Born 39 years ago as Ellen Steinberg, a shy, frumpy, nice Jewish girl reared in the San Fernando Valley by a liberal middle-class family that converted to Unitarianism, Sprinkle currently describes herself as a "bisexual lesbian." She's mainly attracted to transsexuals, hermaphrodites, transvestites, amputees, burn victims and the disabled, for they are "unique." Her show, she says in a voice that suggests she's your very best friend, is about opening up sexuality, using her path of "pornography and prostitution and kinky sex" to broaden our understanding. Sexual evolution, not revolution. Audience members will become, Sprinkle is confident, aware, not aroused. Empowered instead of blue.
"I love to talk about orgasms." Sincere and enthusiastic, she's making a video documentary on the subject. According to Sprinkle, there is more than penile and clitoral and vaginal climax. "If you really get in touch with the sexual energy moving through your body, if you really let this energy build and flow and move, then you can have what is called a full-body orgasm, which is this enormous wave of orgasm going throughout you from toe to finger to top of the head."
A student of Tantric and Taoist sex practices, Sprinkle says women (and men, praise the Lord) can achieve this heightened pleasure through breathing. Likening it to the "energy orgasm" dancers and athletes experience, she reveals that in her previous video she had a five-minute orgasm. "And the funny thing is that some people who saw it said, "Oh, that's fake," because they've never experienced anything like it.... So that's why I ended up making this new [video], because I realized how limited people's concept of orgasm is and sex in general."
If you're tempted to write off this veteran of some 200 skin flicks, consider the following: Her performance art has received favorable notices from the likes of ArtForum, and she's been interviewed in the highbrow magazine Drama Review as well as Angry Women, a coffeetable volume put out by counterculture publishing company Re/Search and featuring movers and shakers in the performing arts. She's an honors graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York, and one of the videos she has written and produced, How to Be a Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps, was screened at the Whitney Museum. She founded Pornographers Promoting Safer Sex and is on the steering committees of Union Labia: Sex-Positive Feminists and Prostitutes of New York. Author of more than 300 articles for Penthouse, Hustler, Utne Reader and Oui, she has taught sex workshops and performed her show around the country and abroad. Maybe most noteworthy is that congressmen Dana R. Rohrabacher and Jesse Helms went after her a couple of years ago to ban the NEA's funding of "offensive" artwork.
Sprinkle postulates that there are three types of sex: junk sex, health sex and gourmet sex. "Like food, you can't always have a gourmet meal, nor would you want one for every meal. Think of that with sex, where you aren't always in a position to have the ideal." Although junk sex -- hot and heavy goings-on in back seats -- has its place, Sprinkle is more interested in talking about health sex: simply using sex as a healing tool. "They've scientifically proven that just thinking about sex strengthens your immune system.... And if you have a headache or menstrual cramps or even some emotional trauma, you can nourish your body with feelings of pleasure. It's a great painkiller."
It's also a moneymaker. Sprinkle still keeps her, um, hand in the oldest profession, servicing one particular john because, she says, "I happen to like this client and I've seen him for 19 years." Explaining the most recent trick between them, she laughs: "I needed a coat." Turning serious, Sprinkle elaborates: "I really love the combination of sex and money. It's very honest. It's like, hey, I can give you this wonderful experience. It's instant appreciation. It's giving something back. It's very nice."
For Sprinkle, a firm believer in safe sex who has repeatedly tested negative for HIV, prostitution has always been "nice," so much so that she says she had to be told she was in fact engaging in it when, at 18, she began having sex as a masseuse at a massage parlor. "It was in a little trailer in Tucson, Arizona, and everything was called "massage" or "client." You never heard the words "trick" or "whore" or anything.... So they paid for a massage and, you know, things would happen from there. And, you know, they gave you extra money. But if you only gave them a massage, that was okay. The main point that I make [in my show] is that it just seemed like good whole-hearted fun. The word "prostitution" seems so sleazy and at times dangerous. And that wasn't my experience. It was this nice trailer and nice people were there." Sex occurred, she says, because she wanted it to. "Obviously on some level I knew it was prostitution, but it just wasn't directly connecting with my picture of what prostitution was."