their jokes, their gossip, their obvious or subtle put-downs of women who seem too aggressive or too "easy."
Willis fully developed these ideas in "Towards a Feminist Sexual Revolution" and "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" -- both seminal essays written in the early eighties in which she posits her conviction that a politics of sexual liberation must assume that sexual expression and satisfaction is as crucial to women as it is to men. She was under no delusion, however, that the sexual liberation achieved for women by feminists in the sixties was anything approaching an unmitigated success. The coinciding sexual libertarian movement was "conspicuously male-dominated and male-supremacist" and women were further abused and exploited under the guise of becoming "liberated." Today, slut-shaming, "she was asking for it," "good girls don't have abortions," female sexuality as a public prerogative of patriarchy, all of these misogynistic attitudes aimed at repressing and controlling female sexual desire are still very much with us.
In "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" (1984) Willis addresses the complicated and thorny subject of how radical feminism collapsed in large part by coming to be associated, both from within and from without the movement, with "man-hating," a legacy feminism has yet to shed. In "Sisters Under the Skin?" (1982), she unpicks the equally barbed issue of black women's disenfranchisement from a feminist movement perceived as serving upper-middle-class white women exclusively. In "The Family" (1979), she insists that without a serious critique of that institution "the best we'll ever get is a jerry-built system of day care centers designed to allow women to keep their shit jobs, and here and there the inspiring example of a 'nurturing father' who expects the Medal of Honor for doing what mothers have always done."
Willis has a genius for dissecting a subject, illuminating its facets, then clarifying its significance in a larger context. Her lucid prose is replete with gems:
"Fashion, cosmetics, and feminine hygiene ads are aimed more at men than at women. They encourage men to expect women to sport all the latest trappings of sexual slavery–expectations women must then fulfill if they are to survive." ("Women and the Myth of Consumerism,"1970)
"A woman is usually aware, on some level, that men do not allow her to be her 'real self,' and worse, that the acceptable masks represent men's fantasies, not her own. She can choose the most interesting image available, present it dramatically, individualize it with small elaborations, undercut it with irony. But ultimately she must serve some male fantasy to be loved–and then it will be only the fantasy that is loved anyway." ("Janis Joplin," 1980)
"These days the formula is familiar: women we are told (often by women themselves) are now free enough so that they can choose to be sex objects/wear six-inch heels/do the housework without feeling oppressed. The unspoken question, of course is whether women can refuse to be sex objects/wear six-inch heels/do the housework without getting zapped." ("The Family,"1979)
"To experience male dominance is one thing, to understand that it is political, therefore changeable, is quite another." ("Sisters Under the Skin?" 1982)
I suspect that Ellis is not as well known as, say, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter, Naomi Wolf, or Camille Paglia because she never published a book in her lifetime. In 2011, Willis's rock criticism was published in a collection called Out of the Vinyl Deeps and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I am grateful that Willis's daughter thought this single volume of her mother's work too partial and unrepresentative. She has given us an anthology that provides a sweeping cultural, political, and psychosexual panorama of our immediate history with a meticulous, complex interpretation of that view. "What we need," Willis wrote, "is not a violent revolution but a mass transformation of consciousness." Her collected work, essential to an understanding of what went wrong and what went right for feminism's second wave, encourages us to imagine radical change.
Crossposted from my column The Bombshell at www.Bookslut.com
Born in 1941 to a middle-class Jewish family, Willis grew up in Queens. She studied English at Barnard, got married, and moved to Berkeley, where she embarked upon a PhD in comparative literature. By twenty-four, she'd dropped out of graduate school, divorced, and was living in the East Village, convinced she wanted to write for a living. She became a staff writer at Fact magazine and wrote freelance for various publications. In 1967, her trenchant assessment of Bob Dylan in Cheetah was noticed by William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker; he hired her to report on rock music and counterculture. She left The New Yorker in 1975 for the Village Voice, a publication more in keeping with her political and social views. Deeply involved with feminist activism, Willis founded the radical feminist group Redstockings with Shulamith Firestone in 1969 and in the mid-1970s formed the pro-choice street theater protest group No More Nice Girls. She eventually became a professor at NYU's journalism school and established the Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism.
