Changing The World, One Sex Party at a Time

If the New York Post isn't lurid enough for you, then you'd better hop the next plan to Sodom. The NYC rag's June 12 cover story, "Inside the Freak Box," depicts a lascivious crew of hot, young women doing some very very naughty things in a New York nightspot. And if full-contact consorting, occasional nudity and even the odd sex act weren't bad enough, the whole ordeal seemed to be wrapped up in something vaguely political. According to the Post, these sartorial femme fatales - partying, stripping, playing with sex toys in public - called themselves feminists. Oh dear.

Imagine the hand-wringing at Decency HQ when they called in that article. I mean women with vibrators, proud of their vaginas, dancing around, talking about orgasms, all without being dismissed as crazy lesbians - it's an outrage, something that must be shot down in every third-rate newspaper across the country. It's the destruction of everything Western culture stands for. And this is precisely the point.

Meet Melinda Gallagher and Emily Kramer, founders of the evocatively named company - CAKE. Their Striptease.a.thon bash at Spa on June 6 was only the tip of their sexual iceberg. They're not just making women's sexuality into front-page news; these two childhood friends are building a business - a full-blown brand - out of it. Since July of 2000, they've hosted 11 CAKE events, all built around a community of women who like feeling sexy, empowered, and well, orgasmic. Recently, they've helped produce segments on female sexuality for the Learning Channel and the Oxygen network. And now they even have a book - on women's sexual fantasies - in the works.

"American society is extremely conservative when it comes to sexuality - especially female sexuality," Gallagher tells Shout, her master's degree in Human Sexuality lending her words the inflections of a professor. "It has to do with large cultural issues - economic inequality, power." Simply put, CAKE aims to change all of that.

"When women's sexuality has to be in private, it's easily to control. If it's out in public, it's much more amorphous, hard to classify, and it becomes more threatening. That became my mission, to get [female sexuality] out there in a way that has not been done before."

 

And if changing the world means screening a little porn, as Gallagher and Kramer did at the first CAKE event more than a year ago, then so be it. "We decided to have a [porno party] because the whole pornography things is just this big black hole," Gallagher remembers. "What is it, who watches it, what do people like about it? We thought it would be such a cool idea to invite some of out friends and have a screening and then talk about it." So they invited about 100 well-heeled, porn-friendly women from CAKE's then-fledgling website, cakenyc.com

"Six hundred showed up," Kramer says. The parties have since matured into sexually charged evening. There have been hands-on demonstrations of female ejaculation and bared butts and boobs aplenty.

"It was different from any event I'd ever been to," confides 26-year old Andrew Kosewski, and advertising assistant living in Brooklyn, about CAKE's Striptease.a.thon in May. "There was a separate room devoted strictly to vibrators...I left feeling empowered."

As Gallagher explains, "There is something inherently horrible about the fact that a significant percentage of women out there have never had an orgasm. If a woman can come to CAKE and get a vibrator, get information about how to have an orgasm, accept her body and explore her body, then that is a triumph." Kramer finishes the thought: "There's empowerment with information. If you have information about sexuality and you feel confident about your sexuality, then you're going to feel like your sexuality is within your power."

These events, empowering as they are, also work as the engine of CAKE's business. "They're lucrative," Gallagher admits. "There are sponsors for the events who give us money and products to be associated with the brand. We also have membership cards; they're $50.00 and we've been selling them like hotcakes." No pun intended.

Gallagher and Kramer just finished a detailed business plan and are looking for investors. They envision a link of CAKE lifestyle products sure to make Wal-Mart blanche. Everything from CAKE tee shirts and CAKE earrings, to CAKE vibrators. Even a little porn.

"We're thinking about putting together a porn collection to make adult movies accessible for women," says Kramer. Gallagher explains, "Like a music compilation, but with porn."

When asked, Gallagher is happy to play out the political implications of pornography. "We run into feminists who say, 'Porn is inherently degrading to women, it's exploitative, and you can't be feminists and say porn is a good thing.' We've gotten into many many discussions about that, and we've grappled with it ourselves. But if you're going to help women change the world, you have to get in there and explore it. You have to get at the causes of things as opposed to just talking about the symptoms. Pornography and the [misogynist] way it's presented are not because men are evil or because sex is bad. It's because there is a power [imbalance] in our society that you can trace through anything - through economics, marriage, family."

"We're both die-hard feminists," Kramer adds. "We use the word with pride; we understand the complications of the word, the social implications, the history."

So is CAKE subversive? "There is no denying that CAKE will create social change," Kramer offers. Gallagher, for her part, answers more obliquely.

"Well, the female orgasm is subversive."

By Laura Barcella
Photograph by Emily Wilson
www.shoutny.com