-
– Ann Powers, 2005, on this Maureen Dowd tome.One, rad feminists of the 1960s and 1970s did not all look alike. That cliched Norman Mailer-esque view overlooks the fact that it’s war-paint makeup and girdles that cause women to look like clones, not going au naturel. I get so sick of people saying rad fems were not beautiful — have they ever seen pictures of the young Ellen Willis, Shulamith Firestone, or Jill Johnston? How about Michele Wallace when she wrote “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman?” Hot!! I’d burn my bra for any of them.
Two, if Dowd thinks that only non-feminists like “Desperate Housewives” clothing — i.e. sexy retro duds — then she’s never met Carol Queen. Or Nellie McKay. Or these ladies.
-
Former Facebook staffer Kate Losse’s piece on “Lean In”:
For someone with fewer family demands than Sandberg, freedom is depicted not as a pleasure but a problem to be resolved by getting a family. The single woman goes out to a bar goes not to have fun or be with friends (the main reason most women I know attend a bar), but to find a husband with whom to procreate. “My coworkers should understand that I need to go to a party tonight…because going to a party is the only way I might meet someone and start a family!” Astonishingly for a book published in 2013, there are no self-identified lesbians, gay men, or even intentionally unmarried or child-free people in Lean In’s vision of the workplace. It’s not clear why Sandberg thinks that everyone should be in the business of getting a family, since the book argues that family gets in the way of work. But it seems that Sandberg can only imagine the dreaded “leaning back” as a product of family demands. Who would take a vacation voluntarily?
Has definite Ellen Willis-like pleasure politics vibes.
-
Besides, most people made endless assumptions about married couples and treated them accordingly; it wasn’t so easy to get married and pretend you weren’t.
– My mother, summing up my feelings about matrimony 5 years before I was born. (From “The Family: Love It Or Leave It,” included in the forthcoming collection!) -
-
“The emphasis on sex that currently permeates our public life attest not to our sexual freedom but to our continuing sexual frustration. People who are not hungry are not obsessed with food.”
—Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls
*Quote recommended by Emily of Emily Books, a fantastic new indi(e) bookstore.
-
It’s less a matter of “the right to control our bodies” than the freedom to accept and relish our bodies, to explore our capacity for pleasure.
– Ellen Willis on women’s sexual freedom -
Under present conditions, people are preoccupied with consumer goods not because they are brainwashed but because buying is the one pleasurable activity not only permitted but actively encouraged by our rulers.
– Ellen Willis -
Ellen Willis is such a badass. I am so excited that I get to write about her.
Though everyone knows I’m a sucker for Paul Simon myself, she’s so good here I almost want to nod and agree.
“His alienation, like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore.”
Nailed it. (Just wait for Graceland, Ellen; you’ll like that better.)
-
Ellen Willis, 1964
-
For a year I cut myself off from men altogether. Perhaps I had to plunge so deeply into the negative side of my ambivalence in order to say good-bye to it, or try to. When I began to be with someone again it was a bit like moving to a strange country. In the intervening years aloneness had become my norm, my taken-for-granted context. And yet those same years had changed my sense of myself, of men, of the ground rules for relationships, making it impossible to simply pick up where I left off.
– Ellen Willis, “Escape from New York” (via rightnow-forever)#singleladies
