Uncommon sense

Ellen Willis on the inane '90s

by Michael Bronski

DON'T THINK, SMILE! NOTES ON A DECADE OF DENIAL. By Ellen Willis. Beacon Press, 193 pages, $25.

Reading Ellen Willis feels like a great discussion with a witty, politically perceptive friend over Sunday-morning bagels and endless cups of coffee. She is that rare thing -- a social journalist with leftist and feminist politics whose mind and political framework are open enough to reach often surprising conclusions. (And that's not a slam on "political correctness": there may not be many progressive journalists who fit this description, but there are almost no conservative ones who do.) Though her work is, at heart, ideological -- that is, she sets forth clearly articulated political positions -- it never succumbs to knee-jerk cant or holier-than-thou posturing.

Willis has been a beacon of sanity on the cultural and political scene since the late 1960s, when she wrote about rock, sex, and the counterculture for the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications. At the Village Voice -- where she wrote about feminism, politics, and the left -- she became a weekly fixture. Often, she was so far ahead of the curve that what seemed at the time to be around the bend now looks like simple common sense. In a harsh 1973 review of the misogynistic Deep Throat, for example, Willis sounded like a utopian or a crackpot when she called for a new feminist pornography; today, there is an entire industry of female-centered and feminist porn.

Willis's essays of the 1970s and '80s have already been collected in, respectively, Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1980) and No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992). Now, in Don't Think, Smile!, she takes on the '90s -- the decade of The Bell Curve and Monicagate, Anita Hill and Karen Finley, O.J. Simpson and the Million Man March. For Willis, it's been 10 years of political, sexual, racial, and social crises that have been met, on both the right and the left, with a sheer refusal to question received wisdom or engage in substantive deliberation. Most Americans, she suggests, approach events of the day with the attitude that former Speaker of the House Tom Foley expressed on the eve of the US invasion of Panama: "This is not the time for a lot of complicated debate."

Willis pegs conservatives, of course, as the worst offenders when it comes to blindness about economic crises, which they ignore in favor of "cultural politics" -- specifically, a determination to maintain traditional social structures that keep women, people of color, and homosexuals in their place. (It's especially satisfying to watch her demolish Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which attributed the majority of social problems to supposedly inherent differences in intelligence among classes and races.) But she points out that many progressives play the denial game too, rejecting cultural issues as mere "identity politics," a perilous distraction from the "real" work of social change (namely, economic and class issues). For Willis, the idea of wide-scale social change is inseparable from personal change and, ultimately, personal autonomy. On the subject of sexual-harassment law, for example, she argues that women will not truly be liberated until they can freely choose sex, not just be protected from it.

Willis's bold analysis cuts through easy political and moral posturing. She deconstructs the assumptions of one conservative, David Boaz of the right-libertarian Cato Institute, noting that he "complains of unmarried welfare mothers' `long-term deendency' on government, as if it were unquestionably preferable that mothers be forced into long-term dependency on husbands." And she lucidly exposes the way the right conflated the private and the public spheres by treating the Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones affairs as part of one undifferentiated sex scandal. She also has a remarkable capacity to reframe politically or emotionally confusing realities so that they become understandable. On African-American support for the Million Man March, for instance: "It's hardly surprising that black men flocked to a Farrakhan march . . . any more than it's surprising that whites voted for the Gingrich Congress. Most blacks don't subscribe to Farrakhan's more extreme views, but then most whites don't subscribe to the Republican right's more extreme views. It's just that there is no serious competition out there."

Willis forges her way through thorny debates without losing subtlety or measure -- balancing anti-porn feminist Catharine MacKinnon's "obsessive erotophobia," for example, against her obvious concern for the safety of women. Always, she returns to her touchstones of compassion and common sense. "My own vision of what I want . . . has at its center the conviction that freedom and equality are symbiotic, not opposed," she writes. "[M]y measure of a good society is the extent to which it functions by voluntary cooperation among people with equal social and political power." In a time when politics and political writing have degenerated into sound bites and sensationalism, Ellen Willis reminds us that integrity and human dignity, a quick wit and a dead-on style, offer the hope that we can make sense of -- and maybe even change -- the world.