RIP

Sheesh, all this talking with my ladies has made me miss a death of a very important woman, Ellen Willis, from her info on Wikipedia:

She is also known for her feminist politics and was a founding member of Redstockings. She was one of the few women working in music criticism during its inaugural years, when it was by and large a male-dominated field. Starting in 1979, Willis wrote a number of essays that were highly critical of anti-pornography feminism, criticizing it for what she saw as its sexual puritanism and moral authoritarianism, as well as its threat to free speech. These essays were among the earliest expressions of feminist opposition to the anti-pornography movement. Her 1981 essay, "Lust Horizons: Is the Women's Movement Pro-Sex?" is the origin of the term, "pro-sex feminism".[4] She was also a strong supporter of women's abortion rights, and in the early 1980s was a founding member of the pro-choice street theater and protest group No More Nice Girls.

Redstockings is really cool. Willis and the better know Shulamith Firestone founded it, and more info can be found here:

The group is a strong advocate of consciousness raising and what they refer to as "The Pro-Woman Line" – the idea that women's submission to male supremacy was a conscious adaptation to their lack of power under patriarchy, rather than internalized "brainwashing" on the part of women, as was held by some other radical feminist groups. Redstockings holds the view that all men oppress all women as a class and that it is the responsibility of individual men to give up male supremacy, rather than the responsibility of women to change themselves.

I apologize for those of you who I haven't been talking to about all of this - it may seem to come out of way left field. But rest assured it's not - I've been formulating much of this in my head for weeks and am finally able to get it out. I guess my blog is my outlet for consciousness raising. And to think I used to scoff at that term in my women's studies courses.