Sprinkle, Sprinkle, Little Star

An Even Deeper Examination of Annie Sprinkle

by Ziad Touma

"Let there be pleasure on earth, and let it begin with me!" is Annie Sprinkle's motto, North America's pioneering sex icon, who awakened Montreal's sex-positive awareness by recently bringing to town her Sluts And Goddesses Video Workshop or How To Be A Sex Goddess In 101 Easy Steps, along with her own live, avant-garde stage performance: Post Post Porn Modernist: A One-Woman Show and Tell. Adapting with the sexual evolution (or revolution?) of our era, this missionary of the Rubber Age celebrates sex as the nourishing life-giving force, by embracing the genitals as part of our spiritual entity.

Born Ellen Steinberg, Annie Sprinkle was a chubby and timid Jewish girl, living in suburban L.A. with her two academic intellectual parents. She even did ballet and was a Girl Scout "like all the other porn stars". She candidly admits that she was never sexually abused, except for the fact that she wasn't taught to masturbate, which she considers sexual abuse. It was only after having lost her virginity at the age of seventeen that she became impassioned with sex and gave birth to her alter ego: Annie Sprinkle. "I was attracted to the sprinkles on ice cream cones and to the sound of wetness. I like waterfalls, piss, vaginal fluid, sweat, cum, anything wet. So the name "Annie Sprinkle" seemed perfect" (Annie Sprinkle in Re/Search, 1991, p.29). Now chairperson of the P.O.N.Y. committee (Prostitutes of New York) and founder of PPSS (Pornographers Promoting Safer Sex), the thirty-eight year old "Shirley MacLaine of Porn" has devoted the last twenty years of her life to passionately exploring and researching sexuality, mostly through first hand experience.

"One of the first superstars of the original '70s porn era, (...) this patron saint to the sexually disenfranchised and rebellious (...) developed a whole new church of adherents in her current incarnation as a sex workshop teacher, erotic photographer and uninhibited performance artist" (Gauntlet, 1993, p.123).

But now, after all these years of dedicated work for the industry, her personality has evolved onto a higher plateau and is reincarnated as Anya, a New Age Sex Goddess. Neither Ellen nor Annie, Anya is an older and wiser ancient persona concerned with raising awareness of the AIDS era and expanding our concepts of sex through a combination of Eastern philosophy, yoga, meditative breathing and spiritual healing. Through a reciprocal exchange of sexual and orgasmic energy, the New Ancient Sex professed by Anya is inspired by Tantric, Taoist and Native American techniques of rhythmic breathing and deep eye gazing. Her "Guidelines for Sex in the '90s" accept our generation's reality by assessing and demonstrating the integral omnipresence of condoms and the playful love of latex.

"I can't even look at a porno movie anymore if it's not safe sex. It makes me throw up. I've lost too many friends. I'm too concerned with the future of sex for future generations. I'm very busy creating sex-positive safe sex information. I want people to learn how to have incredibly fabulous sex safely" (Annie Sprinkle in Gauntlet, 1993, p.129).

Annie's genuinely candid use of sexually explicit material is not the least bit sensationalist, instead she educates audiences about the various aspects of women's sexuality and potential by demystifying female anatomy. By defeating taboos, her discourse provides a political battleground, embracing existing stereotypes and reappropriating roles that have been vandalized and exploited by the patriarchal culture thereby empowering women with some control over their representation.

If Annie Sprinkle's primordial artistic endeavour resides in the demystification of female sexuality then she requires a candid, direct and personal approach in order to communicate with her audience. In her film Sluts And Goddesses Video Workshop or How To Be A Sex Goddess In 101 Easy Steps, she chooses the role of mistress of ceremony, a psychedelic friendly sex mentor who playfully tutors the whole proceedings by addressing the viewer in a straightforward and forthright manner. Consequently, she highlights her own screen presence and acknowledges the company of the concrete observer by looking directly into the camera lens, mirroring back the viewer's gaze.

