Orgasm Inc.: Director's Statement
Written by: Liz Canner
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I have been filming Orgasm Inc. for eight years. The film began as a video art piece on the odd medical beliefs about women's sexual pleasure since medieval times. Then by chance, I was offered, and accepted, a job editing erotic video at Vivus, a pharmaceutical company that was developing a Viagra-type drug for women. My employers gave me permission to film the experience of working for them for my documentary. This gave me unusual access into the secretive world of the pharmaceutical industry. I did not set out to create an exposé, but what I uncovered at Vivus compelled me to keep filming and investigating.
My insider perspective allows the film to scrutinize the everyday patterns of pharmaceutical company work in order to explore a culture that has been perverted to place the drive for profit above our health. Orgasm Inc. will be the first documentary to explore the way in which the pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers are attempting to market and sell us our sex lives, and the doctors and activists who are trying to stop them.
Because this is the first documentary on this topic, I need to convey a lot of complicated information in the film. In order to do this creatively, I use standard narrative techniques while playing with the forms of personal documentary, verite, and corporate video. In addition, this allows me to aesthetically explore one of the films central questions: should sexuality be viewed through the cold lens of science and medicine or as a more sensual humanistic activity? For instance, the scenes at Vivus mimic the sanitized style of a corporate video. Video art scenes and animations, meanwhile, offer innovative, and at times playful, explorations of some of the film's central themes. For example, changing ideas about female sexuality over time are explored on camera through an Oprah-like talk show in which historical characters debate female sexual function from their perspective. The guests include characters such as Renaldus Columbus, (the first anatomist to 'discover' the clitoris in 1559) and Sigmund Freud.
It's clear that the world is about to be saturated with ads for sex treatments for women. The drug companies and medical device manufacturers have already begun spending millions of dollars on marketing not only their coming drugs but also the 'disease'. The existence of both 'disease' and 'cure' is beginning to dominate all discussion of sexual dissatisfaction, conveniently sweeping major contributing factors under the rug. It is my hope that Orgasm Inc. will provide an antidote to drug company marketing and scientific distortion, and play a strategic role in protecting millions of women from being deceived into taking unnecessary and possibly unsafe drugs.
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