When filmmaker Liz Canner was hired by a pharmaceutical company racing to produce the first female Viagra on the market, she got an insider’s look at the unethical business of Female Sexual Dysfunction, which she hilariously documents in Orgasm Inc.
Canner was hired by the company to edit erotic videos for its FSD drug trial, that had been approved by the FDA to treat this new “disease.” Getting permission from her employer, she set out to document its efforts in a film she planned to be about “science and pleasure,” but soon became suspicious of the company, its competitors, and the medical industry at large for taking advantage of women’s insecurities, while also potentially endangering their health, in pursuit of the kind of money that could be made off what she suspected might be an invented illness. As Carol Queen, from the Good Vibrations Antique Vibrator Museum, points out in the trailer, “Is a drug gonna help them? Maybe if it has a map of the clitoris on the box.”
It’s most likely that there are some women out there that actually do have some kind of sexual dysfunction, who have exhausted all other outlets of treating the issue, and could benefit from some kind of drug. But Orgasm Inc.—out February 11—asks whether FSD will be an umbrella diagnosis for women who’ve never been stimulated properly, and questions the ethics of the companies who are more than willing to keep women in the dark about their own bodies in order cash in.
‘Orgasm Inc.’ Titillates & Enrages with New Trailer & Poster [The Film Stage]