But new critics are beginning to emerge. Radical feminists are launching blogs and taking up that old debate again, in a tougher cultural context. Often they're women who've survived or worked with survivors of incest, rape, abuse, and harassment. They are women who didn't find sex work rewarding or empowering, but soul-crushing and destructive.
"In order to accept prostitution, pornography, and stripping as part of mainstream sexuality, you have to not know how violent and exploitive it is, the emotional damage it does, how profoundly racist it is, how many of the acts meet the legal definition for torture," says Prostitution Research & Education's Melissa Farley. "And you have to not know that many people in it really want to get out."
Emily Kramer and Melinda Gallagher founded Cake in 2000.
In New York City, Cake parties easily draw 800 people.
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The disconnect between the two camps quickly becomes obvious. Women who go to Cake parties haven't seen or experienced the horrors brought up by people like Farley. It's a pretty safe bet that nobody at the Impala was contemplating a career as a sex worker, that none of the attendees had ever been slapped around by a pimp or spent a six-hour shift pole-dancing for ranks of leering men. These unscarred, prosperous girls were just playing.
Critics say this kind of behavior is both elitist and insensitive. "A lot of these women, they're trying on these roles because they think it's edgy or hip," says Rebecca Whisnant, who co-edited a book called Not for Sale that was discussed at Girl Fest Bay Area. But they don't think about the effects of that play-acting, she explains. When camera-ready girls talk about stripping by choice, they camouflage the fact that many women in the sex industry have few other options.
It's a symptom of free-market feminism, says Whisnant, in which the rights of the individual consumer are paramount. "This is something that you see a lot in the statements of Ôfeminist' porn producers and so on. ÔIf this doesn't harm me, if in fact it's good for me, then it's feminist' — which is about the most piss-poor conception of feminism I've ever heard. Feminism is dead at that point, as far as I'm concerned," she states. "Feminism is not necessarily about doing what's good for you — hopefully it will be good for you. But it's about considering the implications of your choices and everybody's choices for women in general. That has just disappeared completely from the whole world of so-called sex-positive feminism."
The big, unanswered question is why so many women are embracing exhibitionism. Two splashy books recently came out that tackled parts of that query. Pamela Paul's Pornified and Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Cultureboth say Cake is one symptom of a much larger problem.
Women are emulating male sexual behavior, they say, in a garbled attempt at equality. By reading Playboy, admiring porn stars, and adopting a more casual, anything-goes approach to promiscuity the modern girl is trying to show that she's one of the guys. She doesn't sue her boss if he invites her along to the strip club after the client dinner; she looks at it as a mark of his favor and a good networking opportunity.
"I think it's a very twisted way of looking at women's liberation to assume that every step towards aping men is a step forward," Paul says. "I think women are kidding themselves. They talk about owning something, empowering yourself. You can talk about all of that, but if I go out and eat 20,000 Big Macs, am I owning McDonald's? Am I empowering my body by co-opting it myself? It doesn't make any sense. "
While some women legitimately enjoy the power that comes with exhibitionism, not all who pull their tops off are fulfilling a secret desire. In early March, for example, the American Medical Association conducted a survey of female college students and recent graduates. Asked about behavior on spring break trips, 57 percent agreed that being promiscuous was a way to fit in.
The societal expectations that tell women that overt sexuality is the "right" way to be sexual have helped Cake become a phenomenon, although its founders are loath to admit it. Kramer and Gallagher may not have set out to prove anything when they threw their first Porn Party, but over the years they have become more determined to portray Cake events as part of a feminist empowerment movement.
"I feel like we're right in the middle of this long story," says Gallagher. "We've now progressed to a certain level. We have this sense of equality, and female sexuality is a priority in our lives, and we have a positive body image. Now where do we take that in our lives?"
So far, the best answer they've come up with is to put female sexuality on display on top of the slick bar, in a scene that can be mistaken for a Playboyparty. It may be that there aren't many new ways to create an erotic charge in a room full of men and women — we're limited by biology, after all, and millions of years of conditioning. Or it may be that we're not as far along in the story as Gallagher thinks, and that when real female sexual empowerment comes along, it will look quite different.
