Safe, communicative, deep, meaningful, sexy sex

In Annie Sprinkle's "Herstory of Porn", Sprinkle goes through the details of her career as a porn star and how she has made a transition from mainstream, to feminist porn. This move was political, as well as spiritual.

In the performance, it is clear that Sprinkle is critiquing mainstream porn. One of the first conflicts happened during the AIDS scare that hit the industry. Sprinkle started a group called Pornographers Promoting Safer Sex. She wanted to use porn as an educational forum to promote and teach people how to have sexy safe sex; " I called on the porn industry to help educate the public. I figured if everyone in porn started using safer sex, people could see exactly how to do it and see that safer sex could be hot sex," (Sprinkle 2001:56). However, Sprinkle was in for a surprise as the porn industry did not share her goal of promoting safe sex. In the narrow confines of what is considered sexy for the industry, safe sex is not included and in some sort of cost benefit analysis, it seemed that the threat of consumers not buying videos where actors practiced safe sex, outweighed the possibility of death and disease; "unfortunately the heterosexual porn industry didn't take the challenge to use safe sex, and continued to use almost all unsafe sex. That's when I realized that for the most part, the porn industry wasn't a community that cared about people, but a business that really only cared about money" (2001: 56).

Someone who knows all too well the challenge of promoting safe sex in the mainstream porn industry is Tistan Taormino. Taormino is a sex educator and writer who has released a series of videos and books that are inspiring and helpful to the formation of people's sexualities and desires.

In Taormino's "Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women," the video starts off with the battle to get the mainstream distributor to take on her project. She had not done a video before and so the "man in charge" was hesitant to support her film. Further, the video was not your standard porn, but an educational aid for those interested in anal sex and play. With her enchanting powers and of course, an in office demonstration, it is agreed to do her film.

Women like Taorimino and Sprinkle are working not to censor porn, but to improve it and have a more diverse range of options to choose from; "I'm trying to change some of the outmoded ideas of pornography, and its limited view of what is sexy," (Sprinkle 1996:85). For Sprinkle, she wanted to move towards more sensual play where love and connection is evident; "I wanted to do a scene that was more sensuous, where the sex was slower and more meditative. Where it wasn't all so genitally focused but more full-bodies. Where the lovers connect with their hearts, and eyes," (2001:54).

It seems then that the old anti-porn "radical" feminists had it all wrong. The answer to the "porn problem" is not its censorship, but the production of more porn that shows a variety of bodies, sexualities, and fetishes as well as promoting safe sex and connection. The moral of the story then ladies is: pick up your camera and get to it!


Annie Sprinkle and Gabrielle Cody, "Anie Sprinkle's Herstory of Pron" Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance, New York: Continum, 2001.

Annie Sprinkle, "The Best is Yet To Come," in Tales from the Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography, Cherie Matrix, ed., San Francisco: AK Press, 1996.