A Piece of Cake: Recipes for Female Sexual Pleasure - Hardcover

Women today are leading vibrant and diverse sexual lives. We are evolving in our relationships and our careers, entertaining a never-ending variety of fantasies and realizing pleasure-filled adventures. A distinct and powerful female sexual culture is emerging, wherein women are more satisfied and in control than ever before.

Despite this progress, many age-old myths and misconceptions about women and sex still abound. Female pleasure is discussed in antiquated terms, when it's discussed at all. We are supposedly less sexual than men, labeled either "bad girls" or "good girls," sexy babes or sexless mothers, sluts or virgins. Moreover, we're expected to just "look good" rather than "feel good," encouraged to fake it if we can't "make it," and generally discouraged from getting off.

There is a huge disconnect between how women are portrayed and how women really live, fantasize, think, and act. In 2000, we created CAKE to set the record straight. We began producing events in New York City and later expanded to London. We launched the CAKE website -- www.cakenyc.com -- and asked women from around the world to share their sexual experiences with us. Our goal was to create a forum, to begin a dialogue, and to allow women to integrate sexuality into all aspects of their lives. From our first CAKE event, where naughty excerpts from 100 of the best erotic films were projected on 40-foot screens, we knew we were on to something! We watched as the floodgates opened and women started talking...dirty!

Over the past five years we have talked to, worked with, and entertained thousands of women, in person and online. We created the CAKE Report, an online sex survey that included demographics, personal sexual histories, body image, masturbation habits, orgasm techniques, fantasy lives, partner explorations, contraception preferences, and sexual health practices. Slowly but surely, a fresh vision of female sexuality emerged.

Many of the women we interviewed live in New York City. Others are scattered throughout the United States, and the rest hail from the UK and abroad. Some are married, and some are single. They come from a wide variety of religious backgrounds. A majority have college or graduate degrees, some have children, and most identify as "straight," though they are not always fond of labels.

What follows is a profile of a new generation of women, and the birth of the CAKE philosophy of female sexuality.

Recipes for Female Sexual Pleasure

We have chosen to highlight positive ways that women seek and find sexual pleasure. We do not claim that all women have experienced or must explore sexuality in every way we suggest. Our agenda is to provide more options for women and to show the many ways that women get turned on and get off.

Let's get started. Here are recipes for you to expand your repertoire. Female sexuality is about to come out of the closet.

The CAKE Philosophy

• Women like to initiate sex.
• We get turned on every day of the week.
• We are visual.
• We fantasize.
• We know how to get ourselves off.
• We like sex (better than shopping!).
• We know how our bodies work.
• Sex isn't over with until we orgasm.

Copyright © 2005 by Melinda Gallagher and Emily Kramer

and are being evolved.

-- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species

It was the summer between 6th and 7th grade when I read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume. Margaret always talked about finding her "special spot," and I read the book, like, twice, trying to figure out where the hell that was. Finally I just started exploring my own body and found my clitoris right away. We've been best friends ever since!

-- Elizabeth, 22

We start our journey with the origins of women's sexual lives -- our childhood years. This time is all about self-discovery; as kids, we dream, feel, touch, and explore. Long before your "first time," you had a first fantasy. Indeed, your first kiss may have come after your first orgasm. There were movies that made you hot (remember Grease?) before you even knew about real turn-on material. These were the moments when we first encountered sexual pleasure. And then there was light....

But it wasn't all good. Just as our curiosity compelled us to explore, we learned that our role was to be sexually passive, ultimately monogamous, and more emotional than sexual. Now, that's no fun! Despite these messages, we forged on in secret, when no one was watching. We searched, scrounged, and sometimes begged for more information about what was going on with our bodies. With determination and luck, we found our own paths to pleasure, and our sexual evolution began.

Looking back on these primitive times, we find it's quite clear that our capacity to be sexual doesn't just pop into the picture when we are adults. We've been sexual all along. Let's go back behind the scenes and take a brief look at how our first experiences with sexuality affect who we are today. Join us for a trip down memory lane -- from birth to babe.

You're no more than eleven years old, in bed with your silky "My Pretty Pony" comforter snuggled around you. The pillow is between your legs and you curiously start rubbing rhythmically up against it. The sensation is like an itch that feels better the more you scratch it; you rock against the soft fluffiness, faster and harder, until you explode. You are shocked and amazed, but you don't tell anyone about your new favorite bedtime routine. Not long after, you decide to touch yourself with your fingers to see how that feels, and you find your sensitive clitoris. Your nightly ritual evolves, and you learn that you love your smell, that your nipples like to be squeezed, and that the air from the ceiling fan feels good blowing across your body -- the same things you love to this very day.

Oh, the places we'll go! Renee (27) wishes she had been taught that her first sexual feelings (and she had a lot of them) were natural. Little did she know, at age 7, that she wasn't the only girl who loved to climb the rope in gym class! No one, not even her friends, had ever talked to her about sex, let alone masturbation, so she tried to stop her hands from heading south of the border. In junior high, she heard about a "nasty" thing called jerking off that only boys did, but since what she did felt so good, she figured that must be something else entirely.

The female body is obviously not so difficult if a six-year-old can work it out sans instructions. Roberta (23) found her clitoris when she was wiping herself after she peed. Going about her business, she felt something that was different than usual. She repeated the motion and discovered her clitoris, and moments later she had her first orgasm. All of this occurred before she even knew what was happening to her; all she cared about was that it felt great! Once we experience arousal, the natural next steps are masturbation and hopefully orgasm -- and that's exactly the path many girls take, like ducks to water.

Sure, it's not always so easy. Maggie (35) tried touching herself early on. It felt really nice, but the magic never happened. When she was 14, her boyfriend convinced her to try it out again. So one day she kept rubbing, determined to figure out what he was so excited about. During an after-school nap, she alternated between her left index finger and her middle finger and her left index finger, because each one kept getting tired, until after over an hour her right middle finger did the job. She remembers thinking, "My head is exploding, I am going to die here, and this is how they are going to find me, with my hand down my pants!"

It's cause for celebration when women learn to masturbate early, and masturbate often. After our first orgasm, there's just no turning back. In one moment, we truly begin to understand the relationship between sexual thoughts, that feeling "down there," our body's capability to experience pleasure, and the positive power of it all. We may not know what it all means, but we're sure we want to do it again...and again...

Pleasure Tip: Remember one technique you discovered on your own that felt good when you were a kid (maybe that time in your basement, springing up and down on the bouncy ball...) and try it again now.

You're taking your time in the tub when your mom barges in and yells, "Stop touching yourself! Get out of that tub and stop thinking naughty thoughts!" You knew it! You're going straight to hell for your evil ways. But instead of atoning for your sins, you simply learn to be more secretive.

When masturbation is forced to hide out at home, it's easy to feel ashamed of our sexual development. Even when we're not explicitly discouraged, we still know that our habit is considered "bad." If we have little outside encouragement, we go off on our own lonesome journeys toward figuring out how to actively experience pleasure. But with just a shove in the right direction, we're off to the races. Yeehaw!

When Melissa was thirteen, her mother had the unusual foresight to give her daughter her first vibrator! Her mom instructed her to "go to it, and figure out what makes you feel good before you share yourself with another person." This motherly deed made Melissa (now 31) feel that her body and her pleasure were hers to own and that it was up to her to decide how and when she would share them with someone else. Many years, and thousands of orgasms later, Melissa's mom's advice has worked extremely well.

Melissa, consider yourself a lucky, lucky girl! Many of us don't get such positive direction from our families and are, instead, se...