"One lesson of feminism, surely, is that being like other women, rather than a shining unfettered exception, isn’t such a terrible thing."

Writes Michelle Goldberg reacting to this line in a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz: "I secretly wanted monogamy, that I was just like every other woman who wanted to tie her man down."

The Goldberg column is titled "When Sexual Liberation Is Oppressive" (NYT).

She's bringing up a 1981 essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz, because Willis Aronowitz quoted herself in her new book "Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution."

Willis Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, who was — as Goldberg puts it — a "pro-sex feminist writer."

Don't you have to choose what to put first, sex or feminism? If you set out to put them on equal footing, what do you get? I must be a feminist and I must be pro-sex.

"At a time when the pop charts were dominated by cloying songs such as 'A Horse with No Name' and 'Joy to the World' and the playlists of burgeoning FM radio stations were heavy on..."

"... James Taylor; Crosby, Stills & Nash; and the Eagles; Creem respectfully ceded coverage of those artists to Rolling Stone. It championed, instead, proto-punk bands such as the Stooges, the MC5, ? and the Mysterians, and Count Five; mavericks such as Lou Reed, Dr. John, Marc Bolan, and George Clinton; and nascent heavy-metal acts, including Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Alice Cooper. 'Unlike Rolling Stone, which is a bastion of San Francisco counter-culture "rock-as-art" orthodoxy, Creem is committed to a Pop aesthetic,' Ellen Willis wrote in The New Yorker. 'It speaks to fans who consciously value rock as an expression of urban teen-age culture.' The original staffers... saw the magazine as a cross between Mad, the satirical comic book, and Esquire circa the height of New Journalism....  Try as he might, [publisher Barry] Kramer never succeeded in turning Creem into the sort of cash-cow life-style magazine that Rolling Stone became. Its steadiest advertisers included A-200 Pyrinate Liquid ('one shampoo kills lice and nits'), Boone’s Farm wine, and mail-order head shops that hawked pipes, personalized roach clips, and something called the 'grass mask.' ('Shit, what a hit!')"

From "The Overlooked Influence of Creem Magazine/A new documentary makes the case for America’s only rock ’n’ roll magazine'" (The New Yorker).

ADDED: I tried to find an image for that item called the "grass mask." First, I turned up a lot of random junk that mostly gave me additional ideas about what it could be. I just wanted an old 70s ad. Then I put "grass mask" and "shit, what a hit" in quotes and that narrowed the hell out of the results to the point where I got to this PDF of a 1974 issue of an alternative newspaper called The Living Daylights....



There are no ads, so it's just somewhere in all that writing. If you readers would divide up the work, it's 28 pages, and maybe 28 of you could each read a page. If you find "grass mask"/"shit, what a hit," please write out the whole sentence and tell us the page number. Thanks! Lately, I've been nostalgic for the 1970s. Something about New York City going to hell has got me thinking about how the hell that was NYC in the 70s (when I lived there) was so much better than the fresh hell that is New York City today. But in any case, The Living Daylights seems to be from Australia. I've got no nostalgia about Australia. What does "the living daylights" refer to anyway?

What is the real "free speech problem" on the left from the point of view of a real leftist?

I'm reading "Do Progressives Have a Free Speech Problem?/The illiberal left is a lot less threatening than the right. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist" by Michelle Goldberg (NYT). Goldberg signed the "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" that was published in Harper's, and she's using this column to expand on the topic.

She says she initially declined to sign the letter, "in part because it denounced 'cancel culture'" — a term she associates with "right-wing whiners like Ivanka Trump who think protests against them violate their free speech." I'd like to see the first draft! I want to know what had to be taken out to get so many signatures. At least we know what one person says she objected to and that it was, she says, edited out. Goldberg notes that discussions of the letter have talked about "cancel culture," even though the words aren't in the draft.

After avoiding writing about the subject — telling herself other things are more important — she got triggered by the "scathing rejoinder" written by Hannah Giorgis (in The Atlantic):

“Facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review, or having one’s book panned does not, in fact, erode one’s constitutional rights or endanger a liberal society.”

This sentence brought me up short; one of these things is not like the others. Anyone venturing ideas in public should be prepared to endure negative reviews and pushback on social media. Internal workplace reviews are something else. If people fear for their livelihoods for relatively minor ideological transgressions, it may not violate the Constitution — the workplace is not the state — but it does create a climate of self-censorship and grudging conformity....

"Dana Densmore, a founding member of the separatist group Cell 16, took issue with the idea that sex was a basic human need."

"In 1968 in a journal appropriately titled 'No More Fun and Games,' she wrote that 'guerrillas' had important things to do and couldn’t be sidetracked by sex, which was 'inconvenient, time-consuming, energy-draining and irrelevant.' Romantic love was a problem, too. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a radical feminist philosopher, positioned it as the enemy of independence and insecurity. 'What is love but need?' she wrote in 1968. 'What is love but fear?' Other early feminists weren’t against romance in a perfect world, but they reasoned that until conditions improved, heterosexual love was too tied to marriage and societal expectations of what it meant to be feminine. Shulamith Firestone, in her classic 1970 manifesto 'The Dialectic of Sex,' saw romance as 'a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their conditions.'.... 'Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience?' Firestone wrote."

Writes Nona Willis Aronowitz in "Don’t Let Sex Distract You From the Revolution/Maybe the Second Wave celibates were on to something" (NYT). It's just by chance that crossed my bloggability line on the same day as the WaPo article "How Lady Gaga convinced me to give up dating — and finish my book" (link goes to my blog post) — other than that the newspapers might have been influenced by Valentine's Day.

Nona Willis Aronowitz, who is 34 years old, is the daughter of the radical feminist Ellen Willis, so take that into account. It's interesting to hear a relatively young person make sense of what the older generation had to say, and I'm struck by the shortsightedness of what she has to say about her own generation:

Ultimately, the pro-sex feminists won out. In this moment of feminist resurgence, no one is suggesting we stop having sex....

Ultimately? There is no ultimately. Life goes on. And there is another generation after you. If you can see that "Maybe the Second Wave celibates were on to something," why are you confident that the war is over and the "pro-sex feminists" have won? Isn't the label "pro-sex" a little hollow and too proud of itself?

"To the extent that there is a generational divide, it may have to do with the fact that many older women are still wary about the internet, which leads them to not only miss the context of a longstanding feminist internet tradition of ironic misandry..."

"... but also to overlook the more nuanced chatter happening among younger women on social media and digital sites.... And yet most of the disagreement has to do with age-old ideas about sex, power and the function of social movements...

Writes Nona Willis Aronowitz in "The Feminist Pursuit of Good Sex" (NYT). Aronowitz is the daughter of Ellen Willis, "who in a 1981 essay in The Village Voice asked a question that now looms over #MeToo 40 years later: 'Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?'"

Aronowitz says:

My connection to this complex intellectual heritage is at the heart of why I find the prevailing narrative about #MeToo’s generational split baffling and harmful. Here’s how the story goes: Older critics, flattened into “Second Wave feminist has-beens,” are accusing the movement of becoming increasingly anti-sex, anti-agency and anti-nuance. Younger women, also known as “Twitter feminists,” are accusing these critics of being bitter establishmentarians, unable to cede ground to new ideas. They’re both wrong, but so is this tired mothers-and-daughters framing, which threatens to derail substantive debate in favor of a catfight narrative.

I note the assertion that both sides are missing nuance. The older women think the younger ones are "increasingly anti-sex, anti-agency and anti-nuance." And the younger ones think the older ones don't follow "the more nuanced chatter" of the internet so they don't grok "the feminist internet tradition of ironic misandry."

If only we could be more nuanced, maybe we could meet in the middle. But everybody's always only seeing the lack of nuance on the other side. You get the self-flatterer imperiously telling other people to compromise. But Aronowitz seems to be more of an onlooker, trying to mediate. I look at  Memorandum's River and see there's no significant internet talk about her column. I look at the NYT's own "most-emailed," "most viewed," and even "recommended for you" lists and don't find it. Even with "Good Sex" in the title, it's not getting traction.

From the Wikipedia article on Ellen Willis:

Willis was known for her feminist politics and was a member of New York Radical Women and subsequently co-founder in early 1969 with Shulamith Firestone of the radical feminist group Redstockings.... Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement in what became known as the feminist sex wars. Her 1981 essay, Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex? is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism."

Willis was the first popular music critic for The New Yorker, between 1968 and 1975... In 2011, the first collection of Willis’s music reviews and essays, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (University of Minnesota Press), arrived. It was edited by her daughter Nona Willis-Aronowitz. Ellen Willis "celebrated the seriousness of pleasure and relished the pleasure of thinking seriously," a review in The New York Times said.

Is anyone celebrating the seriousness of pleasure anymore? Even Nona Willis-Aronowitz — seemingly dedicated to her mother's legacy — left off the "Lust Horizons" part of the title of that 1981 essay. She calls it simply "Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?" — perhaps because few readers get the reference to "Lost Horizon" these days...

... but I think it's because "lust" — a popular and positive word in the 1970s — has become ugly again — returned to its stature as one of "The 7 Deadly Sins"....



The question are feminists pro-sex? becomes — with nuance —are feminists pro-good-sex? The easy answer then is yes, but we're left with the difficult question is how to find good sex when her own daughter edits out Ellen Willis's word "lust"?

ADDED: To be fair, Aronowitz does, in her first paragraph, call herself "lusty," but she's speaking of herself in the past and "before I’d learned much about feminism." She was, she says, "fascinated by what we now call the 1970s 'golden era' of pornography... Being a lusty, modern woman, I was enthralled."

But "lusty" doesn't mean "lustful." It means merry and cheerful or hearty and vigorous. "The Turk... gave him two or three lusty kicks on the seat of honour," wrote Edmund Burke in his memoir.

The word that means "Full of, imbued with, or characterized by, lust or unlawful desires; pertaining to, marked by, or manifesting sensual desire; libidinous" (OED) is "lustful."