Female Chauvinist Pigs (8 page)

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?

Despite what can fairly be called a campaign of begging on my part, Kramer and Gallagher refused to answer questions about why they can’t achieve their “female-directed sexual revolution” without the constant presence of taut, waxed strippers. They were evasive, I think, on the subject of girls on display because they can’t quite figure out what else to do. And it
is
a tough one—how do you publicly express the concept “sexy” without falling back on the old hot-chicks-in-panties formula? It’s a challenge that requires imagination and creativity that they do not possess. They haven’t yet found a way to enact the redefinition they are advocating, so they are wishing for feminist justification where none exists. The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.

Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it when I asked her what she made of all this, “You think you’re being brave, you think you’re being sexy, you think you’re
transcending
feminism. But that’s bullshit.”

O
n August 26, 1970, tens of thousands of women went on “strike” from their homes and families and jobs to march down Fifth Avenue on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage. The action was Betty Friedan’s brainchild, and she’d announced the idea of a “Women’s Strike for Equality” in an infamous two-hour speech at NOW’s fourth national conference—just minutes after she was voted off the board of the organization she’d started back in 1966. “They kicked Betty upstairs; everybody had had it with her at that point,” remembers Jacqui Ceballos, a former president of New York NOW and, at various other times in her seventy-eight years, a student of astrology, a television actress, and the founder of the first opera house in Bogotá, Colombia. “She had created some really very bad vibes with her position on lesbians and she had alienated everybody.” (Friedan notoriously called lesbian feminists a “lavender menace.”) “Oh, if I can tell you how they humiliated Betty Friedan! One time they sent her down to get coffee. Yes, ma’am! So she’s going to have this big strike and march. And I’m telling you, she had no one to work with. No one! But I went to Betty and I said, ‘I’ll help you.’ I got the Socialist Worker’s Party in on it and everyone was nervous about those women, but let me tell you: They were organizers!”

In an inspired publicity stunt, Ceballos and her comrades took over the Statue of Liberty. “Put a sign on her saying
WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE
!
MARCH ON AUGUST
26! I always get excited thinking about it because it was really something. We’d already had women go and case the statue and they knew
everything:
They knew what the weather was going to be like and they knew the wind angle and they knew how to hang up these two huge banners. So we got ’em up and then the guards were banging around at the entrance of the statue, but the mayor John Lindsay called and said,
Let the women be!
Oh, it was a huge event.”

The committee organizing the march also held a traditional press conference to enlist supporters. “We invited the whole press and Bella Abzug and we invited Gloria Steinem because she had been making feminist remarks, and then Betty didn’t show! She was stuck in traffic,” Ceballos says. “The press was getting antsy and I realized we were going to lose them if something didn’t happen, so I jumped up and started saying things that were in my head—saying we were going to do all these things that I had no idea if we were going to do. I told everyone that fifty thousand women would march and then I had to get ’em. There must have been no news that summer, because, I’m telling you, it went around the world. It was scary as hell! I remember running around Manhattan with Jill Ward,”
Mother Courage
’s cofounder, “putting flyers about the coming march everywhere we could find a place. At one point we were driving up Park Avenue at rush hour, stopped at a red light, and in the car next to us the couple was obviously arguing, and the woman was crying. Jill jumped out of her driver’s seat, tapped on the window, and gave the woman a flyer.

“All day long before the march at five o’clock we had actions,” Ceballos continues. “We went to restaurants that were for men only; we did a prayer service. They say we had no sense of humor, but it was hilarious: We put out the
NOW York Times
and had a wedding announcement with a picture of the groom, and we gave out awards to the Biggest Male Chauvinist and all that kind of thing. Everyone in town was waiting for us. By the time the march came, after doing actions all day, I turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue and there were
thousands
of women. I couldn’t see the end of the line. It was not a march like the early suffragists. We were dancing and singing and running and there were thousands of people watching us. After our march, Kate Millett said, ‘We are a movement now.’ And that’s how I felt: We are no longer a group of crazy radicals, we’re a political movement. At that point, even my mother got involved.”