Ellen Willis Quotes
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In practice, attempts to sort out good erotica from bad porn inevitably comes down to 'What turns me on is erotic; what turns you on is pornographic.'
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Whatever their limitations, Freud and Marx developed complex and subtle theories of human nature grounded in their observation of individual and social behavior. The crackpot rationalism of free-market economics merely relies on an abstract model of how people 'must' behave.
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If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist.
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For democrats, it's as crucial to defend secular culture as to preserve secular law. And in fact the two projects are inseparable: When religion defines morality, the wall between church and state comes to be seen as immoral.
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I can't keep myself from playing roles. The emotionless decadent, looking for diversion from boredom, is a favorite.
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The struggle of democratic secularism, religious tolerance, individual freedom and feminism against authoritarian patriarchal religion, culture and morality is going on all over the world - including the Islamic world, where dissidents are regularly jailed, killed, exiled or merely intimidated and silenced.
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What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
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On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
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To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.
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For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.
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Individuals bearing witness cannot do the work of social movements, but they can break a corrosive and demoralizing silence.
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Dylan is free now to work on his own terms. It would be foolish to predict what he will do next. But hopefully he will remain a mediator, using the language of pop to transcend it. If the gap between past and present continues to widen, such mediation may be crucial. In a communications crisis, the true prophets are the translators.
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The artificial separation of politics and culture is nowhere more pronounced than in the discourse of foreign policy and international affairs.
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Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with 'usefulness' and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.
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I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.
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Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.
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A triumphalist corporate capitalism, free at last of the specter of Communism, has mobilized its economic power to relentlessly marginalize all nonmarket values; to subordinate every aspect of American life to corporate 'efficiency' and the bottom line; to demonize not only government but the very idea of public service and public goods.
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You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to surmise that war has a perverse appeal for the human race, nor is the attraction limited to religious fanatics committing mass murder and suicide for the greater glory of God.
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By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.
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My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
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While liberals appeared to be safely in power, feminists could perhaps afford the luxury of defining Larry Flynt or Roman Polanski as Enemy Number One. Now that we have to cope with Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms, a rethinking of priorities seems in order.
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I believe that body and spirit are not really separate, though it often seems that way. I believe that redemption is never impossible and always equivocal. But I guess that I just don't know.
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The Democratic power elite on some level feels delegitimized by its working-class, black and female constituencies. What it wants are the 'legitimate' votes of suburban, white, middle-class, affluent males. Even liberal voters and organizations tend on some tacit level to accept the idea that they are not the 'real' Americans the Democrats must pursue.
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To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression.