No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

Overview
Ellen Willis’s No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays gathers two decades of writing in which a pioneering feminist critic argues that genuine liberation demands pleasure, autonomy, and a radical skepticism toward moral authority. Drawn from newspapers and magazines across the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the pieces move between political analysis, cultural criticism, and memoir-like reflection. Willis links the personal and the political without piety, insisting that feminism and the broader left must expand, not restrict, the sphere of individual freedom. The title signals her impatience with deferential roles assigned to women and with a left that sacrifices desire to respectability.

Core concerns
The collection turns repeatedly to three entwined themes: the struggle over women’s bodily and sexual self-determination; the danger of authoritarian currents on both right and left; and the unruly energies of popular culture as resources for liberation and sites of cooptation. Willis writes as a democratic socialist and civil libertarian who distrusts state power, moral panics, and the impulse to police culture. She treats feminism not as a code of conduct but as a project to enlarge human possibility, placing confidence in dissent, irony, and the pleasures of everyday life.

Feminism and sexuality
Willis’s pro–sex feminist stance runs through essays on abortion, pornography, and sexual politics. She reframes abortion rights as a positive freedom rooted in women’s authority over their lives, not a grudging exception. She denounces the anti-pornography crusade for aligning segments of feminism with conservative censors and for misdiagnosing the problem: the issue is not the representation of sex per se, but the structures of power that shape desire and work. Her argument is both principled and pragmatic: censorship strengthens the state and narrows the imagination, while sexual liberation, messy, experimental, open, offers leverage against patriarchal control. The title essay’s refusal of “nice girl” compliance models an ethics of forthrightness: say what you want, defend it publicly, and do not barter freedom for approval.

Culture, music, and pleasure
A legendary rock critic, Willis reads pop as a battleground where fantasies of freedom contend with market discipline. She writes about the thrill of rock and the disappointments of its commodification, refusing to sneer at mass taste or to romanticize the underground. Pop culture, for Willis, does not merely reflect politics; it trains sensibility, how people feel about risk, love, sex, and authority. She treats music, film, and television as laboratories of desire in which women and men test identities, sometimes reproducing domination, sometimes cracking it open. Her method honors ambivalence: she asks what pleasures mean, who gets access to them, and how they can be widened rather than moralized away.

Politics and the culture wars
Writing through the Reagan-Bush years, Willis dissects “family values,” the war on drugs, and speech-policing battles from record-label warnings to campus codes. She criticizes liberal accommodation to conservative frames and warns that the left’s own puritan impulses, nostalgia for order, suspicion of fun, sap its appeal and betray its emancipatory promise. She is equally sharp about identity politics when it hardens into factional gatekeeping, urging solidarity grounded in freedom, equality, and skepticism of coercion. The essays on AIDS, reproductive justice, and anti-feminist backlash foreground the stakes: lives, not symbols, are on the line.

Voice and significance
Willis’s style is lucid, wry, and free of jargon, combining reportage, theory, and confessional candor. She makes political clarity feel like a form of erotic honesty, a way of telling the truth about what we want and fear. The collection maps a coherent vision: a counterculture that resists both market and state paternalism by cultivating pleasure, critical intelligence, and democratic debate. Decades later, its arguments about censorship, sexual autonomy, and the uses of pop culture remain startlingly fresh, challenging movements to choose freedom over moral comfort and to take desire seriously as both motive and method of change.