Free Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy Page B

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