{"id":177,"date":"2006-11-10T06:53:44","date_gmt":"2006-11-10T11:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=177"},"modified":"2007-02-27T22:09:08","modified_gmt":"2007-02-28T03:09:08","slug":"ellen-willis-1941-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=177","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Willis, 1941-2006"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"EllenEllen Willis died on Thursday, November 9, 2006<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Parents may not always want to proudly claim their children and it is only right that children often rebel. But if I were to name my intellectual and political parents, they would be Stanley Aronowitz and Ellen Willis.<\/p>\n

Ellen’s Left <\/strong><\/p>\n

One simple, if simplistic, way of mapping divisions in the political world is to picture a two-by-two table with four cells representing different political tendancies: along one “economic” axis exists a spectrum that runs from “Capital” to “Labor.” A second “cultural” axis runs along a spectrum from “Communitarian” to “Libertarian.”<\/p>\n

It is pretty easy to fill in the cells on the Right:<\/p>\n

Capital\/Libertarian: the radical, free market, anti-regulatory Right. Fill in with Cato Institute<\/a>, etc.<\/p>\n

Capital\/Communitarian: the pro-business and culturally conservative Right. Think of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Left is more difficult.<\/p>\n

Isn’t it tempting to put the entire<\/em> Left into the Labor\/Communitarian cell? After all, the “Left” has been, for the most part, defined by its Communitarian and\/or Collectivist impulses. Leftists are, almost by definition, critics of Capital and its<\/em> culture of decadence, perversity, and sin. No?<\/p>\n

When I try to draw this map on the board in a classroom, students are often stumped by the final empty space, unable to name anyone who belongs in the Labor\/Libertarian terrain.<\/p>\n

Since the culturally conservative backlash of the 1980s, that space has been occupied and preserved almost single-handedly by Ellen Willis.<\/p>\n

Nobody was better at exposing authoritarianism on the Left or tracing hidden utopianism on the Right.<\/p>\n

If you haven’t read anything written by Ellen Willis, you might start with her critique of Thomas Frank<\/a> or her essay, “The Mass Psychology of Terrorism<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

At some point, though, you have got to read “Towards a Feminist Sexual Revolution” (originally published in Social Text, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall 1982, pp. 3-21.) It is an extraordinary manifesto for a gender politics that embraces sexual freedom and cultural radicalism.<\/p>\n

The obituary published in the New York Times<\/em><\/a> quotes Ellen saying that her “deepest impulses are optimistic.” The political and intellectual roots of that optimism is in Ellen’s axiomatic commitments to the socio-psychological insights of Wilhelm Reich<\/a>. Ellen was the rightful heir to the legacy of Reich and his deeply anti-fascist political views on pleasure, culture and freedom.<\/p>\n

In Ellen Willis, I have lost a mentor and a friend.<\/p>\n

I fear that the Left has lost something more: its greatest champion of freedom and pleasure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ellen Willis died on Thursday, November 9, 2006. Parents may not always want to proudly claim their children and it is only right that children often rebel. But if I were to name my intellectual and political parents, they would be Stanley Aronowitz and Ellen Willis. Ellen’s Left One simple, if simplistic, way of mapping […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}