The first piece in the book, "Up from Radicalism: A Feminist Journal" relates how Willis became a radical feminist. A girl intuits early on, she says, who are the rulers and who are the ruled -- how she then responds to patriarchy and male dominance is at the heart of feminism. A stringent, wondrous feminist inquiry underlies everything Willis writes. Coming of age in the fifties, she "followed all the rules -- build up their egos, don't be aggressive, don't flaunt your brains, be charming, diet..." By 1964, she'd joined the Civil Rights movement. Based on her readings of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse, she began to form her own ideas about patriarchal sexual repression as social control, particularly of women.
The "liberated woman," like the "free world," is a fiction that obscures real power relations and defuses revolution. How can women, subordinate in every other sphere, be free and equal in bed? Men want us to be a little free -- it's more exciting that way. But women who really take them at their word make them up-tight and they show it -- by their jokes, their gossip, their obvious or subtle put-downs of women who seem too aggressive or too "easy."
Willis fully developed these ideas in "Towards a Feminist Sexual Revolution" and "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" -- both seminal essays written in the early eighties in which she posits her conviction that a politics of sexual liberation must assume that sexual expression and satisfaction is as crucial to women as it is to men. She was under no delusion, however, that the sexual liberation achieved for women by feminists in the sixties was anything approaching an unmitigated success. The coinciding sexual libertarian movement was "conspicuously male-dominated and male-supremacist" and women were further abused and exploited under the guise of becoming "liberated." Today, slut-shaming, "she was asking for it," "good girls don't have abortions," female sexuality as a public prerogative of patriarchy, all of these misogynistic attitudes aimed at repressing and controlling female sexual desire are still very much with us.
In "Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism" (1984) Willis addresses the complicated and thorny subject of how radical feminism collapsed in large part by coming to be associated, both from within and from without the movement, with "man-hating," a legacy feminism has yet to shed. In "Sisters Under the Skin?" (1982), she unpicks the equally barbed issue of black women's disenfranchisement from a feminist movement perceived as serving upper-middle-class white women exclusively. In "The Family" (1979), she insists that without a serious critique of that institution "the best we'll ever get is a jerry-built system of day care centers designed to allow women to keep their shit jobs, and here and there the inspiring example of a 'nurturing father' who expects the Medal of Honor for doing what mothers have always done."
Willis has a genius for dissecting a subject, illuminating its facets, then clarifying its significance in a larger context. Her lucid prose is replete with gems:
"Fashion, cosmetics, and feminine hygiene ads are aimed more at men than at women. They encourage men to expect women to sport all the latest trappings of sexual slavery–expectations women must then fulfill if they are to survive." ("Women and the Myth of Consumerism,"1970)
"A woman is usually aware, on some level, that men do not allow her to be her 'real self,' and worse, that the acceptable masks represent men's fantasies, not her own. She can choose the most interesting image available, present it dramatically, individualize it with small elaborations, undercut it with irony. But ultimately she must serve some male fantasy to be loved–and then it will be only the fantasy that is loved anyway." ("Janis Joplin," 1980)
"These days the formula is familiar: women we are told (often by women themselves) are now free enough so that they can choose to be sex objects/wear six-inch heels/do the housework without feeling oppressed. The unspoken question, of course is whether women can refuse to be sex objects/wear six-inch heels/do the housework without getting zapped." ("The Family,"1979)
"To experience male dominance is one thing, to understand that it is political, therefore changeable, is quite another." ("Sisters Under the Skin?" 1982)
I suspect that Ellis is not as well known as, say, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Elaine Showalter, Naomi Wolf, or Camille Paglia because she never published a book in her lifetime. In 2011, Willis's rock criticism was published in a collection called Out of the Vinyl Deeps and nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I am grateful that Willis's daughter thought this single volume of her mother's work too partial and unrepresentative. She has given us an anthology that provides a sweeping cultural, political, and psychosexual panorama of our immediate history with a meticulous, complex interpretation of that view. "What we need," Willis wrote, "is not a violent revolution but a mass transformation of consciousness." Her collected work, essential to an understanding of what went wrong and what went right for feminism's second wave, encourages us to imagine radical change.
