Ellen Willis's No More Nice Girls Countercultural Essays
Glenn, David
No MORE NICE GIRLS: COUNTERCULTURAL ESSAYS, by Ellen Willis. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan/ University Press of New England, 1993. 298 pp. $22.95. Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the...
...Willis's feminism, by contrast, is libertarian—she yearns not so much for a just society as a free one...
...WINTER • 1994 • 299...
...This obliqueness means that Willis answers certain questions thinly or not at all...
...AIDS and economic stagnation dramatically change the terrain on which fights over sexual freedom and the family are fought...
...At a public forum in 1992 she called the vocabulary of socialism "bankrupt," and in a recent essay she predicts that the next great upsurge of the left, not the right, will be the force that finally extinguishes the libertarian energies of the 1960s...
...Out of feminist principle she has renounced marriage...
...She champions freedom and individualism without ever embracing a vacuous libertarianism...
...At their best, her essays embody a powerful and attractive democratic leftist sensibility...
...Liberal campaigns against sex discrimination in education and employment are necessary and fine, but they don't speak to psychocultural dimensions of sexism—the deeper bigotries that foster eating disorders, domestic violence, and "the sexual shame and self-hatred endemic to [women's] condition...
...Ellen Willis fits a certain stereotype of the post-1960s radical...
...But where Eugene Genovese seems curdled and Camille Paglia unhinged, Willis is consistently bracing, intelligent, and radical...
...Willis's thought is better served when she draws less deeply and explicitly from Reich...
...After zinging Wallerstein for methodological sloppiness (she used no control group of children in intact families), Willis leads her essay into contentious territory...
...A core assumption here is that a rebellion against the structures and practices of male supremacy is as necessary as ever...
...This sort of radical feminist analysis is usually framed in terms of one of two classically American narratives...
...Since phrases like "gratuitous denial" and "the nation's repressed guilt" appear on virtually every page here, we might turn the question 298 • DISSENT Books around: if so much of our behavior is really governed by unconscious impulses and repressed desires, doesn't that render "whole areas of our political judgment suspect...
...Or are they proof of conservatives' nay-saying arguments against cultural radicalism...
...It never becomes quite clear...
...in the heat of political struggles, idealism and conviction curdle into guilt, shame, and moralism...
...Wallerstein's data expose genuine pain, of course—the pain of children and adults struggling to find a balance of connectedness and autonomy within family structures, both "intact" and "broken," that have been radically transformed in the last thirty years...
...A phrase like "postfamilial world" may reek of 1970s earnestness, but much of Willis's approach toward sexuality and feminism has an earlier source: Wilhelm Reich's radical interpretation of Freud, in which sexual liberation is deemed necessary to save civilization from its self-destructive neuroses...
...By contrast, she argues, "Conservatives, as usual, have a coherent, if quixotic . . . position on this issue: Restore the social centrality of marriage by reversing the trends toward personal freedom and sexual equality that have undermined it...
...To retreat from this challenge would be a failure of nerve...
...One wishes that Willis would wrestle more thoroughly with the tensions between her Freudian inheritance and her faith in the possibility of a radically democratic society...
...Since so much of this book is devoted to criticisms of the left and to the imagining of alternative lefts ("Instead of beating our breasts, we might take our cue from pleasureloving radicals like Emma Goldman"), it's startling to see how little sustained attention is giving to questions of class...
...What are the prospects for an unleashing of radical energy today, in the age of the temporary worker and the maquiladora...
...She considers the narrow field of debate in which Wallerstein's studies were constructed and received, and notes its limits...
...She's a New Yorker, she's Jewish, and she's written essays for the Village Voice calling for the abolition of the nuclear family...
...Willis usually explores her ambivalences fearlessly—that's one of her great strengths—but on the Socialist Question she remains oblique...
...And she argues that cultural nationalism and identity politics give rise "to a logic that chokes off radicalism...
...But my aim here is not to trivialize sexism or to "re-center" class—just to give it a seat at the table...
...During the peak of feminism's second wave, Willis recalls, feminism intensified my utopian sexual imaginaWINTER • 1994 • 297 Books tion, made me desperate to get what I really wanted, not "after the revolution" but now —even as it intensified my skepticism, chilling me with awareness of how deeply relations between the sexes were corrupted and, ultimately, calling into question the very nature of my images of desire...
...Sometimes Willis's Reich-flavored analysis leads her toward interesting observations about the connections between eros and our political life...
...The duty of radicals is to grasp as accurately as the cultural right the deep structural effects of feminism's rise...
...How does class prejudice intersect with the scars of male supremacy in the lives of working-class women...
