Annie Sprinkle

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 City, 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. 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. 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 five 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. Her most popular lecture was 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 a seven year long art project 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." in 2006 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 to 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 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 drew greater attention to the female orgasm. A stated aim of her performance art and other works has been to expand and deconstruct mainstream ideals of sexuality. Sprinkle and her wife Beth Stephens are known for promoting a combination of environmental activism and sexuality called ecosexuality, and launching the ecosex movement with their Ecosex Manifesto. They state ecosexuality involves imagining nature as a lover. Ecosexuality combines sexuality and ecology and opposes sexual dynamics of dominance and exploitation, placing it adjacent to ecofeminism, which highlights how women and nature are treated similarly in a patriarchal society. == Post-porn movement ==

Annie Sprinkle coined the term "post-porn" to describe sexually explicit media that is experimental, conceptual, humorous, feminist, artsy, punk, and outside of mainstream porn aesthetics. In her one-woman touring show "Post-Porn Modernist" (1989–95), she performed Public Cervix Announcement, Sprinkle inserted a speculum into her vaginal canal to display her cervix to the audience in a playful, satirical celebration of the female body. Sprinkle has characterized her own art involving erotic and explicit imagery of the vulva and internal female anatomy as feminist activism. 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 seen as sexual. == Publications ==

• Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Jennie Klein, 2021. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. • • • (1991). In • • • • (1997). In • • — winner of a 2002 Firecracker Alternative Book Award • "Contributor". In: • • • "Foreword" (2007). In: • "Foreword" (2014). In: . • • == Filmography ==