Crossposted from my column The Bombshell at www.Bookslut.com
January 29, 2016
collected essays from 1960's 70's 80's 90's 00's and a final one on the left in usa "today". willis, i think, has developed a stereotypical pragmatic usa style feminism. maybe she is one of the framers of this? but, equality, freedom, liberty for all people is a safe definition. her writing on music , i think, is where this reader found the most interest. she has a great way of melding the personal with bigger picture of social and geopolitics when talking about music. her opinions are bold, but won't necessarily steer you wrong. but it is opinion too.
this book won national book critics circle award 2014.
has pictures, but no index of editorial notes or other help for reader. be prepared to plunge into dense text that goes on n on.
this book won national book critics circle award 2014.
has pictures, but no index of editorial notes or other help for reader. be prepared to plunge into dense text that goes on n on.
October 12, 2015
It is probably inevitable that a thick collection of polemical essays will contain a lot of repetition, and this is no exception. Read it anyway. Willis was a great rock critic, and the comprehensiveness of the book enables one to follow the development of her thinking as a feminist and left-wing diagnostician and theorist. There are better-known critics who are far less enlightening. And though no one would mistake her for a scintillating stylist, her prose, except when she gets bogged down in Reichian analysis, is better than merely serviceable.
January 11, 2018
1. That word "essential" is risky, isn't it? Here are a couple of ways in which Ellen Willis's voice sure is essential: it's rare to find a feminist who cares about sex as much as she does; her writing on pop culture is really good; Willis's views are often just slightly heterodox - it's good, her analysis is surprising and points out true things that might get overlooked.
2. That psychoanalysis stuff, though. I dunno.
3. I don't really know what "radical" means [and don't @ me, I know how to Google stuff], but I suspect Willis would not pass muster among the people calling themselves "radicals" these days. That's not a criticism of either group, only a note that there is something a little old-fashioned and myopic (perhaps related to the full-throated embrace of some kinds of psychoanalysis) about Willis's perspective.
4. This is, for sure, a depressing, depressing read: turns out feminist writing hasn't changed that much in the last 60 years! Maybe you forgot that for a minute? Try out this Ellen Willis book, it'll remind you.
5. People who'd like Ellen Willis: people who wish Emily Nussbaum wrote about culture instead of, uh . . . culture? You know, TV. Your woke niece. People who'll read 500 pages to find a stray slam on David Brooks (hi). Music fans and sixties junkies. Marlon James, probably.
6. The introductory essays are good, because they're brief, except for Spencer Ackerman's, which is truly shit. But Willis's 2000s writings is probably too close to be judged fairly.
7. There is a sense in which Willis never got over some trips she took in the 60s, I think. Which I guess is fair enough, but she definitely affords the white middle-class movements of the time more than they deserve (and she's not exactly looking at them with rose-colored glasses). Maybe that's not fair to say, since I didn't live through them, and the transformation from 1950s to 1960s is basically an abstraction for me. But I expect the note is worth making, since so many other people picking up this collection will be in a similar boat. What I mean is, you know the part in High Fidelity where John Cusack says, "Some people never got over 'Nam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I guess I never really got over Charlie." (I haven't read the book in a while, so I don't remember if it's in the book like that.) Willis never got over the 60s. I'm not saying she ought to have. It's just something you notice.
