Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real
We all know sex is used to peddle everything from chewing gum to automobiles. But as a “postporn feminist,” Sprinkle has used it to sell cultural radicalism through her own brand of performance activism. The last time I saw her in Chicago, several years ago at Lower Links, she taught a “sex-education class” topless, inviting audience members to feel her breasts, giving the stage to her transsexual lover, who stripped naked to show us his dual genitals. That night she and her disarming candor were selling sexual tolerance, and the overflow crowd was more than happy to buy.
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But when it comes to peddling sex as pornographers do–and as Sprinkle does in this new show–the real product being sold is usually power. The pornographer gives his audience a simulated power over the unruly forces of sexuality. His performer shows you what you want to see, does what you want done, performs to your specifications. Whether this object of desire is enjoying himself or herself, or enjoying running the camera or editing the film, is beside the point. The urges that have been suspected of driving men mad for millennia are safely packaged and corralled. As Susan Griffin argues in Pornography and Silence, pornography is culture’s attempt to exact revenge on nature, exerting power over the forces before which we’re powerless. Power, not sex, is the most interesting subject in the world.
But by the middle of the first act, Sprinkle has made her point. And like most pornography, after 20 minutes the show sinks into a rut. The clips may get more graphic, but the ideas stop coming. Once you’ve accepted her premise that pleasure in all forms should be respected, there’s not much left to do. Sex, it turns out, is one of the most boring subjects in the world, even if Sprinkle is never less than charming–though she’s so heavily miked that the intimacy she usually generates in performance is severely compromised.
