ORGASM INC.

Directed by Liz Canner

Reviewed by Matthew Brown
May 2 2009

Orgasm Inc. gets billed as being about the search for the female Viagra, the miracle cure-all which (like the fountain of youth, El Dorado, or Frank Darabont's script for Indy IV) lurks in the popular unsconscious as an mystically valuable boon which will, in this case, chase away the demons of female sexual unfulfilment, shower orgasms from the sky, and make every woman in the United States able to come like a man, god dammit, every time. Each year has a few of these docs; I call them porn for smart people. After all, who doesn't want the shamelessly naughty experience of going into the dark with like-minded intellectuals and having a bit of sexy brain-sex at the movies, as long as it doesn't involve that long-nailed wraith of the cyberverse, Nina Hartley? Especially when Come As You Are is handing out free vibrators in the lobby before the show?

Fortunately, Orgasm Inc. isn't really about the making of a drug; this film is about the medicalization of perfect normalcy, by industries who stand to profit by that medicalization. It's about the creation and marketing of the "disease" now called Female Sexual Dysfunction. (FSD has been known by other names in the past, with my favourite always being Freud's reliable old "hysteria", which calls to mind images of restless uteruses leaping out of the body and flying around the room, if they aren't masturbated into dormancy by qualified male doctors.) FSD has been popularized by the pharmaceutical industry in the United States over the course of the past few decades. It's all part of a broader effort to turn otherwise unremarkable aspects of normal human life (are you shy, or do you have social anxiety disorder? Is your kid restless, or does he have ADHD?) into something that can be treated with pills.

As medical targets go, Female Sexual Dysfunction is pretty slippery. How is it even defined? None of the drug companies anxiously pursuing its cure seem confident in the answer, even though they themselves are the ones creating the definition. It seems like FSD can range everywhere from consistent painful intercourse to just not wanting to fuck your partner after a tough day at the office. The omnipotent witch-queen of the American patriarchy, @Oprah, is confident enough in FSD's existence to broadcast an incidence rate of "43% of American women" to her slavish cabal, but Leonore Tiefer, who is trying to block FDA approval for FSD drugs, sees a lot of troubling instability in those kinds of figures. Sexual feeling, she says, has been quantified and commodified in a way that other feelings (when was the last time you counted the number of times per month you felt friendly towards your friends?) aren't. Why? Well, guess.

Orgasm Inc. is smartly made. It's a talking-heads documentary, to be sure, but director Liz Canner gets good subjects talking intelligently about an important issue, and gets her camera into the right places to build the momentum of her argument. In one instance, she finds a lady in a clinical trial for an electronic stimulation device called - no joke - the Orgasmatron. The woman almost never reaches orgasm, it seems, and is willing to have electrodes inserted into her spine in order to be "normal." Canner then holds back revealing that this poor woman is only in the trial because she believes that "normal" means women having orgasms during intercourse, every time, like in the movies. Otherwise, she can bring herself off by other means without difficulty at all!

Later in the film, a (female) representative at a sexology conference is selling "laser vaginal rejuvenation," the filthy and apalling upward-trending cosmetic surgery fad to reshape mature vulvas into the abstract, uncluttered slits left behind at puberty. (Because a healthy, adult vagina is "gross," I guess.) This woman, in describing her organization's creation of "designer vaginas" (which I must presume are somehow "not gross") is so conflicted about what she is saying that her face literally vibrates while she chokes out the words; she later suggests that she may soon quit. (She ultimately doesn't.)

Everyone, obviously, deserves to have as enjoyable and fulfilling a sex life as they want. Where Orgasm Inc. draws the line is where the standards for that normalcy have been falsely shifted by the huge, huge, huge companies that stand to create a sense of dysfunction where none exists, or to at least put treatment in a more profitable place than where it would be the most actual help. What could be called the ultimate message of the film - "don't let anybody tell you your vagina is broken," or better, "don't let 'normal' get defined for you" is so frustratingly simple and yet far-reachingly important that Orgasm Inc. becomes quite thrilling, often distressing, and more often than not, inspiring and fun. This is required viewing for anyone with genitals, of either denomination.