8. Here's what I did appreciate about this "essential" selection of Willis's writings that is, nevertheless 500 pages long: you do kind of need all of these works in order to understand her perspective as a whole. There's a great deal of repetition here, which is probably less Willis's fault than it is the world's and the patriarchy's, but the variations are interesting for the way the add depth and nuance (at least most of the time). So, by the middle of the collection you're getting a sense of Ellen Willis as much as you are of America in the last half of the 20th century.
9. The aughts writing . . . I don't know what to do about, honestly. There's one essay on Tom Frank that's basically every blog post about the DNC race that even considered gender + some of the Hillbilly Elegy criticisms, but the other stuff is . . . not great, maybe.
10. Willis's writing on music is, truly, outstanding, and I'm going to have to find Out of the Vinyl Deeps.
2. That psychoanalysis stuff, though. I dunno.
3. I don't really know what "radical" means [and don't @ me, I know how to Google stuff], but I suspect Willis would not pass muster among the people calling themselves "radicals" these days. That's not a criticism of either group, only a note that there is something a little old-fashioned and myopic (perhaps related to the full-throated embrace of some kinds of psychoanalysis) about Willis's perspective.
4. This is, for sure, a depressing, depressing read: turns out feminist writing hasn't changed that much in the last 60 years! Maybe you forgot that for a minute? Try out this Ellen Willis book, it'll remind you.
5. People who'd like Ellen Willis: people who wish Emily Nussbaum wrote about culture instead of, uh . . . culture? You know, TV. Your woke niece. People who'll read 500 pages to find a stray slam on David Brooks (hi). Music fans and sixties junkies. Marlon James, probably.
6. The introductory essays are good, because they're brief, except for Spencer Ackerman's, which is truly shit. But Willis's 2000s writings is probably too close to be judged fairly.
7. There is a sense in which Willis never got over some trips she took in the 60s, I think. Which I guess is fair enough, but she definitely affords the white middle-class movements of the time more than they deserve (and she's not exactly looking at them with rose-colored glasses). Maybe that's not fair to say, since I didn't live through them, and the transformation from 1950s to 1960s is basically an abstraction for me. But I expect the note is worth making, since so many other people picking up this collection will be in a similar boat. What I mean is, you know the part in High Fidelity where John Cusack says, "Some people never got over 'Nam, or the night their band opened for Nirvana. I guess I never really got over Charlie." (I haven't read the book in a while, so I don't remember if it's in the book like that.) Willis never got over the 60s. I'm not saying she ought to have. It's just something you notice.
8. Here's what I did appreciate about this "essential" selection of Willis's writings that is, nevertheless 500 pages long: you do kind of need all of these works in order to understand her perspective as a whole. There's a great deal of repetition here, which is probably less Willis's fault than it is the world's and the patriarchy's, but the variations are interesting for the way the add depth and nuance (at least most of the time). So, by the middle of the collection you're getting a sense of Ellen Willis as much as you are of America in the last half of the 20th century.
9. The aughts writing . . . I don't know what to do about, honestly. There's one essay on Tom Frank that's basically every blog post about the DNC race that even considered gender + some of the Hillbilly Elegy criticisms, but the other stuff is . . . not great, maybe.
10. Willis's writing on music is, truly, outstanding, and I'm going to have to find Out of the Vinyl Deeps.
April 21, 2016
Good lord she is a wonderful cultural-critic and writer; her thinking is so lucid and her prose so exuberant. To get a sense of it, just read the piece on Tom Wolfe. It perfectly encapsulates the enduring challenges of reconciling American culture (history, myth, art) and politics, while simultaneously giving an incisive look at the arc of a gifted (but flawed) writer's career. I will surely be dipping in and out of this text for a lifetime; her writing demands it.
December 21, 2018
This review originally published in Looking For a Good Book. Rated 4.5 of 5
I knew nothing about Ellen Willis before venturing into this book but I enjoy reading essays (yes, I'm that guy) and I was drawn to Willis' profile and record.
I'm not sure how to describe Willis, based on her writing. Any label I give her would only box her in to a confine too small for who she really was.
It also seems too small to say that I was highly impressed with the essays here, but I was.
