Short Presentation, Breathworks: Ours

Annie Sprinkle, Erotics of Air, and Ecosexuality

Cecily Chen

My short presentation today focuses on performance artist and sex educator Annie Sprinkle, whose work over the span of forty years seeks not only to promote a sex-positive attitude toward issues such as pornography, prostitution, and BDSM, but also to teach methods of becoming more erotically attuned to one’s body. Steeped in a tradition of Second Wave feminism and New Age spirituality, Sprinkle’s work is concerned with demystifying and destigmatizing women’s sexual pleasures and insistent that “sex is a path to enlightenment,” that there is political power in sexual love.[i] It is Sprinkle’s mindful approach to sexuality that I want to focus on today: her belief that eros is not limited to reproduction or genitalia, but instead continuously vibrant, a joyous reservoir of energy that we can tap into at any moment. A gust of inspiration, if you will, to which we must open our bodies and minds.

In an interview with RE/Search Publications, Sprinkle recalls “learning about Tantric and Taoist and Native American techniques” after her then-partner, Marco Vassi, was diagnosed HIV-positive, which led them to experiment with new and more capacious modes of intimacy. She explains, “We’d do breathing and eye gazing; we’d set the timer for a half-hour and just sit and look into each other, and it became so erotic that we didn’t even have to fuck—when that timer went off we felt like we’d been fucking for half an hour… Together we really expanded our concept of sex.” Sprinkle’s lexicon for sexuality is thus one of breath and psychic energy: each inhale and exhale of air transmits eros from one lover to another, and by inhabiting the same space, they share an intense erotic joy. In the same interview, she says, “Many people don’t breathe during sex, yet if you get really energetic sex going, it’s the breathing heavy that makes you feel good—that moves the energy […] What happens is: you start breathing it up until you reach a certain point where it’s breathing you—it’s doing you.”[ii] For Sprinkle, then, pleasure hinges on vulnerability: it is a process of giving oneself up to an intangible, potentially unknowable force. It is about being sensitive to erotic energies that reverberate imperceptibly around us, and embracing them with arousal and joy.

Fig 1. Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: “Nature is our Lover, not our Mother”

Sprinkle’s view of sexuality is untethered to heteronormativity or capitalist discourses on (productive/reproductive) value; it does not even necessitate physical touch. It makes sense, then, that Sprinkle’s project of embodying an “avant-garde sexuality” extends beyond the body and into its immediate surrounds, where the human and nonhuman, living and inanimate, are all linked intimately by air, by the space they collectively share. Along with her long-term partner Beth Stephens, Sprinkle coins the term “ecosexual” to define a relationship between human and nature that is sexual, erotic, loving, rather than exploitative or damaging. Stephens and Sprinkle treat Earth as a lover, someone to cherish and please. As with a partner we are madly, passionately in love with, Stephens and Sprinkle insist that we treat each breath we share in the Earth’s biosphere as something sacred, something to treasure—that is, to let the Earth breathe us, “do” us, instead of attempting to control its resources. Sexuality is thus coterminous with spiritual mindfulness, weaving together a new kind of environmental ethics that is as much about generating pleasure as it is about conservation. On their website, Stephens and Sprinkle’s “Vows for Marrying the Earth” is illuminating: “Earth, we vow to become your lover. With these steps. Let us reach your love. Through our senses we will become your lover. Everyday we promise to breath in your fragrance. And be opened by you. Let us not be severed from your love.. ”[iii]

[i] Annie Sprinkle, Interview with Andrea Juno, in Andrea Juno, V. Vale (eds.) Angry Women (San Francisco, CA: RE/Search Publications, 1991) 31.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, “Vows for Marrying the Earth,” SexEcology (website) http://sexecology.org/research-writing/earth-vows/