Indie sex-and-science documentary Orgasm Inc. deftly deflates the pharmaceutical industry's hunt for a lucrative cure to female sexual dysfunction.
Fresh from a decorated festival run, Liz Canner's movie digs into the fake disorder, also called female sexual arousal disorder, as well as the latest attempts to turn feminine sexuality into a treatable medical condition.
The basic concept is lunacy with a long legacy extending back to female hysteria and refrigerator mothers. The fact that a so-called female Viagra has been vigorously pursued by medical professionals and the pharmaceutical industry is consensual cultural madness.
Canner's Orgasm Inc., which opens theatrically in New York on Friday and arrives on DVD in June, smartly and whimsically makes naked the impoverished premises and proofs behind the treatment of FSD.
Her quest begins accidentally, as the conscientious indie filmmaker tires of creating depressing documentaries about geopolitical machinations in Nicaragua and at the International Monetary Fund. Once Canner decides to cheer up and edit erotic promotional videos for Vivus, a pharmaceutical pioneer in erectile dysfunction now intent on developing an orgasm cream for women, she's dragged deep into the equally depressing machinations of the medical and pharmaceutical industries.
This is not to say that Canner's film is utterly bleak. A tour of an antique vibrator museum and a cheesy CGI race featuring potential FSD cures are interspersed with soft-corn erotica filmed for Vivus. The purposeful mood-lighteners turn the film into a self-aware sex romp.
Still, Orgasm Inc. is existentially soul-sucking. Watching Ph.D.-approved whitecoats epically stumble while defending these diaphanous diseases and their dangerous "cures" is terrifying business.
We meet Dr. Stuart Meloy, who says, "We need to make money off of this," while stitching the wires and electrodes of his orgasmatron into the spine of an elderly woman.
We see Lisa Thorson, director of marketing for Global Med Technologies, helming a medical convention booth offering laser vaginal rejuvenation and designer vaginoplasty for women with "abnormally long labias," while admitting that she's ambivalent about the medicalization of sexuality.
Orgasm Inc. counters these views with plenty of sensible criticism of female sexual dysfunction from doctors, scientists and the Food and Drug Administration, which gongs Procter & Gamble's mystically named testosterone patch Intrinsa in the eye-opening documentary's waning minutes.
Canner makes fearsomely clear that the last several extremely profitable decades of medical treatment of sexuality feel like the start of a dysfunctional relationship. The worst is probably yet to come.
Images courtesy Astrea Media
WIRED Burning topic, bumbling suits and sellouts, mostly happy ending.
TIRED Clumsy CGI, no Sleater-Kinney songs.
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