The essays here encompass an incredible range - from eras (the 1960's to the 2000's) to topics (from radicalism to music to feminism to peace and hope and beyond) - and all are intelligently composed and carefully articulated. This is the writing of a smart, cultured, modern woman (and I mention her gender not to dismiss her in any way but because I think her gender plays a crucial role in her observations).
At times the writing was dated. We can see the influence of the cultural thinking in the way she expresses herself on issues in the 60's up even through the 90's. Perceptions sometimes change with cultural changes. Yet it also becomes all-too-apparent that we maybe don't change enough as humans. Styles may change. What's acceptable by perception may change. But we don't change. I couldn't help but see too many comparisons to today's politics and revolutions when reading her observations from twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. How sad. How frustrating and very sad. I wondered what she would have to say in today's political climate and about the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh (I was just finishing this book during this debacle).
I loved her insight. "How did the sixties happen in the first place?" she writes,
Man, that made me think... a wide-spread prosperity that made young people feel secure. I'd never heard nor read anyone put it quite that way, and yet it feels spot on. And what a tremendous contradiction then - feeling comfortable let them rebel. Yeah.
On sex she sums up: "When women discuss sex in public, male prerogatives and male hypocrisy come under scrutiny. And that makes a lot of journalists (especially male journalists) nervous— not because sex is trivial, but precisely because it isn’t." This had me wondering what she would have made of the #metoo movement.
When discussing music, one of my favorite observations was:
Watching men groove on Janis, I began to appreciate the resentment many black people feel toward whites who are blues freaks. Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.
And just when I was thinking that everything she wrote was heavy (and most of it is) I came across her essay "Handle With Care: We Need a Child-Rearing Movement" that I agreed with whole-heartedly.
This isn't light reading. It took me a long time to read through this collection because every essay can't just be read, it has to be absorbed. It has to be considered, and that takes time.
I'm sorry that I wasn't aware of Ellen Willis when she was actively writing and I'm sorry that she's gone because I think she'd have some very valuable things to say about the 'Teens.
Looking for a good book? If you like intelligent, socially relevant non-fiction, the The Essential Ellen Willis really needs to be on your reading list.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
I knew nothing about Ellen Willis before venturing into this book but I enjoy reading essays (yes, I'm that guy) and I was drawn to Willis' profile and record.
I'm not sure how to describe Willis, based on her writing. Any label I give her would only box her in to a confine too small for who she really was.
It also seems too small to say that I was highly impressed with the essays here, but I was.
The essays here encompass an incredible range - from eras (the 1960's to the 2000's) to topics (from radicalism to music to feminism to peace and hope and beyond) - and all are intelligently composed and carefully articulated. This is the writing of a smart, cultured, modern woman (and I mention her gender not to dismiss her in any way but because I think her gender plays a crucial role in her observations).
At times the writing was dated. We can see the influence of the cultural thinking in the way she expresses herself on issues in the 60's up even through the 90's. Perceptions sometimes change with cultural changes. Yet it also becomes all-too-apparent that we maybe don't change enough as humans. Styles may change. What's acceptable by perception may change. But we don't change. I couldn't help but see too many comparisons to today's politics and revolutions when reading her observations from twenty, thirty, even forty years ago. How sad. How frustrating and very sad. I wondered what she would have to say in today's political climate and about the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh (I was just finishing this book during this debacle).
I loved her insight. "How did the sixties happen in the first place?" she writes,
I’d argue that a confluence of events stimulated desire while temporarily muting anxiety. There was wide-spread prosperity that made young people feel secure, able to challenge authority and experiment with their lives. There was a vibrant mass-mediated culture that, far from damping down the imagination, transmitted the summons to freedom and pleasure far more broadly than a mere political movement could do.
Man, that made me think... a wide-spread prosperity that made young people feel secure. I'd never heard nor read anyone put it quite that way, and yet it feels spot on. And what a tremendous contradiction then - feeling comfortable let them rebel. Yeah.
