Good Screenings

EQUALS on film: Orgasm Inc

Directed by Liz Canner

• Official Selection - IDFA
• Official Selection - Hot Docs
• Winner Best Feature Award - Vermont

Synopsis

Extraordinary behind-the-scenes access reveals a drug company's fevered race to develop the first FDA-approved Viagra for women - and offers a humorous but sobering look inside the cash-fuelled pharmaceutical industry.

About the director

• "A sexy feature-length indictment of big pharma" that gives "a lot of great laughs."
  - The Toronto Star
• "Maintaining a playful tone, Canner's film nevertheless serves as an indictment of greed at the expense of women who have too long been kept in the dark about their own bodies and sexuality."
  - indieWire
• "Buzzworthy."
  - Variety
• "Orgasm Inc. is one of the best documentaries on both sex and the medical field ever, witty, clever, informative and timely."
  - Firedoglake.com
• "Orgasm Inc., a biting new documentary, gives a behind-the-scenes look at the race to develop drugs, devices, and surgery to treat female sexual problems."
  - Vogue Magazine
• “Upbeat, engaging, enlightening, and provocative, Orgasm Inc. will change the way you think about sex.”
  - Hot Docs Film Festival

• Official Website

More Information

In the shocking and hilarious documentary Orgasm Inc., filmmaker Liz Canner takes a job editing erotic videos for a drug trial for a pharmaceutical company. Her employer is developing what they hope will be the first Viagra drug for women that wins FDA approval to treat a new disease: Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). Liz gains permission to film the company for her own documentary. Initially, she plans to create a movie about science and pleasure but she soon begins to suspect that her employer, along with a cadre of other medical companies, might be trying to take advantage of women (and potentially endanger their health) in pursuit of billion dollar profits. Orgasm Inc. is a powerful look inside the medical industry and the marketing campaigns that are literally and figuratively reshaping our everyday lives around health, illness, desire -- and that ultimate moment: orgasm.

Along with meeting drug company CEOs, field testers, and number crunchers, she encounters doctors, scientists and psychiatrists who are resisting the pharmaceutical industry's notion that sexual dissatisfaction is a "disease" that needs to be treated with a drug. Most of women's sexual problems, they believe, are due to cultural conditions -- relationship issues, sexual abuse, poor sex education, and stress from overwork. Their goal: stop corporate medicine before it is too late.

Throughout Orgasm Inc. important revelations are made and compelling characters are encountered who claim to hold the key to women's orgasm. We meet a doctor in Winston Salem, NC who is testing an Orgasmatron - electrodes inserted into the spine and activated at the press of a button. We encounter a medical device marketer, Lisa, who is deep in the process of launching Designer Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation surgery to "help" women look and feel young and tighter "down there". Ambivalent about the disturbing effects of cosmetic genital surgery, Lisa haltingly admits that she needs to quit her job on-camera. As Orgasm Inc. goes deeper, it reveals that many of the "treatments" for FSD have potentially dangerous and life-threatening side effects, including genital mutilation, breast cancer, and dementia.

Fortunately, all is not bleak on the sexual frontier, Liz also uncovers inspirational pioneers who are committed to leading others to true erotic fulfillment: a sex shop owner who crashes pharmaceutical conferences to educate the doctors who attend, a vintage vibrator collector who provides insight into the history of female "hysteria," and a professor whose monkeys have taught him to pay more attention to women. These visionaries believe that the key to sexual satisfaction is to change not just our sex lives but also our society.

As the film nears the finish line, Procter & Gamble pulls ahead of the other pharmaceutical companies. Its drug Intrinsa, a testosterone patch, touted to be the first drug to treat women with low sexual desire, goes before the FDA. At the heated hearing, activists face off against Procter & Gamble, battling not only over the drug’s FDA approval but ultimately our future cultural and scientific understanding of sex.

The world is beginning to be saturated with ads for sex treatments for women. The drug companies and medical device manufacturers have already begun spending millions of dollars on marketing not only their treatments but also the 'disease'. The existence of both 'disease' and 'cure' is beginning to dominate all discussion of sexual dissatisfaction, conveniently sweeping major contributing factors under the rug. Orgasm Inc. provides an antidote to drug company marketing and scientific distortion, and will help to protect women from being deceived into undergoing unnecessary and possibly unsafe medical treatments. Upbeat, engaging, enlightening, and provocative, Orgasm Inc. will change the way you think about sex.

Choose a version