In psychoanalysis nomenclature, Freud defined voyeurism as a sexually gratifying form of scopophilia, attained by the act of gazing at people who cannot look back or don't know they're being watched. So by her direct address, Annie returns the gaze and, therefore, conquers the concept of voyeurism for she decimates the preferential sexual activity of spying slyly. And as Annette Kuhn argues, the whole constitution of viewing subjects becomes rather different as the alternatives to dominant modes of cinematic representation conceive resourceful modes of cinematic address by mobilizing the discursive:

"What emerges from this is basically that discours foregrounds subjectivity in its address, while in histoire, the address is impersonal. The film theorist Christian Metz argues that cinematic address- by which he means its specifically cinematic aspects- operates largely on the register of histoire, in that film appear to `speak to' spectators impersonally (Kuhn, 1982, p.50)

In her creation of this pseudo-educational, sexually explicit material, Annie Sprinkle adopts the intimately frank mode of discours, allowing her "Mother Knows Best" figure to `speak to' spectators personally, pretending that she perceives their attentive look. The term "to-be-looked-at-ness", first introduced by Laura Mulvey (1990), draws its strength from the fact of its own connotation within the screen image. Annie Sprinkle's self-conscious exhibitionism rejects that idea of connotation by blatantly displaying an enlightened caricature of "to-be-looked-at-ness" that exudes her prerogative to manipulate the conveyed representation. By appropriating the linguistic command, Annie's female figure is not subjected to the determining male gaze in the traditional sense, as bearer of meaning, but is rather determinedly self-assigned as bearer of meaning.

Sprinkle's considerable work for the sex industry as porn star and massage parlour prostitute led her to a total deconstruction and eradication of both binaries (i.e. object and subject), a much more militant strategy than just the reversal of the roles and power relations. Tired of being someone else's fantasy, she used her performance to deconstruct standard objects of desire.

Annie is an acting subject, not an objectified passive recipient of the gaze, for she is the one wielding the power. As demonstrated at her Post Post Porn Modernist stage performance she invites her guests to participate in the show by asking them to bring their cameras along, highlighting their gaze as they photograph her modeling in fetishizing porn positions. In her "Public Cervix Announcement", she lines up the audience members and invites them to peer through a speculum in order to examine her vaginal canal, while she smiles and humours them. By allowing both parties (spectator and performer) to acknowledge each other's presence and accept the exchange of gazes and return of looks, Annie once again abolishes the idea of voyeurism, as defined by Annette Kuhn:

"Pleasurable looking here takes the form of voyeurism, in which the object of the look is outside of, and distanced from, the subject, and there is apparently no comeback for the spectator in the form either of a returned look or other response, or no punishment for looking." (Kuhn, 1982, p.58)

"Get to know your pussy, she's your friend", Annie says while holding up her sex-ed posters illustrating the female reproductive system. By inviting spectators to peer into her neck of the womb, Annie demystifies one of the obsolete icons in art and literature: the vagina as a dark, enigmatic and potentially dangerous region for all who dare enter: "Some men think we have teeth in there!". This attempt to represent mysteries of the unseen world occurs in the context of a programme specifically targeted for a female audience, although Annie encourages men to show up... in drag!

Thus by actively intervening in pornography (previously considered as an exclusive gentlemen's library), Annie seizes the "means of production" in order to conceptualize an innovative female gaze which acclaims the possibilities of women's various sexual agencies. Her feminist "re-vision", as defined by Adrienne Rich, "enters an old text from a new critical direction" and rejects the phallocentric, patriarchal, male desirable construction of sexuality in order to assert through the genre, a vital kind of ideological construction of female sexuality, concerned with issues of gender rather than sex. In Annie's own words, then:

"Post Porn Modernists celebrate sex as the nourishing, life giving force. We embrace our genitals as part, not separate, from our spirits. We utilize sexually explicit words, pictures and performances to communicate our ideas and emotions. We denounce sexual censorship as anti-art and inhuman. We empower ourselves by this attitude of sex-positivism. And with this love of our spiritual selves we have fun, heal the world and endure." (RE/Search, 1993, p.23)

Ziad would like to acknowledge the assistance of Pascale (Cinema Parallele), Tamu, and Aniko Bodroghkozy in the preparation of this paper.

References

Hoffman, Barry (ed.) PORN IN THE USA: Exploring the limits of free expression, Gauntlet, 1993

Juno, Andrea and Vale, V. (eds.) ANGRY WOMEN, Re-Search Publications, 1991

Kuhn, Annette, Women's Pictures: Feminism & Cinema, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed P. Erens, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990.