annie sprinkle

Deeper Inside Annie Sprinkle

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There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.

Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.

Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.

As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.

-Brandon Ledet

Pornography Trichotomy

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Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast, Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, or The Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition, or Pandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.

1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.

You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.

When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.

Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.

-Brandon Ledet

A Body to Live In (2026)

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Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.

I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.

For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.

Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.

-Brandon Ledet

Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

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It doesn’t matter how many times you see the same story repeated in genre movies, as long as there’s a little stylistic or thematic novelty added to the template.  I’ve seen plenty of characters purchase possessed antique mirrors that warp their perception of reality and perception of their selves, mostly in cheaply produced horror pictures like Oculus, Mirror Mirror, and The Evil Within.  I’ve never seen that story adapted into a feature length Golden Age porno before, though, which is the novelty that the 1981 film Pandora’s Mirror brings to the template.  Vintage porno star Veronica Hart stars as the titular Pandora, who is mesmerized by an “enchanted” (i.e., cursed) mirror that she finds in the back of a dusty antique shop.  No one in the film ever refers to her by “Dora” or “Dorie” or any other nickname; it’s “Pandora” every time in case anyone in the audience loses track of the allusion.  Instead of seeing a demonic presence or an evil reflection of herself in the mirror like in most of these stories, Pandora’s mirror allows her to watch the sexual adventures of its previous owners over the past couple centuries, hypnotizing her in an erotic trance.  Obviously, that set-up is mostly just an excuse to stage hardcore sex scenes in various period costumes, but it also plays directly into one of my favorite genre tropes: the doomed protagonist who becomes obsessed with something that’s obviously going to kill them, but they keep at it anyway because it makes them horny.  The fact that the object of obsession is a magical mirror in this case is only the icing on the erotic novelty cake.

The only thing you need to know about Pandora is that her erotic obsession with her mirror is out of character and a cause for concern among her uptight yuppie social circle.  The only thing you need to know about the mirror is that its owner is a seemingly immortal Dan Ackroyd type (Frederick Foster), who appears in every vignette but never has sex on camera; he’s only around to ominously answer questions like “How long have you been here?” with “I have always been here.”  He does helpfully provide the backstory of the mirror’s enchantment, explaining that it was made from the wood of an oak tree that was struck by lightning, which is apparently where all enchanted lumber comes from.  For any information on why the mirror is evil, we just have to draw our conclusions from the spooky synth score and the fact that Pandora is immediately addicted to gazing into its enchanted glass.  There’s an interesting subversion there in how an object that’s typically associated with self-obsession and vanity is instead a voyeuristic window into the sex lives of others, but it all comes around by the time Pandora sees her own sexual fantasy reflected in cursed object (a threeway with the two gym bros who lift weights on the rooftop across the street from her apartment).  This is largely a story about a woman’s masturbatory fantasies taking over her waking life until all she can or wants to do is stare into the sex mirror, to the point where she’s literally consumed by it. 

If there’s anything especially notable about the sex here, it’s that every period-piece fantasy depicted is a group activity.  We start with a Revolutionary War foursome, ramp up to an Old Hollywood poolside fivesome, ease back into a 1970s Broadway foursome, and conclude with a full-on S&M dive bar orgy (at NYC’s infamous Hellfire Club, reigned over here by a tiara-crowned Annie Sprinkle).  The only one-on-one coupling occurs in a go-nowhere side plot in which Pandora’s boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) cheats with her conniving frenemy (Sandy Hillman) after being abandoned for too long as she stares into the mirror.  Situationally, the sexual scenarios that appear in the mirror are pretty hot, especially as they play with the power dynamics of timid newcomers being seduced into deep-end group sex hedonism.  In practice, the action can be a little too impractical & inhuman to maintain that erotic tension, though, especially since every single act of cunnilingues & analingus (and there are plenty) includes way more biting and random tongue flittering than direct, effectual licking.  Worse yet, the casting-couch Broadway audition segment requires a performer to masturbate with the world’s least convincing dildo: a hollow, plastic toy seemingly cut in half with scissors, so that it collapses any time it’s squeezed.  It would be beside the point to knock the film for not properly cropping out the shotgun mics & stage lights that creep into the frame during those sex scenes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say the sex itself could’ve been a little more sincerely steamy.

Overall, this is a much classier picture than the only other title I know from director Shaun Costello (credited here as Warren Evans): the infamous 1970s enema-kink geek show Water Power (credited there as Helmuth Richler).  The gauzy soap-opera cinematography, ambient synth soundtrack, and urban fairy tale premise all add to its mystique as one of the eerier outliers of narrative pornography’s Golden Age, at least in the wraparound story that connects the less satisfying tangents of cosplay group sex.  It’s the sex that makes the picture an outlier in the larger canon of haunted mirror movies, though, so it almost doesn’t matter that none of the performers can seem to go down on each other without using every tooth in their jaw, or that Costello has seemingly never seen a functional dildo before.  Just the mere fact that they’re fucking on camera at all is enough.

