Ellen Willis Quotes

Politics is downstream from culture.

You don't run a feminist agenda and achieve political power.

From the moment when a subordinate class becomes really independent and dominant, calling into being a new type of State, the need arises concretely, of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society.

… the process of social change was not merely a matter of new inventions pressing on old institutions: it was a matter of new classes displacing old.

2017 may have been that year when identity politics hit a brick wall - and slumped limply on the pavement.

There are some good traditions in our culture, one of which is that men dance with women. Soon we will reach the stage where we will all have to publicly apologise for being heterosexual.

We have to overcome the practice of male domination - even though it's changing, and changing in Liberia quite drastically.

For years, we talked about how the only way to really win the political battles was to win the cultural ones. And rather than simply ignore pop culture, it would be far better to give it a big fat bear hug.

In general, everybody should admit the world is changing really fast, and it's hard for the conversations to keep up. I mean, it's hard to remember now, but when Barack Obama ran for president, he was against gay marriage.

All the excuses that people in power used to make for not telling diverse stories or including diverse people, they've proven to be false.

There are a number of people who are anxious to leave #metoo behind and move on, but I don't think people realize how short of a time we have been discussing this issue compared to how long this has been an issue.

'Our thing' is turning into 'my thing' within the Mafia, just as the larger American society is facing the new realities of the 'me generation.'

This #MeToo world, it's not new. None of us believe it's new. It's exciting that we find ourselves with a hashtag and a movement, but in general, none of these stories are new; it's just there's an audience now, and everybody's interested in trying to be responsible about this.

When the corpses are cleared no new order will emerge. Power, society, relationships, will descend in all their confusion on a new generation. The old, who started this conflagration, will retreat, worn out, the survivors and the young will continue the dance.

In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn’t complacent, it’s stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That’s not wimpy—it’s powerful and productive.

Christians lost the battle in the public square over gay marriage because, frankly, we were outthought, outfought, and outmarketed on the issue.

I contend that the reason why America is not as happy as it was in 1950 or 1920 or whenever, 100 years ago, is because our priorities are wrong, but it has nothing to do with exploiting the planet and has everything to do with losing faith in God.

Only when women wield power in significant numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women … that will be a society that works for everyone.

On a small planet, where minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year, where tradition marches on with a deafening, orderly beat -sometimes the order is disturbed by a dreamer, an artist, a scribbler - sometimes the beat is changed one person at a time.

The Death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

This world of ours is a new world, in which the unit of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed, and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new, not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality.

Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

the society which projects and undertakes the technological transformation of nature alters the base of domination by gradually replacing personal dependence (of the slave on the master, the serf on the lord of the manor, the lord on the donor of the fief, etc.) with dependence on the "objective order of things" (on economic laws, the market etc.).

There was a dance that everyone was doing that was heavily skewed with the power in one direction, but the dance was basically working, and then the dance got really disrupted with the first wave of feminism, and nobody found their footing yet - not the guys, not the women.