Amelia Hill in New York reports on a new club run by sexual liberation gurus who are ready to spread the word in Britain
Sunday June 17, 2001 The Observer
The latest craze to hit America is wild and raunchy. It has been condemned by the government, excoriated by the media and last week forced one of Manhattan's hottest nightclubs to close its doors and summon the police less than two hours after opening. Who thought feminism still had the power to be so controversial?
But the new wave of girl power, due to arrive on British shores next February, claims to speak for the new generation of young, straight professional women who believe they have been alienated by more conventional feminist arguments.
'Look around you,' said Melinda Gallagher, president and co-founder of Cake, a group that has taken on the battle of transforming attitudes towards women's sexuality.
'The myth that female sexuality belongs in the bedroom and is centred around pleasuring men is everywhere in mainstream society but it doesn't reflect what the young women of today are really talking about.
'Women are changing and we're right on the cusp of some big changes. The battles fought by feminism in the past have culminated in this moment,' she added. 'Our generation is stepping up and demanding its freedom just like previous generations did before us.'
Cake was born in July in a SoHo loft after Gallagher, who has a master's degree from New York University, Emily Kramer, a graduate of Columbia University, and Matthew Kramer, a former executive for MTV, decided to take the battle for equality back into the field.
The aim of Cake is to prove that women can be as aggressive and forceful in their sexuality as men; enjoying watching and participating in pornography and sex shows such as stripping just as lustfully as the other half of the population.
'Over one-fifth of pornography sold, is sold to women,' said Matthew Kramer. 'But society still deals very harshly with females who flaunt their sexuality in a confident, free way. Women can play at being forward but when the lights go down, they are expected to cede to men, male lusts and male pleasures.'
Cake's battle cry was heard last week when the New York Post, one of America's biggest-selling newspapers, cleared its front page for the story of how a nightclub was forced to shut down just one and a half hours after opening.
Spa, a downtown hangout for stars such as Sean 'P Diddy' Combs, Leonardo DiCaprio, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, had hosted a club night run by Cake and dedicated to encouraging women to express their sexuality as actively as possible.
The night was the last of three encouraging the female clubbers and their male partners - no unaccompanied man was admitted - to take part in amateur stripteases, watch female-orientated pornography and perform mild sex acts inside the Freak Box, a capsule fitted out with a camera projecting events in the box onto the walls of the club.
Previous nights had been runaway successes with crowds of more than 1,000 turning up and women claiming to feel more liberated to speak their minds and use their bodies than ever before. Last week, however, two porn stars, Marie Silva and Jack Bravo, broke federal law by having full sex inside the Freak Box, causing the club's director, Scott Sartiano, to end the evening immediately and call the police.
New York City authorities, which have recently closed down a large proportion of the city's adult entertainment businesses, are looking into the incident and although Spa has expressed regret, the club could face closure.
However, the founders of Cake are unrepentant: 'It's awkward for us to censor people having sex in a safe, secure environment but we regret that, in the furore, our real message got completely lost,' said Emily Kramer.
Cake will arrive in London next February, when the group hosts the launch party for GQ magazine's Sex Maniac's Handbook .
'We're not about man-bashing,' added Emily Kramer. 'Men are half of the equation and there can't be change without them, and we're not just trying to move the power dynamic: this isn't about women being on top but about where we get our assumptions about female sexuality from and whether they still represent us.'
'We realised that there was this trend on the streets that wasn't being reflected outside the white-collar world of academia,' said Gallagher. 'Women are examining the images of sexuality they see around them and realising it doesn't add up for them.
'Cake is the result of everything feminism has built up to so far,' she added. 'It's being played out by the new generation of women and we're just giving them a stage.'
Silva, one of America's most popular porn stars, believes the group has found a fresh way to make feminism relevant to young women.
More conventional feminists are divided over Cake's platform, with many quick to disassociate themselves and accuse the founders of trivialising feminism's past battles - and those still waiting to be waged.
'Women every day are struggling with survival,' said Naomi Wolff, author of The Beauty Myth. 'Feminism's battles are about sexual assault and domestic violence. Trying to call this a feminist issue is an embarrassing and complete failure to recognise what feminism is really about.'
Others, including Katie Roiphe, author of The Morning After: Sex. Fear and Feminism, agree that the society's repression of female sexuality is still an issue but believes the time for large-scale statements is past.
'You just have to look at the success of The Rules to see how women are still advised to behave towards men but the real questions we still have to answer are about how women deal with all the opportunities on offer to them today,' she said. 'These have to be answered in the personal realm and applied to how women live their day-to-day lives. I'm not sure these public gestures are necessary any longer.'
Emily Kramer rejects such claims, maintaining that sexual equality hinges on the freedom for women to express themselves as publicly and as theatrically as possible. 'As long as somebody has the ability to suppress such a large piece of women's energy and being, we remain in a state of incompletion,' she said.
'Sexual repression is a symbol of the overall economic and social domination men still exert over women,' Kramer added.
But Candida Royalle, a porn star since the Seventies who founded Femme Productions in 1984 to create adult material for a female audience, believes Cake is behind, not in front of the times.
'This is like the wave of feminism of the Sixties and Seventies when women thought being equal meant going to the office in a pin-striped suit,' she said.
'Equality is not about imitating men and sexual equality is not about flaunting female sexuality in the same way men do,' she added. 'This could be a part of the process but the important thing is to develop a language more closely related to what women really want.'