by Ariel Levy
Royalle knew her movement sisters wouldn’t see it that way. “I pretty much lost touch with them. I knew that what I was doing would be seen as a betrayal, that I was taking part in something that was considered degrading to women. It was my way of going to the other extreme,” she says. “Rebelling against the too-radical uptightness that was turning a movement I loved into these old biddies telling me we shouldn’t have relationships with men.”
Imagine how Susan Brownmiller must have felt. Her vision had always been crystalline, her beliefs ardent. She had become engaged in the women’s liberation movement when it was a unified, sure-footed quest for change, and suddenly she was in a maze of contradictions. Now there were “feminists” working with conservative Republicans. There were “feminist” pornographers. There were separatist “feminists,” and there was a highly vocal contingent of S/M lesbian “feminists.” What had been clear and beautiful was now messy and contentious.
“There had been an innocent bravery to the anti-pornography campaign in the beginning, a quixotic tilting at windmills in the best radical feminist tradition,” Brownmiller writes in In Our Time. But it degenerated into a deadlock. “Movement women were waging a battle over who owned feminism, or who held the trademark to speak in its name, and plainly on this issue no trademark existed.” Sisterhood had been powerful, but infighting and scoldings grew exhausting. Movement women were becoming depleted. “Ironically, the anti-porn initiative constituted the last gasp of radical feminism,” writes Brownmiller. “No issue of comparable passion has arisen to take its place.”
On the Web site for the group CAKE, it says “The new sexual revolution is where sexual equality and feminism finally meet.” CAKE throws monthly parties in New York City and London at which women can “explore female sexuality” and experience “feminism in action.” They lament, “Back in the day, because fighting sexual abuse was the priority, mainstream feminism tended to treat sexuality like a dark horse.” CAKE wants to fix all that. Founders Emily Kramer and Melinda Gallagher cite Hugh Hefner as a hero.
CAKE parties are so prominent they were featured on an episode of Law & Order in 2004—renamed Tart parties, which actually seems like a more apt moniker when you think about it. (In an interview with ABC’s 20/20, Kramer and Gallagher said that they chose “cake” as their name because it is a slang term for female genitalia, and connotes something “gooey, sweet, yummy, sexy, sticky.”) They have 35,000 online subscribers, a book deal, a Web boutique through which they sell tank tops and vibrators, and a Showtime reality pilot in the works.
CAKE is also a sort of hypersexual sorority. You have to pledge to get in, which involves writing an essay and paying a hundred dollars. Then, if you are accepted, you get regular e-mails from CAKE’s founders called “CAKE Bytes,” with commentary on everything from the Bush Administration’s war of attrition on abortion rights to the perceived weaknesses of Sex and the City. Kramer and Gallagher engage in a certain amount of old-school grassroots organizing—they arranged for a bus to take women from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., for the April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives, for example—but their parties are what have put them on the map.
Themes have ranged from “Striptease-a-thons” to porn parties, and the events are thrown at upscale venues like the W hotels and velvet-rope clubs throughout Manhattan and London. CAKE made the front page of the New York Post with one of their early parties in 2001, at which two guests, the adult film actors Marie Silva and Jack Bravo, had intercourse and oral sex inside CAKE’s designated “Freak Box,” a steel closet with a camera inside offering everyone outside live streaming video of the shagging-in-action projected onto huge screens throughout the party.
In the fall of 2003, they threw an event called “CAKE Underground” at a club called B’lo in Manhattan. On the e-vite, they said it was an opportunity to “witness the REAL LIFE ACTUALIZATION of women’s sexual desires.”
They had hired a dwarf to work the elevator. The words “exhibitionism” and “voyeurism” and the letters XXX were projected onto the club walls. The hos they wanna fuck, 50 Cent boomed over the sound system. I was presented with a sticker of a woman’s hip to knee region clad in garters and fishnets above the words, “ASK ME: If I know where my G-spot is.” (I am strangely shy about discussing the topography of my vagina with strangers, so I declined to wear the sticker as instructed by the woman in pigtails at the door.)
Gallagher, a stunning thirty-year-old with long chestnut hair and the physique of a short model, and Kramer, who wore punky clothes and a wary expression as she surveyed her party, have adopted the women’s movement’s early policy on admissions to anti-rape speak-outs: Men pay double and have to be accompanied by a woman. That did not seem to hurt the male attendance at B’lo. The room was packed with women wearing extremely revealing clothing or just lingerie, and young men in jeans and button-down shirts who couldn’t believe their luck.
A blonde in a white fur jacket over a pink lace bra sucked a lollipop while she waited for her $11 vodka tonic at the bar. A fellow in his early thirties wearing a suit with no tie asked her, “Have you ever had a threesome?”
“What?” she said. Then she realized that he was only reading off the ASK ME sticker she had plastered on her right breast. “Sorry,” she said. “Yeah, I’ve had like four.”
