In The Biblical Sense

Written by Ellen Friedrichs

Golden Girl

On a warm night in 1972, eighteen-year-old Ellen Steinberg took up her customary post, selling buttered popcorn at a movie theatre in Tucson, Arizona. As luck would have it the police burst in, raiding the theatre for screening hard-core porn film "Deep Throat." The projectors were shut off and Steinberg was picked up.

Testifying in court at the subsequent trial, Steinberg met "Deep Throat"’s producer, Gerard Damiano, and its star, Linda Lovelace. Having lost her job at the theatre, she began working at a local massage parlor. "In my naiveté," she writes in her book, Post Porn Modernist, "I thought of myself as a horny masseuse who simply ended up having sex with the clients. I was working as a prostitute for a good two months before I realized it!" When the truth finally became clear, and once the initial shock had worn off, Steinberg found that she liked the idea of making a living through sexual gratification. Shortly thereafter, she followed Damiano to New York to pursue pornography, and, like a kernel of corn bursting from its husk, Annie Sprinkle was born.

The new name, a reference to her predilection for giving golden showers, seemed necessary. As Sprinkle explains in her memoir, "Ellen Steinberg just didn’t sound very sexy." Unlike many women who have to fight efforts to sexualize their ethnicity, Jewish women often struggle to be seen as sexual despite their heritage. Sprinkle highlights this conflict on her Web site, anniesprinkle.org(asm), by juxtaposing images of the young and almost sexless Ellen Steinberg with sexually explicit images of Sprinkle, bearing captions such as, "Ellen is fat and ugly, and nobody seems to want her. Annie is voluptuous and sexy, and lots of people want her." When she worked as a prostitute, "only three times did someone ask for a Jewish woman and those were Chasidic clients. Jewish women are not really often fetishized." For Sprinkle, becoming a porn star meant casting off the meek, timid Ellen, so hemmed in by stereotypes of Jewish sexuality.

But despite changing her name, (an almost universal practice for porn stars), Sprinkle "was always out about being Jewish." The exception that proved the rule–"there really weren’t any famous [female] Jewish porn stars"—Sprinkle, by her mid-twenties, had starred in over a hundred pornographic films. "Oddly enough," she says, "in the seventies and eighties in porn all the men were Jewish, but there were very few Jewish women, maybe only two or three."

After working exclusively in front of the camera for several years, Sprinkle eventually felt the need to reinvent herself anew. By 1981 Sprinkle had become the first woman to produce and star in her own porn film. "Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle" showed women as sexual aggressors, focusing on female orgasm and ejaculation, and revealed Annie Sprinkle’s origins as Ellen Steinberg. Making the transition to photographer and visual artist, Sprinkle began playing impishly with the Jewish aspect of her multifaceted identity. In an unforgettable self-portrait entitled "Jewish American Princess," she sits with her head crowned, scepter in hand and breasts exposed. "Those are Jewish stars as my pasties on my nipples," adds Sprinkle. The Star of David also appears often in her "Tit Prints"—works for which Sprinkle dips her breasts in paint and makes impressions on fine vellum paper.

In 1989, Sprinkle began staging what would become her most notorious piece of performance art—"Public Cervix Announcement." Lying on her back, legs splayed, Sprinkle invited audience members to inspect her cervix with speculum and flashlight. Climaxing (so to speak) in a "sex magic masturbation ritual," the original performance provoked a furor in Congress among conservative Republicans. "[Sprinkle’s show] is a sewer of fetishism, depravity and pornography," fumed US Rep. Dana R. Rohrabacher as debate raged over whether the federal government should fund such controversial art.

When not inflaming the passions of Congress, Sprinkle, who recently attained a Ph.D. in sexology, tours the country with her one-woman shows and art projects. At the recent opening of her New York retrospective, guests perused miniature nudes and portraits of sex workers with titles like "A Tiny Pair of Giant Boobs" and "A Very Small Big Black Dick." "Then there’s another piece," said Sprinkle, resplendent in a floor-length purple gown, "where you connect the dots between my mouth, my nipples, my clit and my hips." Joined together, the dots transform into a Jewish star. Something Annie Sprinkle knows all about.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.