Last week local paper SF Weekly ran a seven page article about Cake, the New York grrrl-power sexy party, who had their debut San Francisco party a few weeks back. I met Emily from Cake at the Center for Sex and Culture where we both shared the stage to celebrate the release of Carol‘s new book, Whipped. Emily was cute and smart and cool; she gave me a free copy of the Cake book and we chatted and joked. I didn’t make it to the party, even though my Stockroom Forum pal Midori was going.
I joked a few posts ago about the article, saying how it was hilarious the author Eliza Strickland made references to Playboy (and how dated that is, all by itself). But when I really dug into the article, I was actually pretty shocked that something so sex-negative, and olde-tyme anti-porn had made it as a viable piece about a women’s sex party in a local paper. The article wasn’t really about Cake, but was instead a grandstand for the writer to promote her views on women and porn, her extremely negative perceptions about sex workers, and make some seriously sweeping judgments about women who go to (and enjoy) events like Cake parties. I guess it just really bugs me that our local papers never seem to get what’s going on in the vibrant, exciting and edgy world of sexual San Francisco, which is always more evident when we get visits from sex-positive friends from other places. I’m saddened that Cake was treated to such distaste for free expression of female sexuality, because that’s not what we do here. We’re critical, yes, but we understand that fundamentally we’re all on the same side.
I interviewed Emily from Cake today and she gave us her opinion on the piece — and in my mind, what the article should have been about, the party — at SFist, in SFisting: We Ogle The Weekly’s Rack With Cake.
Image: the OG hottie of cupCAKEs and Lusty Lady-ness, Rachel Kramer Bussel, by Paul Sarkis.
I discussed the views put forth in the article heatedly and at length last saturday with Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders; how could someone be so out of touch with sexuality in San Francisco? I knew sex workers who went to the Cake party — off the clock, or rather, off the brass pole — and just had a plain old fun time. But Strickland’s article saw the women at Cake thusly: “Women who go to Cake parties haven’t seen or experienced the horrors brought up by people like Farley [anti-sexwork feminist quoted throughout the article]. 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.”
Honestly, if you read the article out loud and take a drink every time you say “objectify”, “male gaze”, “feminist”, and “prostitute”, you will get totally wasted. I *knew* Cake was a party! Woo-hoo!
Everything about Strickland’s article was just plain wrong, from the fact that she didn’t even bother to write about the party and contrived a ridiculous link between Cake parties, sex work and porn — to the hateful quotes from anti-prostitution feminists. If you’re going to go *there*, why not ask the unionized women at the local worker-owned Lusty Lady how they feel, too? In the end, Strickland tells us “that when real female sexual empowerment comes along, it will look quite different.” My question is, that since she still thinks women’s sexuality is Playboy magazine, how the fuck will *she* know?
Someone please tell Eliza Strickland that women who like sex are not *whores*.
And as for whores, some of them them really like thier jobs — a favorite comment is from a friend who told me that she went into escorting “because there’s nothing more humiliaitng that waitressing”.
