In the months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a chasm "the size of ground zero" opened between feminist author and cultural critic Ellen Willis and the burgeoning anti-war movement.
Willis was a radical, but she supported military action and found herself taken aback by young protesters "looking and sounding like preserved specimens of the '60s anti-war counterculture, with the same songs and peace-and-love slogans."
"Everything about this bothered me: that 20-year-olds were using their elders' language and style instead of inventing their own; that those blinky-eyed, reductive slogans had induced me and many other card-carrying members of the anti-war counterculture to roll our eyes even in 1967," she wrote in an essay that appeared in the journal Radical Society in April 2002.
As a cultural critic, Willis spared none; the posturing and foibles of her fellow leftists were as much a target of her criticism as those on the right. That willingness to critique with equanimity infused her writings on music, sex, politics, religion and movies and produced bold, sometimes unexpected results.
Willis, a former columnist and senior editor for the Village Voice and the first pop music critic for the New Yorker, died of lung cancer Thursday at her home in Queens, N.Y., said her daughter, Nona Willis-Aronowitz. She was 64.
At New York University, Willis was founder and director of the cultural reporting and criticism concentration in the journalism department. One course, "The Cultural Conversation," sought to help students "inculcate habits of thinking that are vital to informed and intelligent cultural reporting and criticism."
"While conventional news writers are simply expected to put their own attitudes aside, cultural journalists must be conscious of their standpoint and its impact on their observation and judgment," she wrote in a class syllabus. "Your credibility and the power of your literary voice depend a good deal on your ability to develop this capacity for self-reflection."
Such self-reflection was a hallmark of Willis' writing. She was born Dec. 14, 1941, in New York City and graduated from Barnard College in 1962. In 1969, she co-founded Redstockings, a short-lived but significant radical feminist group. When abortion was still illegal in most of the nation, the organization engaged in speak-outs and demonstrated in support of abortion rights.