On sex she sums up: "When women discuss sex in public, male prerogatives and male hypocrisy come under scrutiny. And that makes a lot of journalists (especially male journalists) nervous— not because sex is trivial, but precisely because it isn’t." This had me wondering what she would have made of the #metoo movement.
When discussing music, one of my favorite observations was:
Watching men groove on Janis, I began to appreciate the resentment many black people feel toward whites who are blues freaks. Janis sang out of her pain as a woman, and men dug it. Yet it was men who caused the pain, and if they stopped causing it they would not have her to dig.
And just when I was thinking that everything she wrote was heavy (and most of it is) I came across her essay "Handle With Care: We Need a Child-Rearing Movement" that I agreed with whole-heartedly.
This isn't light reading. It took me a long time to read through this collection because every essay can't just be read, it has to be absorbed. It has to be considered, and that takes time.
I'm sorry that I wasn't aware of Ellen Willis when she was actively writing and I'm sorry that she's gone because I think she'd have some very valuable things to say about the 'Teens.
Looking for a good book? If you like intelligent, socially relevant non-fiction, the The Essential Ellen Willis really needs to be on your reading list.
I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.
March 22, 2016
"Dylan's music is not inspired. His melodies and arrangements are derivative, and his one technical accomplishment, a vivacious, evocative harmonica, does not approach the virtuosity of a Sonny Terry."
I mean, seriously, who can read this crap? So déclassé and urbane -- so disenchanted and arch as a way of sucking up to her intellectual "betters," of achieving some aesthetic cachet. Ellen Willis' "Dylan" essay shows up the scene of her early writing, in this 1967 essay that she was under the influence of Robert Christgau and the cosmopolitans at Commentary who expect her to come on like the Village Explainer. "A Sonny Terry?" Sorry, name me another. "When critics call Dylan a poet, they really mean a visionary." Okay, but how square is this squabbling over what we call him? And Ellen Willis was no square. The whole essay is a tissue of lies, half-truths, and prostate-squinching trajectories of piss.
I love Willis, but you've got to get away from that scene to get to the good stuff here -- the essay on The Family -- indeed, nearly all the work she did for The Village Voice in the Seventies and Eighties. That stuff will last. One of her first slick pieces was a journal of the Sixties, "Up From Radicalism," that offers at very close first hand an account of the decade's invidiously masculinist cultural and political radicalism. The piece she did on rape for Rolling Stone is wrenchingly dispassionate criticism, a work of genius. The work on Clinton in the nineties seems to me as sound as a pound, antidote to Christopher Hitchens. The music criticism is collected elsewhere.
I mean, seriously, who can read this crap? So déclassé and urbane -- so disenchanted and arch as a way of sucking up to her intellectual "betters," of achieving some aesthetic cachet. Ellen Willis' "Dylan" essay shows up the scene of her early writing, in this 1967 essay that she was under the influence of Robert Christgau and the cosmopolitans at Commentary who expect her to come on like the Village Explainer. "A Sonny Terry?" Sorry, name me another. "When critics call Dylan a poet, they really mean a visionary." Okay, but how square is this squabbling over what we call him? And Ellen Willis was no square. The whole essay is a tissue of lies, half-truths, and prostate-squinching trajectories of piss.
I love Willis, but you've got to get away from that scene to get to the good stuff here -- the essay on The Family -- indeed, nearly all the work she did for The Village Voice in the Seventies and Eighties. That stuff will last. One of her first slick pieces was a journal of the Sixties, "Up From Radicalism," that offers at very close first hand an account of the decade's invidiously masculinist cultural and political radicalism. The piece she did on rape for Rolling Stone is wrenchingly dispassionate criticism, a work of genius. The work on Clinton in the nineties seems to me as sound as a pound, antidote to Christopher Hitchens. The music criticism is collected elsewhere.
