Like all great missionaries, Annie Sprinkle burns with holy zeal. Yet unlike her thou-shalt-not preaching brothers, the foundation of Sprinkle’s gospel is the giving and receiving of pleasure-preferably via orgasm.
Now, with a dazzling documentary, Annie’s Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm, this cheerful missionary has another means to convert the masses.
And her orthodoxy is wholly seductive.
With Amazing World of Orgasm, the celebrated American prostitute/porn star turned performance artist/sexologist and PhD, has assembled a wild yet intelligent assortment of perspectives about her favourite topic.
A breathless introduction-“I definitely love to have orgasms. Doesn’t everybody?” she asks-serves to identify a basic problem: that the orgasm is the most pleasurable of experiences, yet there’s little research about it.
Aiming to fill that knowledge gap, Sprinkle then turns the spotlight over to 25 way-out-there personalities, each of whom spends between 30 seconds and two minutes giving us their take on the almighty orgasm.
The astounding group that orgasm enthusiast Sprinkle has rounded up includes medical researchers, sex therapists, a dominatrix, a BDSM educator, practitioners of tantric sex and yoga, an artist with cerebral palsy, an elderly but sexually active woman and a recovering Catholic.
The speakers speculate about Western and Eastern models of orgasm, stopping along the way to ponder consciousness, spirituality, the cosmos and ecstatic experience.
Angles of discussion range from a hilarious prostitute activist who explains how to fake two kinds of orgasms-“Think of a gorilla,” she advises when explaining “the animalistic orgasm”-to a philosophical midwife who draws a connection between giving birth and having an orgasm.
There’s a yogi who describes his “laughgasms” and a queen of mean who demonstrates how to induce “feargasms” in submissive men. There’s a guy who wonders about orgasms during space travel. And there’s a green-faced rock star/freak named Kembra who says, “Orgasms make me feel more positive and hopeful.”
The documentary’s zany and colourful Deee-Lite aesthetic-a bit of camp, a touch of acid trip psychedelic, a few notes of Kirk-era Star Trek-is both fun and stimulating, and perfectly complements the magnetic left-of-centre sentiments of the experts.
In a less puritanical world, Sprinkle’s documentary would be shown as part of high school sex education.
And why not? Matter of fact, informative, lighthearted and thoughtful, it presents the necessary facts and offers an additional wealth of insights about orgasm, community, humanity, happiness and the universe.
What else could one hope for?
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