Work It Make It Do It Makes Us Harder Better Faster Stronger
At the start of the new documentary Orgasm Inc., we meet Charletta, a sixtysomething woman who says she cannot reach orgasm. Well, she takes that back: She can. Just not at the same time as her husband. Not like they do in the movies. “Not like normal women,” she insists. She’s so convinced something’s wrong that she joins a clinical trial for the Orgasmatron – an electrical device implanted in the spine to induce climax.
Produced over 10 years by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner, Orgasm Inc. is an indictment of the medicalization of female sexuality and the quest to develop and market medical solutions for a class of disorder called female sexual dysfunction, or FSD. The film targets, for instance, an alarming, though ultimately flawed, study cited by drug companies claiming that as many as 43 percent of American women suffer from FSD – a ready-made pharmaceutical market if ever there was one.
Canner uses Charletta and others as evidence of the ridiculous – even dangerous – lengths women have gone to feel “normal.” She argues that FSD doesn’t exist, at least not in the physiological sense, but rather was manufactured by “Big Pharma” to convince us we have a problem that only its pricey drugs and technologies can fix. (…)
Many doctors specializing in female sexuality argue that women are indeed candidates for FSD drugs. “The pharmaceutical industry did not create distressing sexual problems for women,” says Dr. Jan Shifren, director of the Vincent Menopause Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She says the percentage of women who experience such difficulties hovers around 12. Not Big Pharma’s 43, but not insignificant, either. “That doesn’t mean we need to treat women exclusively with pills,” she adds. “The answer is somewhere in between.”