May 20, 2021
Organized in chronological order, THE ESSENTIAL ELLEN WILLIS traces the continuities in her thinking - in her final years, she had begun a psychoanalytic exploration of fascism and backlash thinking, and the deep strand of influence from Reich and Freud was always a part of it. On the other hand, she quit writing about rock music after the '70s, and the liberation via culture that she kept evoking in her writing after that point seemed like a memory. The pieces about THE SOPRANOS and TV talk shows make one wonder what she would've written had she been interested in extended thought about Madonna, Grace Jones, the riot grrrl movement, '80s teen comedies, slasher movies, etc.. Her essays from the 2000s also make her own backlash away from leftist ideas about American foreign policy whose particulars, especially about Israel and the Afghanistan war, have aged pretty badly, and while she's far from wrong about the sexist repression of the ideology that led to 9/11, the universalist assumptions of applying Fruedian ideas to an Islamic culture in the Middle East, even suggesting that the bombers were consciously destroying a phallic symbol, are rather blinkered. But even when some of those pieces haven't stood up well, Willis was a brilliant, inspiring writer and thinker, adept at thinking through the contradictions and complexities of living under capitalism and a backlash to any ideology touting liberation which gains traction.
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April 17, 2021I rarely DNF books because it makes me feel bad - which is something I'm trying to work on, because why read a book you don't like? But, anyway, I DNF this one.
And that's strange because Ellen Willis is a fantastic writer. Really. I admire her skills, I wish to be as good as her. Some of her pieces in here, especially Dylan, is brilliantly done.
But also — much of it goes over my head; it's very complex politics that I just can't grasp fully without having a written copy to write notes on, to flip through and go back. And so I'll have to pick this back up another day.
And that's strange because Ellen Willis is a fantastic writer. Really. I admire her skills, I wish to be as good as her. Some of her pieces in here, especially Dylan, is brilliantly done.
But also — much of it goes over my head; it's very complex politics that I just can't grasp fully without having a written copy to write notes on, to flip through and go back. And so I'll have to pick this back up another day.
March 28, 2015
Reread several of these before moving on. Told me things about how I think and what I've experienced that I never knew. Especially interesting are later pieces....how a "liberal libber" holds on to her open mind while re-evaluating her youthful idealism. (The first few pieces are music criticism, and aside from a few revelations about Bob Dylan, whom I never thought about much, I could have skipped.)
February 2, 2022
4.5 stars. Made me think a lot about Marxist and psychoanalytic theory. I feel like putting this book with a bell hooks volume would be a great dialogue...
Also, I think the upshot of this book is, "until the left starts thinking about the libidinal aspect of privilege, it's gonna keep spinning its wheels."
Also, I think the upshot of this book is, "until the left starts thinking about the libidinal aspect of privilege, it's gonna keep spinning its wheels."
February 8, 2015
I had never heard of Ellen Willis before picking up this book, and it's a shame. Anyone interested in the history of the women's movement should read this book. It was refreshing in this age of constant conservative opinion spouting to read essays from somebody far to the left on the political spectrum. Much of what she wrote in the late 20th century is more relevant today.
April 18, 2016
Insightful and extremely relevant essays about feminism, politics, and even an essay about the Sopranos. Highlights for me are the section on the 1970s (heavily about feminism - and the culture surrounding abortion, rape, family, raising children, and marriage) and the essays from the 1990s regarding the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal.
July 15, 2017
Cool chronological overview of the intricacies of the feminist movement. Ellen Willis is a really smart writer! I really appreciated her nuanced critiques of both the right and left wing, race, and gender, many of which still seem relevant today.
July 25, 2020
So, so smart and so ahead of her time. Every piece is relevant today, and even the takes I didn’t agree with really made me think. I’m thankful that I bought this book so I can go back to it again and again.
March 5, 2015
Priceless for her Rolling Stone piece on visiting her once free-spirited, suddenly orthodox brother in 1970s Israel. And so much everything else.
October 3, 2020
WHAT A F*CKING WRITER.
May 12, 2025
she's a reasonable gal
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