Make Cake. Have Cake. Eat Cake.

There. I’ve just taught you the whole of Women’s Studies in six words.

The first step is making cake: making a living. Making money. Pointing out all of the hard work of the pink collar industry that is deliberately underpaid. Lamenting the difficulties of leaving the home and family to hit the streets and provide for that same family. Cursing the fact that in order to realize potential, the sacrifices pile up until they appear to outweigh the benefits because you’re pushing a boulder uphill by yourself in sexy 4-inch heels and an apron. You fight for ingredients and you want the right to use those ingredients to make your cake without someone cutting the gas line on your oven or stealing your sugar or forcing you to choose between making a cake or pancakes for your family.

Then you have to have cake: you don’t want to make cake you can’t keep. The world reaps the benefits of your work and there is no time for you to rest on your laurels or anyone else’s. Being taken care of when you’re old has become a liability. Being taken care of when you’re young has become passé. Being taken care of because you’ve traded something of yourself is portrayed as high treason because what you can do still isn’t viewed as an action with earning power. All you do is an investment in someone else’s future, and when that person fails, all the blame comes back to you. You cannot keep your cake if it is a good cake; you cannot keep your cake if it is a bad cake. You make cakes and you put them on display, and no matter what people think of what you produced, the product is no longer yours to control. So you want to keep whatever cake you make, regardless of what it is worth to others, because it is yours.

Lastly, you want to eat cake. You want to enjoy what you do and not be ashamed of enjoying it. You want to walk down the street looking sexy and beautiful without someone raping you. You want to walk into a room with something you’ve completed without hearing people wonder who held your hand through the process. You want to bargain and buy and sell, and you want to take all the proceeds home. You want a dollar on the dollar. You want your kids and you want to decide when you don’t want your kids. You want to speak for yourself and not as an afterthought of men realizing you’re not really in the conversation they’ve had for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few years. You want to eat your cake. You want to swallow whatever consequences you’ve doled out into the world, to enjoy your spoils and your splendors, and you want to take your good old time. You want to enjoy the beauty and wonder of you without reprieve and setbacks.

Make Cake. Have Cake. Eat Cake. The trinity of capital-F Feminism. Frightening in its naive scope, especially when you realize how dull each prong of the trident truly is.

There is no such thing as an idle cake, unless you are used to seeing a finished, dressed-up, multitiered cake divorced of its processes and commitments.

A cake does not start with the ingredients you buy at the market. There were women, like those of my family way back when, who had to pick the eggs from the chickens and milk the cows and mill flour and harvest sugar and tend vanilla fields. Making cake took them considerably longer and they often never saw the pretty pastry on the table. Never mind the problem of obtaining the land and the animals those ingredients need to survive. But it’s not about the environment or the laborers bringing the ingredients to the shop so you can buy the ingredients for the cake. It’s about cake. Cake has its own layers; it doesn’t need more.

Then when you have the cake, you need it to be presentable. You could carry your own cake; but why would you do that when other people can bring it in for you? You can show it off. You can ask another woman to bring in your cake. Another woman who doesn’t have the time to make her own cakes for her friends to see because she’s busy carrying yours. A woman who ran from her horrible life to cross borders and brave bigots and withstand abuse, just so she could carry your cake on a pretty stand made by her relatives back home for pennies and never have a piece. But at least you don’t have to carry the cake; you can just have it there because you did coordinate the shopping and find a recipe adapted from the backs of other recipes. Your cake, sort of.

Now, eating the cake. Cakes are finite. There are only so many pieces you can cut of a cake, and not everyone will get a piece. So you think first come first serve will be fair. Fine. You hop onto your turbo bike to get to the dining room table first, passing women with babies on their backs walking on calloused feet. You drive past large looming buildings with women with fast tongues and quick wits who are hungry and exhausted but can’t leave because her male co-workers have no obligations and can get cake delivered to the office whenever they need it and they’ve never really given a damn where it comes from. You drive past little girls who play on fake plastic ovens and make dry mini cakes. You watch them deny pieces to other little girls who don’t do as they say, and laugh at their arbitrary decision making. You run down a few women who plan to do the Looney Tunes trick: cut a slice of the cake and take the remaining large chunk for self. But you can’t run down all of them. You see the idea lingering in too many eyes, and by the time you reach the cake to take your bite, there’s only a crumb left.

You touch it to your tongue. It’s unsatisfying and empty, and you’ve wasted your entire day, your entire life, and the lives of your mothers chasing it.

Yet you know that if that cake were whole again, you’d drive for it again if you could, and you’d go a little faster and work a little harder. But you’re uncertain if you’d change anything about how that cake happened to be there. You’re uncertain about what would happen if you were eating that cake off the dirt. You’re uncertain if you could understand a world without a cake sitting there waiting for you.

Hm.

Wonder if Feminism is ready for a diet change. Welcome to Women’s Studies. Pay no attention to the dusty recipes, the worn-out appliances or moldy ingredients, my friends. You’re here to speak to the world about a cake…