The documentary Orgasm Inc by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner offers something you won’t see on film outside a Woody Allen movie – a device called the “orgasmatron.” Instead of a white, phone booth-sized chamber, this one is implanted in a woman’s spine. And, in this case it doesn’t work.
The film also offers something that the porn directors of the world would die for – a women having an actual orgasm.
On Thursday night, Canner will be on hand at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre to answer questions about the film, which documents the lack of science behind the search for the “female Viagra.” She’ll be joined by several people after the screening, including Susan Bennett, MD, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School Paula Doress-Worters, Co-author, Our Bodies, Ourselves, Kim Airs, Founder of the female orients sex toy web site, Grand Opening!
Canner got interested in the topic when a company called Vivis asked her to put together a collection of pornography clips for a clinical trial of a drug for “female sexual dysfunction.” She agreed to make the female-friendly porn anthology if the company, would let her document their search for the “female Viagra.” The company welcomed her for a tour of their research center and a weekend retreat. But, by the time she finishes the film seven years later, their drug has failed and they stop returning her calls.
The film tracks the effort to define a woman’s difficulty having a “normal” – read simultaneous – orgasm as a disease. A story in this week’s Globe Magazine miscast the movie’s main point – that orgasm is more than a physical response.
.. the film’s suggestion that sexual difficulty is “all in our heads” – and that women are particularly susceptible to buying the lies that Big Pharma is selling – strikes me as limiting at best, vaguely antifeminist at worst.
Huh? See the film for yourself and decide.
Also take note of some appearances by some other former Boston notables, including celebrity sex therapist sisters Laura Berman. She and her sister partner worked at BU before they took off to the land of Oprah and pop sexology.
In one clip Laura Berman – who wears a white lab coat calls herself Dr. Berman but doesn’t have an MD – insists that Viagra helps women. This despite a trail of failed clinical trials.
It also features self-described menopause specialist Dr. Alan Altman, who recently moved his practice from Brookline to Aspen, Colorado. Altman is a big advocate of hormone replacement therapy and thus a major critic of the Women’s Health Initiative, which linked the drugs to cancer. HRT has also failed as a way to improve female sexual response. But, give Dr. Altman credit. He attends and praises a presentation by a critic of the twisted science – or lack of it – surrounding drug for female orgasm.