Credit: Dangerous Minds / Annie Sprinkle

What on Earth does it mean to be “body positive” in the 2020s? The movement has seemingly come to a screeching halt in the midst of accessible cosmetic surgery, weight loss injections and emaciated, silicon-faced stars from the movies looking like a yassified Gollum everywhere you look.

It’s easy to throw your hands up at the world, say “we’ve lost” and spend the rest of your days navel-gazing while wishing you could still play those early Lizzo records on repeat without feeling like a traitor. Or, you could accept that the very idea of “body positivity” is something that, like our bodies, is ever-changing and entirely our own. It can be whatever we want it to be, and, as shown by the work of Annie Sprinkle, this isn’t a new attitude to have, far from it.

Born Ellen F Steinberg in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the story of Annie Sprinkle begins at the movies. At 18, her family were living in Tucson, Arizona and Sprinkle herself was working at the ticket booth of her local cinema, the Cineplaze Theatre – secretly, the theatre was showing screenings of Deep Throat, which were very much against local law, and when the theatre was busted by the cops, Sprinkle was hauled into court as a witness.

Hilariously, this was where she met Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat, and despite being at a court date to convict him as a criminal, she became his mistress during the case and departed Tucson for New York City, where she lived for 22 years – being Damiano’s mistress gave her an in to her first job as a porn actress, where she took on the professional moniker that we know her by today, but it wasn’t long before she started really pushing the envelope for what a porn actress could be.

Over time, she went from prostitute and porn star to sex educator and artist. This wasn’t lip service either; Sprinkle absolutely believed in her work as more than mere titilation and she was right to, as well.

How did Annie Sprinkle become a sex educator?

Fittingly enough for someone who was still an actor, it began with her movies. They began to be as much about educating people about bodies and sexuality as they were about titillating the audience.

However, everything changed once she started transferring her skills from the screen to the stage to become a performance artist. There are few better examples of this than her spectacularly named one-woman show, Public Cervix Announcement. I mean, honestly? Give her the Tony for the name alone.

Turning the idea of the dreaded OB/GYN exam on its head, Sprinkle made it a communal experience where she got up on stage, sat herself on a comfy chair and inserted a doctor’s speculum. After that, anyone who wanted a peek could come up and take a gander. After all, it’s literally just a vagina, loads of people have ’em! Combined with the fact that a whole lot of people had already seen Sprinkle’s yoni, it made sense for hers to be the one combating the stigma around them.

While her work today is perhaps a little less graphic than it once was, she’s retained the basic (if you’ll pardon the turn of phrase) thrust of her work ever since – all of it is about connecting with our bodies in a way that’s natural, pleasurable and joyous, and even when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, she turned her treatment into erotic art, culminating in a fashion show inspired by chemotherapy.

There’s no vision of the human body that she doesn’t find beautiful, and that’s an inspiration to us all right now – if that’s not genuine body positivity, I don’t know what is.