Annie Sprinkle

Annie M. Sprinkle (born Ellen F. Steinberg on July 23, 1954) is an American certified sexologist, performance artist, former sex worker, and advocate for sex work and health care.

Sprinkle has worked as a prostitute, sex educator, feminist stripper, pornographic film actress, and sex film producer and director. In 1996, she became the first known porn star to get a doctoral degree, earning a PhD in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.

Identifying as ecosexual, Sprinkle is best known for her self-help style of pornography, teaching individuals about pleasure, and for her conventional pornographic film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (1981). Through the production of feminist based pornographic content, include understanding of female genitalia and pornography based on women's desires, Sprinkle has contributed to feminist pornography and the larger social movement of feminism; she is also known for contributing to the rise of the post-porn movement and bisexual/lesbian pornography. Sprinkle, a bisexual woman and member of the LGBTQ+ community, married her long-time partner Beth Stephens in Canada on January 14, 2007.

Life and career
Sprinkle was born Ellen F. Steinberg on July 23, 1954, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Russian-Jewish mother and a Polish-Jewish father. Her family moved to Los Angeles, California, when she was five years old, and she lived in Panama from age thirteen to seventeen. At eighteen, she began working at the ticket booth at the Cine-Plaza Theatre in Tucson, Arizona, when Deep Throat (1972) was playing. The film was busted, and when Steinberg had to appear in court as a witness, she met and began a relationship with Deep Throat's director, Gerard Damiano, becoming his mistress. She followed him to New York City, where she lived for twenty-two years.

Not long after becoming Damiano's mistress, Steinberg began working in porn herself and, at that time, started calling herself "Annie." As her career continued, she says that one night, "as if from the goddess herself," the name "Annie Sprinkle" came to her. She later changed her name legally to Annie Sprinkle. Her first porn movie was Teenage Deviate released in 1975. Perhaps her best known mainstream porn featured role was in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (co-directed by Sprinkle and sexploitation veteran Joseph W. Sarno) which was the No. 2 grossing porn film of 1981.

In 1991, Sprinkle created the Sluts and Goddesses workshop, which became the basis for her 1992 production The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop – Or How To Be A Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps. The film was co-produced and co-directed with videographer Maria Beatty, and it featured music by composer Pauline Oliveros. Sprinkle pioneered new genres of sexually explicit film and video such as edu-porn, gonzo, post porn, xxx docudrama, art porn, and feminist erotica. Sprinkle has also presented many sex workshops with fellow sex facilitator Barbara Carrellas, with whom she presented the stage production Metamorphosex.

Sprinkle has appeared in almost 200 films, including hard- and softcore pornography, B movies, loops, and numerous documentaries. She starred in Nick Zedd's experimental films War Is Menstrual Envy (1992), Ecstasy in Entropy (1999), and Electra Elf: The Beginning (2005). She also appeared in various television shows including four HBO Real Sex programs. She has also produced, directed, and starred in several of her own films, such as Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle's Amazing World of Orgasm, and Linda/Les & Annie—The First Female to Male Transsexual Love Story. Her work in adult films earned her a spot on the Adult Star Path of Fame in Edison, New Jersey, and she was inducted to both the AVN Hall of Fame and the XRCO Hall of Fame in 1999. For three decades, she has presented her work as a visiting artist at many major universities and colleges in the US and Europe.

Annie Sprinkle is known as the "prostitute and porn star turned sex educator and artist." Her best known theater and performance art piece is her Public Cervix Announcement, in which she invites the audience to "celebrate the female body" by viewing her cervix with a speculum and flashlight. She also performed The Legend of the Ancient Sacred Prostitute, in which she did a "sex magic" masturbation ritual on stage. She has toured one-woman shows internationally for 17 years, some of which were titled Post Porn Modernist, Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn,   and Hardcore from the Heart. She then performed two-woman shows with Beth Stephens titled Exposed; Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art, Dirty Sex Ecology, Earthly: An Ecosex Bootcamp, and Ecosex Walking Tour.

