Free Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy

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