...Although No More Nice Girls addresses topics as various as Picasso, terrorism, and the space program, it is radical feminism (of a particular 1969 New York vintage) that lies at the heart of the book...
...For Willis, Wallerstein's response to this pain (a vague call for stronger social pressures against divorce) is typical of liberals— it's "hand-wringing , " myopic, and "trivial...
...Her essays are relentlessly skeptical, yet she never abandons the utopian impulse...
...This willingness to soldier forth with a utopian vision— an intellectual habit distrusted by postmodernists —has great strengths...
...Willis, of course, argues for the former...
...Still, it's clear that Freud and Reich have broadened and disciplined Willis's thinking over the years...
...It's a story of paradox: feminism has spawned both expansiveness and despair...
...Nor 296 • DISSENT Books is she, to say the least, a wide-eyed celebrant of all things leftist...
...Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan/ University Press of New England, 1993...
...it's a shame that Willis avoids the problem...
...It's impossible to answer this question well without considering economic questions more thoroughly than Willis does here...
...History and its convolutions" are the repeated theme of this essay: a burst of utopian energy is followed by an unexpected wave of fear or despair...
...Accepting her premise that all truly radical movements must center around the principle of freedom, how might radicals discourage the American habit of conflating love of freedom with love of the unfettered market...
...She is, in other words, the type of specimen Patrick Buchanan and Dan Quayle might have wanted to cage and put on display at the Republican national convention in Houston...
...She exposes the timidity at the heart of left communitarianism...
...No MORE NICE GIRLS: COUNTERCULTURAL ESSAYS, by Ellen Willis...
...As she puts it elsewhere: "If we really hope to change our condition, there's no escape from the admittedly risky, admittedly arrogant project of reimagining the world...
...With the barriers of sex roles shaken, she argues, all of us would be far more likely to reimagine and reinvent institutions such as the family and the workplace, and to redefine society around such principles as pleasure and self-expression...
...Drug experiences slide from transcendence to addiction...
...If redefining society around pleasure and self-expression sounds like the call of a fuzzy-minded relic, take heart...
...The crucial question is how to interpret these setbacks: are they predictable hurdles, symptoms of the stress of cultural systems in conflict...
...there's no scarcity of writers who flaunt their disillusionment with the left...
...Her long, theoretical exposition of castration anxiety and how the nuclear family transmits sexism and repression, however, is unconvincing and a little tedious...
...To her great credit, Willis rarely hesitates to scrutinize the contradictions in her own political project...
...In No More Nice Girls' most impressive essay, a meditation on "excess" titled "Coming Down Again," Willis draws on painfully concrete memories to examine the problems of the recent cultural left...
...Consider Willis's dissection of Judith Wallerstein's famous mid-1980s studies of the lives of children after divorce, which purported to show that family break-ups are far more destructive than popularly believed...
...But for all her dedication to cultural radicalism, Willis—who over the years has been on staff at the New Yorker, Ms., Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice—is no zealot...
...The moralistic narrative, which Willis rejects, presents sexism as a sort of Original Sin and feminism as a redemptive force...
...As Willis often notes, the explosions of the 1960s were in many ways bound up with the expanding economy and perceptions of an end to scarcity...
...Now that women have won certain kinds of social freedom, the traditional nuclear family, which was always rife with contradiction, is genuinely unstable, "a dying beast...
...How do these dour assertions square with the many passages in which Willis expresses a commitment to class-egalitarian politics...
...This complaint might seem symptomatic of a habit Willis despises: the left's frequent dismissal of feminism as "merely an extension of liberal individualism" and as "a movement of, by, and for white, middle-class women...
...Exploration of this question needn't, of course, lead to neoconservative Freudians' conclusions...
...Most of the more recent essays in her new collection No More Nice Girls attack entrenched patterns of myopia and arrogance among contemporary liberals and leftists...
...She opposes the war on drugs and writes unrepentantly about the acid trips of her youth...
...She defends freedom of speech against antipornography feminists and against leftists who hedge their defense of Salman Rushdie with pious regret for his alleged "blasphemy...
...At one point, arguing against the central assumption of identity politics, she sharply asks: "If our [ethnic or gender] experience by definition makes whole areas of our political judgment suspect, on what moral basis can we act...
...And she is committed to solidaristic political action and endlessly critical of liberalism's limitations, without once succumbing to any of the various antiliberalisms —Leninist, communitarian, nihilist—that have plagued the twentieth-century left...
...Is full employment an appropriate goal for a libertarian left...
...I find some of Willis's particular skepticisms disquieting...
...The tone here may ring familiar...
...Feminists and other cultural radicals must have the courage to construct new alternatives to the family, new ways "to love, to rear children, to find community in a postfamilial world...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