At around eleven, a troop of CAKE dancers got on the stage in the center of the huge room. They wore thigh-high patent leather boots, fishnets, and satin bra and panty sets the colors of cotton candy and clear skies.
At first, they shimmied onstage like garden variety lusty club-goers. But then a visiting crew from Showtime turned on their cameras and when the lights hit the dancers they started humping each other as if possessed. A blonde woman with improbably large breasts immediately bent over and a dancer with a souped-up Mohawk got behind her and started grinding her crotch against the other woman’s rear end.
Many, many men formed a pack around the stage and most pumped their fists in the air to the beat of the music and the humping.
“The girls are much hotter here than at the last party,” a mousy young woman in a gray skirt-suit told her friend, who was in similar straight-from-work attire.
“You think? Look at that one,” she said, pointing at Mohawk. “She’s basically flat!”
A twenty-five-year-old assistant with lovely green eyes and an upswept ponytail was looking back and forth between the dancers onstage and her ex-boyfriend, who was having a smile-filled conversation with a sleek woman in a black bra. “What should I do?” she said. “Should I go over there? Should I go home?”
The next day, I called her at her office at around one o’clock. (She was so hung over I could almost smell the alcohol through the phone.) “He went home with that girl,” she said. “I ended up staying really late. My friend and I were in the back room and we got really drunk and kind of hooked up with like seven people. Mostly girls. The guys just watched. Uck.”
Many of the conflicts between the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution and within the women’s movement itself were left unresolved thirty years ago. What we are seeing today is the residue of that confusion. CAKE is an example of the strange way people are ignoring the contradictions of the past, pretending they never existed, and putting various, conflicting ideologies together to form one incoherent brand of raunch feminism.
Some of this is motivated by a kind of generational rebellion. Embracing raunch so casually is a way for young women to thumb our noses at the intense fervor of second-wave feminists (which both Kramer and Gallagher’s mothers were). Nobody wants to turn into their mother. Certainly, this generation can afford to be less militant than Susan Brownmiller’s compatriots because the world is now a different place. In their book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000), Jennifer Baumgardner and Gloria Steinem’s former assistant Amy Richards tell us they are different from their “serious sisters of the sixties and seventies” because they live in a time when the “femini
st movement has such a firm and organic toehold in women’s lives.”
But raunch feminism is not only a rebellion. It is also a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women’s movement. “Whether it’s volunteering at a women’s shelter, attending an all women’s college or a speak-out for Take Back the Night, or dancing at a strip club,” write Baumgardner and Richards, “whenever women are gathered together there is great potential for individual women, and even the location itself, to become radicalized.” They don’t explain what “radicalized” means to them, so we are left to wonder if it is their way of saying “enlightened” or “sexually charged” or if to them those are the same things. In this new formulation of raunch feminism, stripping is as valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education or supporting rape victims. Throwing a party where women grind against each other in their underwear while fully-clothed men watch them is suddenly part of the same project as marching on Washington for reproductive rights. According to Baumgardner and Richards, “watching TV shows (Xena! Buffy!) can…contain feminism in action”—just as CAKE bills their parties as “feminism in action.” Based on these examples, it would seem raunch feminism in action is pretty easy to achieve: The basic requirements are hot girls and small garments.
I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists—“one of the most interviewed people in the world,” as she’s put it—on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of Flying. “I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo,” she said. “It’s called ‘Dumb Blonde.’ I thought, Thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans women.” She was quick to tell me that she “wouldn’t pass a law against the product or call the PC police.” But, she said, “let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation. The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m for all that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power. I don’t like to see women fooled.”
Nouvelle raunch feminists are not concocting this illogic all by themselves. Some of it they learned in school. A fervid interest in raunchy representations of sex and a particular brand of women’s studies are both faddish in academia now, and the two are frequently presented side by side, as if they formed a seamless, comprehensible totality. I went to Wesleyan University at the height of the “politically correct” craze in the nineties. Wesleyan was the kind of school that had coed showers, on principle. There were no “fresh men,” only “frosh.” There were no required courses, but there was a required role-play as part of frosh orientation in which we had to stand up and say “I’m a homosexual” and “I’m an Asian-American,” so that we would understand what it felt like to be part of an oppressed group. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but such was the way of PC.
I remember a meeting we once had, as members of the English majors committee, with the department faculty: We were there to tell them about a survey we’d given out to English majors, the majority of whom said they wanted at least one classics course to be offered at our college. We all bought the party line that such a class should never be required because that would suggest that Dead White Men were more important than female and nonwhite writers. But we figured it couldn’t do any harm for them to offer one canonical literature course for those of us who wanted to grasp the references in the contemporary Latin American poetry we were reading in every other class. It seemed like a pretty reasonable request to me. After I made my pitch for it, the woman who was head of the department at that time looked at me icily and said, “I would never teach at a school that offered a course like that.”
