The Essential Ellen Willis

Introduction

49 The world had changed only so much for her. The world has changed only so much for us. Reading the Ellen Willis of the seventies feels too painfully like having our latter-day lives described. Such are the spasms of a revolution, which doesn’t necessarily happen in linear fashion, which sometimes goes backward before it goes forward, and which requires all too much work in between. Willis, for whom the seventies are in part a hangover from the instantly mythologized sixties, doesn’t shrink from living in her time, even when it offers cruel backlash, and even when her own desires and doubts defy her ideals. “The worst insult you could throw at those of us who had been formed by the sixties was to imply that we were living in the past; not to be totally wired into the immediate moment meant getting old, which we hoped we would die before,” she writes in “Beginning to See the Light.” Signs of the incomplete work of liberation were and are everywhere. Women were having sex with fewer consequences but with the lingering side effects of inequality, where “freedom for women is defined solely as sexual freedom, which in practice means availability on men’s terms.” Willis hears it in the music she loves, diagnosing the precise contradiction of liberatory yet misogynistic music: “Male performers perpetuated the mythology that made women the symbol of middle-class respectability and kicked over the pedestal without asking who had invented it in the first place.” Janis Joplin, she realizes, “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.” The temptation is to blame sex and culture, rather than the power structure that still informs them, a temptation Willis resists. INTRODUCTION Irin Carmon 50 THE SEVENTIES Retreat—from pop culture, from sex, from bodily autonomy—is not an option . She rejects separatism and also, implicitly, essentialism: “For me feminism meant confronting men and male power and demanding that women be free to be themselves everywhere, not just in a voluntary ghetto.” That means refusing to apologize or equivocate, as in the terrifyingly relevant “Abortion: Is a Woman a Person?” Willis lays out her case against forced pregnancy and asserts, “In 1979 it is depressing to have to insist that sex is not an unnecessary, morally dubious self-indulgence but a basic human need, no less for women than for men.” (It’s depressing in 2014, too.) But it never means the abdication of selfcriticism —of herself, of the movement, of the female-led forays into pop culture that left her cold—and it does mean hurtling honestly into the unknown, as in the religious odyssey of “Next Year in Jerusalem.” Desire, and ultimately sexual freedom, in Willis’s utopia, is not about decadence or novel ways to organize the same exhausted battles; it comes with a responsibility for justice and self-knowledge. In the meantime, there is backlash and imperfect middle ways, and there is porn. A fierce civil libertarian, Willis was mostly unwilling to allow her visceral critique of pornography to triumph over her commitment to free speech—and the prescient suspicion that what would be wielded against obscenity would also be wielded against liberation. “I imagine that in utopia, porn would wither away along with the state, heroin, and Coca-Cola,” she writes. In the meantime, we have the desire and the unfinished work. And her writing to make sense of it all. IRIN CARMON is a national reporter for MSNBC.com, where she covers gender and politics, and a visiting fellow at the Yale Law School’s Program for the Study of Reproductive Justice. ...