To Heal Myself

“I’m in this to heal myself,” says Charletta. “Not only am I not normal, I’m diseased.”  Charletta is a clinical trial test subject who believes what she’s been told. “All of my life, I’ve difficulty achieving orgasm,” she says, and so she’s having an orgasmatron inserted in her spinal cord.

So named by its inventor, Dr. Stuart Meloy of Winston-Salem, NC, the orgasmatron is about as creepy as it sounds, a set of electrodes that a woman can “turn on and off with a remote control.” The doctor appears quite sure of his product in Orgasm, Inc., as does his patient, at first. But Liz Canner’s documentary raises questions, not only regarding the procedure, which is briefly shown (“Typically it takes 20 minutes,” he says, then frowns vaguely as he notes that this one was “about 40 minutes”), but also the very idea that Charletta needs treatment. And it’s this idea—in a word, the medicalization of women’s sexuality—that Orgasm, Inc. targets.

Canner traces her own interest in the subject to a time when she was hired by the pharmaceutical company Vivus to “help with a clinical trial” by making porn videos. The assignment got her thinking about why or how a drug might not only “help” women to achieve normal sexual desire and behavior, but also, how that normal state was being defined. This meant rethinking as well how the disease was being defined. As the film points out, “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD) was advertised as a condition in need of treatment in order to create a market for the treatment—whether by electrodes or therapy or, most often, by drugs.

The process is circular and then some. In the United States, drugs need to be approved by the FDA, which demands that a disease exists before such approval. And so the pharmaceutical companies, following the booming success of Viagra and other drugs to treat “erectile dysfunction” during the 1990s, undertook a campaign to define FSD. Canner points out that this campaign, multifaceted and ongoing, “is actually changing how we think about our bodies about our disease and about our health.” Or, as British Medical Journal visiting editor Ray Moynihan puts it, FSD exemplifies “the corporate-sponsored creation of disease.”

The documentary shows how this happens, through advertisements and news stories featuring experts employed by the drug companies, for example, Laura Berman, once paid $75,000 a day to promote Pfizer’s Female Viagra, currently hosting OWN’s In the Bedroom With Dr. Laura Berman. Canner also looks at how the practice is only a faster, more media-saturating version of longtime processes, for instance, labeling women “hysterical” during the 19th century.

Such labeling and diagnosing are not reserved for women only, of course. The film notes as well that recently medicalized conditions like “Restless Leg Syndrome” and “Social Anxiety Disorder” emerged in order to sell drugs to treat them: “There’s a lot of money in telling healthy people they’re sick,” submits Canner. The current system has been in place for decades, and it undermines the ostensible “war on drugs”: when the world around you argues that drugs will fix you (or whatever particular ailment you’re feeling), why would you not self-medicate if you had no recourse to expensive prescriptions? The route to the present was paved in 1981, observes the documentary: even as Nancy Reagan campaigned to “Just Say No,” her husband created the Task Force on Regulatory Relief that “opened the floodgates for direct to consumer advertising.” Thus, labeling and diagnosing are less a matter of expertise and need than commercial enterprise, preying on the widespread faith in the U.S. that drugs can fix everything.

Canner interviews Berman (who continues to promote Female Viagra even after Pfizer has halted trials), as well as Berman Center employees, who wear lab coats and lead her, with camera in hand, through a simulated assessment: “Your total today is $1500,” says the receptionist at the end, cash or credit card. While it’s clear that FSD can be profitable for some, it is also, according to NYU’s Lenore Tiefer, a racket. The film shows her organizing and lecturing against the process, as well as appearing before the FDA, she says, “To try to throw a roadblock in front of their steamroller.” 

As the film plainly celebrates this effort and decries the drug industry profiteers, it’s partly entertaining and partly reductive. When “sexpert” Kim Airs crashes an industry convention in Atlanta, she brings along sex toys and a lively patter. Her listeners look alternately bemused and amused as she pulls out her vulva puppet and offers instructions on vibrators. When a male doctor stands up at the end of her presentation to affirm it—“This is incredibly important stuff”—the film seems to have made a point, but it’s not an especially original one.

It’s a little too easy to observe, as does Harvard’s Susan Bennett, that “We as a society think we should be able to fix everything just by having a pill.” Orgasm, Inc. shows that amid all the other kinds of defining, this “we” remains discouragingly vague.