Willis was always five steps ahead of the oncoming Zeitgeist. Never afraid to take the counter, even contrary, position on politics and culture, Willis often — in retrospect — proved sibylline in her musings. In her 1973 essay “Hard to Swallow: Deep Throat,” she not only offered a feminist critique of the movie (she found it a “sexual depressant”), but called for a feminist pornography that would “go beyond gymnastics to explore the psychological and sexual nuances of sex.” It would be nine more years before the infamous Barnard Conference, which spawned the feminist sex wars between opponents of pornography and so-called pro-sex feminists, proclaimed the need for a public culture of women’s sex magazines and films. While some have admired Willis’s prescience here, no one has noted her suggestion that the model for this new feminist porn might be the newly emerging art form of gay-male porn such as Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour or Wakefield Poole’s Bijou. But, as usual, Willis couldn’t be easily pinned down. Sure, hardly any straight people were praising gay-male porn in the 1970s — and Willis had a great take on gay-male culture in general: she loved its unbridled embrace of popular culture — but she also complained that these examples of gay-male erotica were, well, “unbearably romantic.” Now that gay-male porn is as mass-produced, obsessed with screwing, and non-idiosyncratic as its heterosexual counterpart, Willis would probably shift her criticism.
Leafing through Willis’s books, I am reminded just how deftly she could dissect culture, how sharply satiric and just plain funny she could be. Her 1979 humor piece “Glossary for the Eighties” is a critique of “politically correctness” as a right-wing slur — before the term was actually invented. “SUPERSENSITIVE: in the habit of hearing insult and bigotry where none is intended; Jews are traditionally the worst offenders, being inclined to take constructive criticism like “Pale-faced Jew-boy, I wish you were dead” as evidence of anti-Semitism.” In “The Family: Love It or Leave It,” published the same year, she takes on the emergent religious right’s attack on non-traditional lifestyles. The essay is more pertinent now, during the fight for marriage equality, than it was 27 years ago. And her 1982 “Sisters Under the Skin” is a brilliant, sophisticated critique of both the white-feminist movement and its African-American critics, which points out, simply, that “insistence on the hierarchy of oppression never radicalizes people, because the impulse behind it is moralistic.” This captures yet another of Willis’s great strengths: saying clearly what others know but are afraid to say out loud.
While Willis’s writings about feminism, sexuality, and popular culture are superb, her work on the endless complications of Jewish-American-Israeli politics and American Jewish identity cast a long shadow on the Middle East cultural battlefield. From “The Myth of the Powerful Jew” (1979) — which discusses ideas of Jewish “whiteness” and otherness a decade and a half before the academy turned it into a cottage industry — to “Is There Still a Jewish Question? Why I’m an Anti-Anti-Zionist” (2003), Willis’s writing is not just nuanced, but a model of how to blend political insight and personal doubt, fueled by a strong progressive vision.
This tentative, yet glorious, utopianism may be Willis’s greatest legacy to future readers. In the epilogue to her second book, No More Nice Girls: Counterculture Essays (1992) she writes:
