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with conservative Republicans. There were “feminist” pornographers. There were separatist “feminists,” and there was a highly vocal contingent of S/M lesbian “feminists.” What had been clear and beautiful was now messy and contentious.
    “There had been an innocent bravery to the anti-pornography campaign in the beginning, a quixotic tilting at windmills in the best radical feminist tradition,” Brownmiller writes in In Our Time. But it degenerated into a deadlock. “Movement women were waging a battle over who owned feminism, or who held the trademark to speak in its name, and plainly on this issue no trademark existed.” Sisterhood had been powerful, but infighting and scoldings grew exhausting. Movement women were becoming depleted. “Ironically, the anti-porn initiative constituted the last gasp of radical feminism,” writes Brownmiller. “No issue of comparable passion has arisen to take its place.”
     
    O n the Web site for the group CAKE, it says “The new sexual revolution is where sexual equality and feminism finally meet.” CAKE throws monthly parties in New York City and London at which women can “explore female sexuality” and experience “feminism in action.” They lament, “Back in the day, because fighting sexual abuse was the priority, mainstream feminism tended to treat sexuality like a dark horse.” CAKE wants to fix all that. Founders Emily Kramer and Melinda Gallagher cite Hugh Hefner as a hero.
    CAKE parties are so prominent they were featured on an episode of Law & Order in 2004—renamed Tart parties, which actually seems like a more apt moniker when you think about it. (In an interview with ABC’s 20/20, Kramer and Gallagher said that they chose “cake” as their name because it is a slang term for female genitalia, and connotes something “gooey, sweet, yummy, sexy, sticky.”) They have 35,000 online subscribers, a book deal, a Web boutique through which they sell tank tops and vibrators, and a Showtime reality pilot in the works.
    CAKE is also a sort of hypersexual sorority. You have to pledge to get in, which involves writing an essay and paying a hundred dollars. Then, if you are accepted, you get regular e-mails from CAKE’s founders called “CAKE Bytes,” with commentary on everything from the Bush Administration’s war of attrition on abortion rights to the perceived weaknesses of Sex and the City. Kramer and Gallagher engage in a certain amount of old-school grassroots organizing—they arranged for a bus to take women from Manhattan to Washington, D.C., for the April 25, 2004, March for Women’s Lives, for example—but their parties are what have put them on the map.
    Themes have ranged from “Striptease-a-thons” to porn parties, and the events are thrown at upscale venues like the W hotels and velvet-rope clubs throughout Manhattan and London. CAKE made the front page of the New York Post with one of their early parties in 2001, at which two guests, the adult film actors Marie Silva and Jack Bravo, had intercourse and oral sex inside CAKE’s designated “Freak Box,” a steel closet with a camera inside offering everyone outside live streaming video of the shagging-in-action projected onto huge screens throughout the party.
    In the fall of 2003, they threw an event called “CAKE Underground” at a club called B’lo in Manhattan. On the e-vite, they said it was an opportunity to “witness the REAL LIFE ACTUALIZATION of women’s sexual desires.”
    They had hired a dwarf to work the elevator. The words “exhibitionism” and “voyeurism” and the letters XXX were projected onto the club walls. The hos they wanna fuck, 50 Cent boomed over the sound system. I was presented with a sticker of a woman’s hip to knee region clad in garters and fishnets above the words, “ASK ME: If I know where my G-spot is.” (I am strangely shy about discussing the topography of my vagina with strangers, so I declined to wear the sticker as instructed by the