Her work and publications, spanning over four decades, are studied in courses at numerous universities, in theater history, women's studies, performance studies, LGBTQ studies and film studies courses. Through The New School of Erotic Touch, she has released several video classes, including Female Genital Massage and Amazing World of Orgasm. Currently her lecture presentation is called "My Life and Work as a Feminist Porn Activist, Radical Sex Educator, and Ecosexual". She has also presented dozens of "Free Sidewalk Sex Clinics", offering free sex education to the public in public space.

Sprinkle's work has always been about sexuality, with a political, spiritual and artistic bent. In December 2005, she committed to doing seven years of art projects about love with her art collaborator and eventual wife, Beth Stephens. They called this their Love Art Laboratory. Part of their project was to do an experimental art wedding each year, and each year had a different theme and color. The seven-year structure was adapted to their project by invitation of artist Linda M. Montano. Sprinkle and Stephens have done twenty-one art weddings, eighteen with ecosexual themes. They married the Earth, Sky, Sea, Moon, Appalachian Mountains, the Sun, and other non-human entities in nine different countries including at Montreal's Edgy Women Festival in 2011.

She was featured in Maya Gallus's 1997 documentary film Erotica: A Journey Into Female Sexuality.

Sprinkle and her partner Beth Stephens became pioneers of ecosexuality, a kind of earth-loving sexual identity, which states, "The Earth is our lover". Their Ecosex Manifesto proclaims that anyone can identify as an ecosexual along with being "GLBTQI, heterosexual, asexual, and/or Other." Sprinkle identifies as a sex-positive feminist, and much of her activist and sex education work reflects this philosophy. In 2009, she appeared in the French documentary film Mutantes: Punk, Porn, Feminism, speaking about the beginnings of the movement as well as her own contributions to it.

In 2017, Sprinkle and Stephens were official artists in Documenta 14. They presented performances and visual art, lectured, and previewed their new film documentary, Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure.

Harvard's Schlesinger Library acquired her papers from 1967-2010, including those covering work with her partner Elizabeth Stephens.

Feminism and environmental activism
Sprinkle is known as a contributor to the development of pornography that intends to be feminist and is known for her disagreement with women against pornography, feminists who do not believe that the creation of feminist porn is possible and argue that porn is a means of hyper sexualization of women, that it is inherently harmful, promotes violence, and objectifies women. In contrast Sprinkle is known for arguing that women should contribute to the production of pornography or other erotic media and that censorship or restrictions on pornography will not cease its production.

As a porn actress, Sprinkle refused to play any submissive roles. She also drew greater attention to the female orgasm. A stated aim of her performance art and other works has been to challenge the censorship of female genitals including the vulva, clitoris, vagina.

Sprinkle and her wife Beth Stephens are known for naming and promoting a combination of environmental activism and sexuality called ecosexuality. They state ecosexuality involves seeing nature as a lover, viewing people's relationship with the Earth is two-sided and considering humans accountable for taking care of the planet and the planet as responsible for taking care of us. Ecosexuality combining sexuality and ecology with an added focus on female sexuality and opposition to heterosexual and patriarchal sexual dynamics of dominance and exploitation places it within ecofeminism, which highlights how women and nature are treated similarly in a patriarchal society.

After receiving her breast cancer diagnosis, Sprinkle made a collage of her breast tissue scans in order to provoke questions about whether a body that has been subject to surgical procedures and illness can be a sexual one. Sprinkle continued to engage in this medical commentary by juxtaposing medical scans with erotic images and using an electrocardiogram to record the waves of an orgasm. In her performance Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle inserted a speculum into her vaginal canal to display her cervix to the audience. The previous acted as satirical-commentary on the private and invasive nature of gynecological procedures. Sprinkle has characterized her own art involving erotic and explicit imagery of the vulva and internal female anatomy as feminist activism.

Post-porn movement
The post-porn movement is a counterculture body of scholarship and ideals that were developed within Europe and the USA. Within the post-porn movement there is a critical lens applied to corporations producing pornography and non-corporate pornographic content is instead valued. The post-porn movement also values the production of pornography which centres queer and gender diverse folks as well as questions the racialization and reliance on stereotypes found in the pornography industry. Sprinkle has contributed to the post-porn movement explicitly in her now retired show Post-Porn Modernist and implicitly through her artistic body of work which engages in critical reflection and parody. Sprinkle has also contributed to this movement by challenging who can be represented in porn and which bodies are sexual ones.

Publications



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