-Brandon Ledet

Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)

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Before phrases like “sex positivity” & “kink” wormed their way into my vocabulary as a horned-up youth, Annie Sprinkle already embodied them in my mind as a sex-culture mascot.  Like other retro fetish icons like Bettie Page & Dita Von Teese, Annie Sprinkle has seemingly always been around in the public eye as a cheerleader for fun, adventurous sex – reaching me before I was old enough to access pornography without parental surveillance.  I don’t know if I first encountered her in a magazine interview or on a late-night broadcast of HBO’s Real Sex, but she’s definitely one of the first cultural ambassadors for kink & sex positivity that penetrated my sheltered suburban bubble.  Long before I had seen a single frame of her golden age pornos, she symbolized the ways that pornography could be fun & feminist in the right circumstances, which helped shape the ways I think of the medium.

While the mainstream porno Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle is likely her biggest commercial success, I don’t think Sprinkle peaked as artist until a decade later, when she was making avant-garde video art instead of traditional hardcore.  The cult VHS oddity Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop: How to be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps is a tongue-in-ass-cheek instructional video promoting kink & sex positivity, a wonderful document of the Annie Sprinkle ethos.  Co-directed with a young Maria Beatty (who still makes artsy fetish videos like Ecstasy in Berlin, 1926) and scored by experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, the video is ostensibly a taped version of Sprinkle’s sex-positivity workshops that she ran in early-90s NYC but is something much stranger & more cinematic than that documentation implies.  In the video version of the workshop, Sprinkle lectures directly to the camera about the mystical slut/goddess binary. She promises to “awaken your inner slut” and “your inner goddess,” challenging cultural biases that a sexually enthused woman is somehow vulgar or immoral.  She walks you through this spiritual slut awakening in front of surreal green screen video-art effects while arhythmic keyboard flourishes, marching drums, and slide whistles trigger a kind of D.I.Y. psychedelic hypnotism.  Sprinkle declares that she wants the video to make sex “empowering, liberating, and healthy,” but in the process she also makes sex a bizarre psychotronic head-fuck.

While commercially marketed as a porno, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop plays more like experimental video art than it does like pure erotica.  It’s telling that Sprinkle & Beatty tacked on a lengthy threesome scene at the end of the video as an afterthought, realizing late in production that their sex video didn’t have much actual sex in it.  And even that scene concludes with Sprinkle experiencing a five-minute, unedited orgasm, lecturing about the different levels of orgasmic pleasure in voiceover while a digital clock counts every eternal second.  Everything that precedes that mind-blowing climax lands somewhere between the high-art mysticism of Derek Jarman’s The Garden and the psychedelic sketch comedy of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!.  A kaleidoscope of vulvas undulates on the screen while Sprinkle instructs on how to find “your goddess spot” and makes cheeky puns about how genital piercings make you “holier.”  Brief sex acts shared between her crew of “Transformation Facilitators” are transposed in front of backdrops that are usually reserved for karaoke screens.  The video is often hot and always fun, but it’s less pornography than it is Dianetics for your clit.

As you’d likely expect, not all of Annie Sprinkle’s sex-positive politics have aged gracefully over the past three decades.  The Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop has some major blind spots when it comes to cultural appropriation in particular, encouraging superficial Orientalist engagement with yoga & bindis as cultural costuming instead of genuine spiritual practices.  In the audio commentary on my mid-2000s DVD copy of the film, Sprinkle shrugs off the insensitivity of these missteps, explaining that she didn’t even know what cultural appropriation was at the time of filming.  However, she also recounts that those aspects of the workshop caused some of the video’s more radical performers to walk off-set in protest on the first day of filming, so those conversations were very much being had at the time whether or not she chose to listen.  Still, I’d like to think that it’s worth squinting past Sprinkle’s political blind spots to appreciate her ambassadorship for good sex and good pornography.  After all, she does have an entire section on her Wikipedia page titled “Contributions to Feminism,” which should be some implication of how important her messaging was at the time, short sights aside. 

If there’s anything especially radical about the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, it’s not necessarily in its erotic mysticism or in its video-art psychedelia.  Annie Sprinkle’s most invigorating contribution to pornography is in her D.I.Y. punk ethos, encouraging her audience to have more playful sex and even to make their own pornography at home.  It’s the same mobilizing energy that the Riot Grrrl movement brought to feminist bands & zines at the time, inciting women to make their own self-liberating art in defiance of the era’s cultural gatekeepers.  Sprinkle’s version just happened to allow her to experience a continuous 5-minute orgasm in the process, which is a pretty sweet bonus if you can achieve it.

-Brandon Ledet