Female Chauvinist Pigs (7 page)

I don’t think Dworkin is being quite fair here. The bias against her work also has something to do with people being put off by her extremist proclamations. Consider this snippet from an article she wrote called “Dear Bill and Hillary” for
The Guardian
(London) in 1998:

This was more than Candida Royalle had bargained for. She had first gotten involved with the women’s movement in her late teens, when she attended consciousness-raising workshops in the Bronx and organized free clinics where local women could come for PAP smears and pelvic exams. For Royalle, it was an ironic disappointment to see the movement go in what felt like an anti-sex direction, because one of the most powerful things she’d gleaned from feminism was a heightened sense of connection with her own body, one area in particular: “A lot of girls don’t grow up knowing they have a clitoris,” she says. “I remember reading the very first edition of
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
and it was that book that made me understand how I could have an orgasm. I had a boyfriend for years who I’d been sleeping with and I couldn’t understand why it was never enough! But then I saw that book and there was this diagram, and it said, you know, you rub this thing long enough and then you have an orgasm. And I thought,
Oh, I think I’ll try that.
That was a big part of the movement back then. Sexual liberation was really a lot of what it was about. Sadly, that changed.”

Now middle-aged, Royalle is a bright-eyed blonde who wears wacky glasses and lives in a roomy apartment in Greenwich Village decorated with dozens of photos of herself in various phases and ages and hair colors. “I think it was the summer of 1970 that I went with a friend over to Corsica and we rented mopeds and spent a night in the mountains and took a hit of mescaline, and there’s all these really fun pictures of us,” she says. “There I am posing—probably flying—with my copy of
Sisterhood Is Powerful.
Like it’s the Bible.” (Keep in mind:
Sisterhood Is Powerful,
the anthology of feminist writings, was edited by Robin Morgan, the same woman who postulated “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”) “It was this fun moment, very much about sisterhood,” says Royalle, “but things changed. It became sort of the opposite. It started about two-thirds of the way in…you could feel the subtle shift. I remember feeling that I was becoming a minority; that I was not sticking to the party line because I did have a boyfriend, and it was kind of like I was sleeping with the enemy. There was a real move to rejecting heterosexual relationships and embracing lesbianism, or embracing separatism. There are women who won’t want to hear this, but I think a lot of women were calling themselves lesbians who, in the end, really weren’t. Because it was the thing to do, it was more politically acceptable.”

In this environment, Royalle felt almost as restricted as she had back in the fifties, only now she was rebelling against feminist sisters instead of an overprotective patriarchy. She left New York for San Francisco to pursue a career as an artist. Royalle paid the bills by modeling for other artists, which led to an offer to appear in an art film, which led to a career in pornography. “During that time I was living amongst a group of people who were fiercely independent, these outrageous drag queens. We had sex with whoever we wanted. We did drugs whenever we wanted. No one could tell us what to do. So when I needed extra money and the opportunity to be in a movie came up, it wasn’t like
Ooh, is this acceptable?
It wasn’t a big deal…there was no AIDS yet and it was still a time of sexual adventurousness.”

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.”

O
n 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.”

M
any 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 “feminist 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.