left-wing political essay
ist, journalist
, activist and pop music
critic.
Willis was born in Manhattan
to a Jewish family, and grew up in the boroughs of the Bronx
and Queens in New York City. Her father was a police lieutenant in the New York City Police Department
. Willis attended Barnard College
as an undergraduate and did graduate study at University of California, Berkeley
, where she studied comparative literature
for a semester but left graduate school
shortly afterwards.
My deepest impulses are optimistic; an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it. 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;...
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.
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.