Grace Bello recently interviewed Melissa Gira Grant for The Toast. This post was brought to you by an anonymous victim of misandry.
The late cultural critic Ellen Willis was best known as the first pop music critic for The New Yorker. But in her forty-year career as a cultural critic, she covered a wide range of subject matter including feminism, countercultural politics, religion, family, and freedom for publications such as The New York Times, The Nation, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice. She co-founded the radical feminist group The Redstockings and started the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at NYU. Willis published Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade in 1981 and No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays in 1992. After Willis died in 2006 at the age of 64, her daughter, journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz, collected her music criticism in the book Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, which came out in 2011. Aronowitz (pictured below), a journalist who reports on education and poverty for NBCNews.com, has curated a new Willis anthology, The Essential Ellen Willis.
To me, one of the most remarkable things in the book is that it brings to light Ellen Willis’s pro-sex feminist pieces – which are really revolutionary even now. So can you talk a little bit about how you think those pieces were perceived back in the day?
Well, it went in two stages. First, with the radical feminists that she was involved in in the late ’60s, sex and pleasure was part of the narrative. It was something that they were talking about along the lines of “the personal is the political.” Then in the ’70s, feminism was – in her view – co-opted by centrists. My mother was watching the conversation around sex – and especially porn, a stand-in for heterosexual sex for certain feminists – she watched it morph into something that was unrecognizable to her, even conservative. So when she started writing about pro-sex feminism in the early ’80s, it was a real reaction not to the conservative right but what she perceived as conservative feminists. So to answer your question, I don’t think she got any abuse for it. But she vehemently disagreed with a lot of prominent radical feminists of the early ’80s about the role of pleasure and sex and pornography. And I think she was attempting to reclaim the conversation to what it looked like in the late ’60s.
I wonder what some of your favorite pieces were in the anthology. Which ones resounded personally for you? What were your favorite pieces to edit and to select?
Whenever anyone asks me where to start with Ellen Willis, I always say, “Read ‘Next Year in Jerusalem.'” First of all, I think it’s her longest piece – at least it’s the longest piece in the anthology. And it’s ostensibly about her brother converting to Orthodox Judaism and her going to Israel to learn more about it. But, really, it spans so many different topics: feminism, politics, family, sex – it’s about so many different things. She argues with herself, she argues with other people, she’s really, really, really thinking about why she believes what she believes. And people don’t do that very often. So that’s my favorite piece of hers.
But my favorite new piece that I’m really excited to introduce to the world, there’s a piece about her transformation from quiet, introspective, married coed from Barnard to countercultural radical feminist, basically. It’s really very personal, it’s very revealing, it’s about this conversion experience from repression to feminist consciousness.
I learned so much personal stuff about my mom. I never really understood why she was married at age 19. I was always asking her to explain it. And I’m really surprised that she never just gave me this piece because it totally explains her cognitive dissonance about it.
Ellen Willis circa 1970
That’s interesting. Can you tell me a little bit about that? How she reconciled being this radical feminist with being married and having a kid?
Well, she didn’t get married to my dad [Prof. Stanley Aronowitz] at age 19. [laughs] She got married to a random other guy. There’s this moment in this journal piece called “Up From Radicalism.” She basically describes knowing that she didn’t want to get married even as she was going through it.
Part of her really wanted to just do what everyone else did. That’s what you did in proto-second wave feminist America. I think there was part of her that really wanted acceptance from the mainstream culture, not to be a weirdo, not to be a loser, just to sort of join the ranks.
But there’s this line about her getting married against her better judgement. And even when she was going through the planning process, she knew she shouldn’t do it. And it’s not like this guy was this abusive monster, you know? He was just your typical mid-’60s guy who expected his wife to cook and clean and put her needs behind his. It was just something she knew she didn’t want, but she did it anyway. That was just so interesting to me, you know?
Ellen Willis and her daughter Nona Willis Aronowitz
When you were going through her previous works, which were the essays that surprised you?
I mean, I hadn’t really paid attention to all of her work in the 2000s. It’s kind of ironic because that’s when I was a teenager and probably could have read all the things she was coming out with at the time. But I was just self-absorbed and didn’t care as much as I do now. [laughs] When I was going through all of the work from the 2000s, I realized how obsessed she was with war and terrorism and national identity in this more straightforwardly political sense. Which was really surprising to me because I had thought of her as a rock critic on one hand and a feminist and social critic on the other, but I never really read her opinions on foreign policy. What really surprised me especially was this one piece of hers, “Why I’m Not For Peace.” It was just really, really patriotic in a weird way. My mother always said that she was optimistic, but that really extended to the character of the United States. She really did believe in this country’s ideals, deep down. So that was really surprising to me to see that later in her life.
Can you tell me what you can about how she sat down to write?
Well, she was a painstakingly slow writer. She would work on pieces for months if she could and at really irregular hours. She would be puttering around at 2 a.m. with coffee during the school week. She mentions this in the intellectual work piece that she would do a couple of more lucrative pieces so that she could really concentrate on the pieces she actually cared about. And I think up until she got her job at NYU, that’s what she did. She was part-time at The Village Voice and freelanced other places and would just take a long time on certain pieces she really cared about. Then when she got to NYU, I think she didn’t really like the bureaucratic element of NYU but she appreciated the time it gave her to write. Every single summer, my whole family went upstate to the Catskills, and both of my parents would retreat into their little offices to write every day. [laughs] So I think she appreciated that.
notes from Ellen Willis’s Bob Dylan piece, which took her seven months to write
I was speaking with Melissa Gira Grant, and she was briefly talking about how Ellen Willis influenced her. So have you heard from any fellow writers, fellow feminists about how your mom has influenced them in the process of creating this anthology?
Yeah! I mean, ever since she died, I’ve been hearing that. I’ve heard from so many of her former students and people who she’s edited. Then when her rock anthology Out of the Vinyl Deeps came out in 2011, there was this whole other wave of people my age who had never met her and were admiring her from afar and would tweet quotes of hers. So, yeah, I’ve heard from a lot of people since I’ve been collecting her work and since she died.
Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson tweeted about Willis’s essay “Memoirs of a Non-Prom Queen“
So what do you think are the most important lessons that Ellen Willis wrote about that would be relevant to feminists today? I mean, for one, the pro-sex feminism pieces are huge, but are there other ideas that really stood out to you?
She was on the offensive rather than the defensive. She actually had ideas about what a feminist world should look like. That there should be communal living spaces to raise children, that there should be true sexual liberation, that there should be free abortion on demand. Rather than sort of pushing back on and reacting to what the right was saying about feminism and women, I think she really had ideas. That sounds so basic, but all too often feminists get caught in a vortex of arguing for freedoms that we’ve already won or trying to preserve them rather than pushing the conversation forward.
In that same vein, my mother was always against the policing of language. And that’s been a real undercurrent of recent feminists. Obviously, she cared about sexism and racism and that obviously comes out in speech as well as actions, but I just feel like she didn’t get hung up on overly policing people’s language. She knew that it was a way not to see the forest for the trees. So, without getting too much into detail, I’ve been seeing that a lot in feminism recently. I think it would have been really frustrating for her.
Is there anything else you wanted to bring up that I didn’t ask about?
I’m excited that young writers are introducing the chapters. Instead of having some literary star write the intro, it was so much better to have current voices who people my age are familiar with to put Ellen Willis in context. And some of them had never even read her before. I don’t think Spencer Ackerman or Cord Jefferson had ever read my mother. But I was thinking, “Who would I want to write a piece about my mom?” This was my task, to assign those pieces. So I did, and they were great. Spencer really argued with my mom. It was totally Ellen Willis-like.
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Images courtesy of ellenwillis.tumblr.com unless otherwise indicated.
