It’s difficult to be sex-positive and not be aware of Dr. Annie Sprinkle, PhD. Now at age of fifty-three, Dr. Sprinkle has worn (and combined) many hats: sex worker (porn starlet, model, dancer, prostitute), sex-workers rights activist, multi-media artist, writer, and a sex educator holding a PhD in the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. With a life so rich and full of accolades, and packed with adventures ranging from high kink to oceanic tantra, one may expect that Dr. Sprinkle would be taking some well-deserved R & R.

Think again: when the fire to create (and educate) burns, it will burn until you draw your last breath.

As a prolific artist, Dr. Sprinkle has collaborated with luminaries ranging from seminal Fluxist, Willem DeRidder, to groundbreaking feminist performance artist, Linda Montano. Her newest collaborative project, Love Art Lab, draws on her feminist and conceptual art background and understanding of convergent social issues, while infusing it all with the colorful, sexy fun that she has become known for.

From the Love Art Lab website:

We, Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie M. Sprinkle, are an artist couple committed to doing projects that explore, generate, and celebrate love. We utilize visual art, installation, theater pieces, interventions, live-art, exhibitions, lectures, printed matter and activism. Each year we orchestrate one or more interactive performance art weddings in collaboration with various national and international communities, then display the ephemera in art galleries. Our projects incorporate the colors and themes of the chakras, a structure inspired by Linda M. Montano’s 14 Years of Living Art.

The Love Art Laboratory grew out of our response to the violence of war, the anti-gay marriage movement, and our prevailing culture of cynicism. We hope the Love Art Laboratory will help make the world a more fun, sexy, tolerant, love-filled place.

Choosing this year to focus on the color green, the couple will be celebrating their 4th wedding on May 17th. In renewing their vows of love, Dr. Sprinkle and Ms. Stephens will add complementary promises to honor and cherish the Earth. Open to the public, the couple requests that guests attire themselves in green (whether it be formal, costume, or sculptural) for the ceremony; and, oh, what a ceremony it will be! Including over 70 participants (from artist Linda Montano to porn legend Veronica Hart), the event details are as follows:

Gather & Green Hors d’oeuvres: 2:30-3:00pm.
Ceremony Performance: 3:00-5:00pm.
Green Cake & Bouquet Toss: 5:00-5:30pm
Where: In the Shakespeare Glen, University of California Santa Cruz
Wedding Themes: Love, Compassion, Environmentalism, and the Earth.

Since I regrettably am unable to attend, I’d like to take a moment to offer my Mazel Tov to the brides. I’ll be keeping you both (along with the Earth) in my thoughts.

Find full details on the Love Art Lab at www.loveartlab.org
Visit Dr. Annie Sprinkle at www.anniesprinkle.org
Visit Ms. Elizabeth Stephens at www.elizabethstephens.org

If you’ve never watched Talk Sex with Sue Johanson on late Sunday evenings on the Oxygen network, you only have this Sunday night to catch up. Sue announced this week that she’s going to retire, leaving the world short one septugenarian sex educator.

Sue’s show is a call-in show and she gets every question known to personkind. As a sex educator, it’s always fun and interesting to hear another person’s answer to a question you’ve gotten before. Sue is a nurse, so she knows her anatomy and she manages to combine both grandmotherly caring (”oh honey, you probably don’t want to stick that in your ass”) and a ‘been there, heard that’ attitude that is comforting and normalizing. I’m really going to miss having her around - and hearing the call-in questions every week.

I can’t recommend enough that you check out the last episode. Find a friend who has cable and loves sex toys and catch her before she’s gone. There are also some awesome clips on YouTube (of course!). I particularly like this one where Sue debunks the necessity of deep throating and gives some great tips for oral sex.

A Babeland coworker sent this to me. It’s called Dildo Art and in a nutshell: Dildos are photoshopped into classic fine art paintings. It’s the kind of thing that we all like to share with each other because somehow, working at a sex toy store makes this that much funnier. I think we should have a contest where we ask people to recreate famous scenes with sex toys in them and take photos. That would be awesome.

The best part is that in some photos there are actually many dildos and sex toys and you can go dildo hunting. It would make a great game for a bachelorette party! In the photo below, there are apparently 7 sex toys, can you find them all?