Orgasms, Incorporated:
Filmmaker explores medicalization of female sexual pleasure in new documentary
By: Meredith Napolitano

Perhaps Freud was onto something in 1905 when he theorized that female clitoral orgasms were adolescent-- in order to reach maturity, a woman had to climax vaginally. She who didn’t, he thought, suffered from maladjustment to her natural role as woman and should seek psychiatric care.

Though he later doubted the claim (an intellectual, not anatomical one) finding a full grasp of the “dark continent” of female sexuality elusive, the idea undoubtedly hit a complex nerve and a sparked lot of faked orgasms in the twentieth century.

Maybe he just wanted to open a can of worms—one that we’re still sorting through. It’s decades after Kinsey, the Sexual Revolution, Betty Dodson’s female masturbation mantras, and the Pill, but it seems the ideology behind the female pleasure quota is always under inspection—or maybe it’s finally being discussed more.

The latest mystery of the dark continent is that an estimated 43% of American women are reported suffering from what is now called FSD (Female Sexual Dysfunction). Symptoms include: “low or absent sex drive, non-maintained arousal during sexual activity, not becoming aroused despite a desire to have sex, not experiencing orgasm, and pain during sexual contact.” If you feel any of these, you might be… “dysfunctional.”

But according to who?

And what if it’s not a disease?

That’s what documentarian Liz Canner proposes in, Orgasm Inc.: The Strange Science of Female Pleasure, which received its NYC premiere this May. In a scathing and heart-felt piece, Canner (an award-winner for her films on human rights and the 2009 Visionary-in-Residence at the Center for Women and Gender at Dartmouth) exposes the pharmaceutical industry’s latest exploits of female sexuality.

Sex for your pleasure or their profit?

From orgasm “agent” creams that increase blood flow, to Viagra pills for women with unknown risks, testosterone patches (“Intrinsa,” a steroid taken for weeks) to an “Ogasmatron,” a chip placed surgically into the spinal cord and manipulated by a remote control source (it fails to deliver the goods in the clinical trial) to “vaginal rejuvenation” (get a designer vagina) to vaginoplasty- surgery decreasing distance between vagina and clitoris—a common factor in vaginal orgasm probability (in one featured patient vaginoplasty results in 1/3 loss of blood), Canner depicts the cringe-worthy “solutions” to FSD on the market. Worse, women are trying them.

“I didn’t set out to produce an expose” said Canner. The film’s message is perhaps a happy accident stumbled upon in the editing room. Hired by Vivus, a pharmaceutical company, to inter-cut erotic videos for a clinical test for an orgasm cream, “Alista,” curious Canner obtained permission to film interviews with Vivus employees about how FSD came to be.

“We don’t know…” answered the flushed Virgil Place, MD who founded Vivus to originally deal with his own erectile dysfunction. Further interviews with pharmaceutical employees manufacturing FSD prescription drugs, are borderline tongue and cheek, leaving the audience wondering if those working in the third most profitable industry in the United States, distinguishing disease from normal function, actually know or believe in what they’re doing.

“There’s no barometer for normal,” explains Canner. “No rule saying you have to have 10 orgasms a month to be healthy. I’m concerned this is becoming about ‘performance.’”

Intending to Matter

Medicine aside, since women often relate desire as being more contextual than physiological, it would seem that the female pleasure measure is predominantly a human responsibility that depends not only on the woman, but on the man. Anxieties about appearance, aging, safety, past trauma or mixed/negative messages from childhood are just a few non-medical triggers that could easily manifest in “FSD,” and those ingrained inhibitions can be hard to shake.

“They (inhibitions) come from divisions about who we should be sexually,” adds Canner.

Self and partner-communication, not drugs, is something Kim Wallen, professor of psychology and behavioral neuroendocrinology at Emory University who studies hormones, emphasizes as beyond key. As he stands near a female monkey showing off her genitals to her mate in the film, he states what he’s learned from his work:

“Pay more attention to females.”

Carol Quan, a plucky antique vibrator museum curator featured in the film, simply wonders if FSD is being marketed as the new Hysteria. “Do I think there is a drug that will help women have more orgasms? If it has a map of the clitoris on the back.”

Still, people will buy a solution in a bottle.

Enter the blonde, perky, approachable and media-savvy sister sexpert team—Doctors Laura and Jennifer Berman, a sex therapist and urologist respectively, who, from the late 90s on, became nationally renown overnight with their “better sex and intimacy at any age” campaign that included sex toys, therapy, tips, books, diagnosis, an opening of The Berman Center in Chicago, appearances on Oprah, and endorsement of FSD prescription drugs on notable news programs.

Women flocked to their “Nice Girls Do!” motto, desperate to repair their sex lives. It all seems empowering in a sense, when you see they do place psychological importance upon love and relationship, until it is revealed that an appointment at the Center cost $1,500 (they do not accept insurance), their approach seems clinical and removed, and they were paid up to $75,000 a day to promote prescription drugs for FSD on TV news shows and talk shows, a moment which left the screening audience furious.

“Sex is a co-created thing that happens between people. You need to prove that something is a disease,” adds Leonore Tiefer, PhD., a psychiatrist from NYU School of Medicine, who fights hard against the FDA’s approval of drugs for FSD and leads the New View Campaign about the dangers of medicalizing sex.

Perhaps the idea behind a hyper-involvement in improving female “performance” is problematic in itself because it can easily be mistaken for one more way to pressure women into feeling inferior and in need of an outside source to fix them, instead of focusing on loving and enjoying what is already literally inside them.

Back to Betty Dodson PhD, the sexologist, who stated, “We are constantly protecting the male ego, and it's a disservice to men. If a man has any sensitivity or intelligence, he wants to get the straight scoop from his girlfriend.”

Re-interpreting Freud, perhaps a paradigm shift in adjusting to maturity is trusting women have that scoop. Orgasm, Inc., is both a cautionary and inspirational tale in that it stands alone as a device to transform mentality and not with a pill or switch.