"To me, the television is sex, the bed is sex, the sky is sex, you're sex, I'm sex, everything is sex." Annie Sprinkle flies bare-breasted and smiling in the face of art-world pretension. Her work, a marriage of performance, pornography, spirituality,...
[more]"To me, the television is sex, the bed is sex, the sky is sex, you're sex, I'm sex, everything is sex."
Annie Sprinkle flies bare-breasted and smiling in the face of art-world pretension. Her work, a marriage of performance, pornography, spirituality, and science, is the undiluted product of 25 years as a sex worker. Sex is the love of Sprinkle's life and her life's work. She refers to herself often as a sacred prostitute, a sexual healer, and includes her experience as a hooker on her sex educator's resume.
Sprinkle created her first Performance piece, "Strip Speak" (1985), as an interactive strip routine for the Mitchell Brothers' burlesque theater in San Francisco. She asked rhetorical questions like "Who here likes big breasts?" and "Who here likes blowjobs?" in order to get down to the fundamentals of desire and the gaze. Such intimate inquiries also open the lines of communication about basic carnal concerns and taboos. Opening -- the lines of communication, the heart, her vulva (at most shows she inserts a speculum and invites the audience to view her cervix) - is the prevailing theme of her work and Sprinkle's favorite topic.
Born Ellen Steinberg in 1954 in Philly, Sprinkle went to work at a massage parlor within months of her first full-fledged sexual encounter. She later explained, "The job was so much fun and I liked it so much, that I couldn't imagine it was prostitution...In my naivete I just thought of myself as a horny masseuse. I liked having sex with the guys after giving them a massage. When it finally did occur to me that I was a hooker, and I got over the initial shock, I enjoyed the idea."
It is exactly this sense of enjoyment that pervades Annie Sprinkle's work, making it all one, big, sex-positive manifesto. "In the future, everybody will be so sexually satisfied, there'll be an end to violence, rape, and war. We will establish contact with extra-terrestrials and they will be very sexy," she predicts, outlining her utopian vision.
A post-porn modernist and a pro-porn optimist, Sprinkle is, of course, not as naive as she sounds. However, she does seem unconscious about how incredibly radical her vision is. Her feminism is vehemently against victimhood: she completely transcends expectations of what she herself should be and also of what is supposed to be sexy.
Her exuberant honesty reveals cultural repression for the sick and twisted thing it is. To hear her talk wistfully about a sexy amputee lover, or to see her video of unconventional-looking women rolling around in orgasmic ecstasy, is shocking. But shock leads to the realization of one's own sense of prejudice. Annie Sprinkle is such a strong personality that she bestirs in her audience a sense of embarrassment -- not for her, but for the impotent prudery of the dominant culture.
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