It was a pretty weird time. It was not okay to have a class tracing the roots of Western literature, but it was okay to offer a class on porn, as a humanities professor named Hope Weissman did, in which students engaged in textual analysis of money shots and three-ways. In an environment in which everyone was talking about “constructions” of gender and pulling apart their culturally conditioned assumptions about everything, it seemed natural to take apart our culturally conditioned assumptions about sex—i.e., that it should be the manifestation of affection, or even attraction. And sex wasn’t just something we read about in class, it was the most popular sport on campus. (This became clear to me almost immediately: When I first visited Wesleyan as a seventeen-year-old senior in high school, I was taken to the cafeteria, some classes, and a Naked Party. I remember giant crepe paper penis and vagina decorations.) Group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur. By the time I was in college we heard considerably less than people had in the eighties about “No means no,” possibly because we always said yes.
The modish line of academic thinking was to do away with “works” of literature or art and focus instead on “texts,” which were always products of the social conditions in which they were produced. We were trained to look at the supposedly all-powerful troika of race, class, and gender and how they were dealt with in narrative—and that narrative could be anywhere, in Madame Bovary or Debbie Does Dallas—rather than to analyze artistic quality, which we were told was really just code for the ideals of the dominant class.
Kramer is also a product of this academic moment. When I met her, she was not long out of Columbia University, where she majored in gender studies and wrote her thesis on “how the power dynamics of sexuality should ideally allow for both men and women to explore, express and define sexuality for themselves.” In an e-mail, she told me she started CAKE with Gallagher because she felt the “mainstream messaging related to sexuality either pitted female sexuality in terms of male sexuality—like articles in popular women’s magazines on how to please your man—or defined sexuality as dominated by men…like critical feminist texts.” (Kramer’s writing here has echoes of Shere Hite, who wrote in the preface to the original Hite Report, published in 1976, “female sexuality has been seen essentially as a response to male sexuality and intercourse. There has rarely been any acknowledgment that female sexuality might have a complex nature of its own which would be more than just the logical counterpart of {what we think of as} male sexuality.”) Kramer was edging in on a solution. “I thought there should be another option for women, and began to formulate a theory behind what that option should be.” She wouldn’t spell her theory out for me, but presumably CAKE parties are its embodiment.
Despite Kramer and Gallagher’s magniloquence on “mainstream messaging” and “feminism in action,” I was reminded of CAKE parties a few months later when I attended an event in a giant parking lot in Los Angeles for Maxim magazine’s “Hot 100,” their annual assessment of the hundred hottest famous women. People were lined up in scantily clad droves on Vine Street, waiting to get rejected when their names were mysteriously found missing from the phone book–sized list at the door. Past the gatekeepers, there was an orange jeep and two hired girls in bikini tops and black cowboy boots who spent the evening smiling, arching their backs, and buffing the vehicle with bandannas.
This was a high-profile party with press coverage and celebrities (Denzel Washington, Christian Slater, the model Amber Valletta, the singer Macy Gray, and of course, Paris Hilton). Somehow, a pair of inordinately geeky-looking guys who were actually wearing backpacks got in. One turned to the other and said, “See that black girl in front of you? Look at her face. She’s so fine.” The dance floor was a sea of naked legs perched on high-heeled sandals.
The party extended into an adjacent warehouse, where a smoke machine kept the air gauzy, and in the center, there was a large bed on a raised dais on which two girls, one Asian, one blonde, both in lingerie and pigtails, had an extended pillow fight. Behind the bar, tall females in white feathered tops danced on poles, their faces set in masks of lascivious contempt. Keith Blanchard, then Maxim’s editor-in-chief, told me, “It’s a sexy night!”
To me, “sexy” is based on the inexplicable
overlap of character and chemicals that happens between people…the odd sense that you have something primal in common with another person whom you may love, or you may barely even like, that can only be expressed through the physical and psychological exchange that is sex. When I’m in the plastic “erotic” world of high, hard tits and long nails and incessant pole dancing—whether I’m at a CAKE party, walking past a billboard of Jenna Jameson in Times Square, or dodging pillows at the Maxim Hot 100—I don’t feel titillated or liberated or aroused. I feel bored, and kind of tense.
In defense of CAKE parties, Gallagher told a reporter from Elle magazine, “you try getting 800 people to behave in a feminist way!” To be sure, that’s no small project. But we have to wonder how displaying hot chicks onstage in exactly the same kind of miniature outfits they’ve always been in moves things in the right direction. If CAKE is promoting female sexual culture, I can’t believe there aren’t other ways to excite women. I even believe there are other ways to excite men.
Kramer said, “CAKE’s mission is to change public perceptions about female sexuality,” and their Web site claims they seek to “redefine the current boundaries [of] female sexuality.” If the whole point is change and redefinition, then I wonder why the CAKE imagery—from the porn movies they project on the walls at their parties to the insignia they use on their Web site, a sexy cartoon silhouette of a lean, curvy lady with wind-swept hair and her hand on her hip—looks so utterly of a piece with every other bimbo pictorial I’ve seen in my life. Why is this the “new feminism” and not what it looks like: the old objectification?