http://www.newsweek.com/id/238360Newsweek | May 23, 2010
The Selling of the Female Orgasm
A provocative new documentary targets Big Pharma's quest for a female Viagra
By Barbara Kantrowitz and Pat Wingert
You can't help but feel the anguish of Charletta, a charming 60-something Southerner who appears prominently in Liz Canner's new documentary, Orgasm Inc. Charletta is so distraught about her inability to achieve orgasm simultaneously with her husband during intercourse that she agrees to be a test subject for a bizarre invention called an "orgasmatron." But inserting this questionable device in her spine stimulates only her left leg, which shakes uncontrollably when she flips a switch. After the orgasmatron is removed, Charletta shares with Canner her distress at being such a freak. "Not only am I not normal, I'm diseased," she says. But under questioning by Canner, Charletta discloses that she can, in fact, achieve orgasm in other ways. When Canner tells her that makes her "normal," since 70 percent of women don't reach orgasm during coitus, Charletta is stunned. By the end of the film, she seems like a new woman. With a big smile on her face, she tells Canner, "I accept myself the way I am." If more women could make such a statement, Canner wouldn't have spent much of the last decade making Orgasm Inc. But the film, which has its New York premiere May 27 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, is a desperately needed antidote to all the hype generated by pharmaceutical companies pursuing their holy grail: a female Viagra. Canner hit on the topic after years of doing documentaries on subjects like human-rights abuses, police brutality, and poverty. Looking for something more upbeat, she was researching female sexuality when she got a call from the pharmaceutical company Vivus, which wanted her to create erotic videos to use in their clinical study of an "orgasm cream" for women.
Vivus had had an initial success with a product for men called Muse, a pellet inserted into the urinary opening with a plastic applicator. The product launched more than a year before Viagra. When the much easier-to-use Viagra pill quickly overcame Muse as the market leader, Vivus started looked at ways to make a product for women's sexual problems. Canner was bewildered by the purported disease that the new Vivus product was intended to cure—something called "female sexual dysfunction." "They were telling me that 43 percent of women had this disorder, which I found amazing," Canner says. "How could that be true if I had never heard of it before?" That question set Canner off on a cross-country quest that included visits with scientists, experts in erotica, and individual women who often suffered profoundly because their sex lives didn't live up to the glowing imagery displayed in popular culture. She found that the often-cited 43 percent figure actually refers to a 1994 study of all kinds of sexual problems, including a lack of sexual desire, anxiety about performance, and pain during intercourse. Canner ultimately concluded that the catch-all female sexual dysfunction is essentially a phony disease made up by pharmaceutical companies."A lot of this is about marketing," she says. "They are trying to sell disorders." A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, said she couldn't discuss Canner's charge since "as a trade association we can't really comment about issues that are specific to individual companies."
Viagra's phenomenal success inspired drug companies like Vivus to search for a product that could solve women's sexual issue with a similar quick fix. That search hasn't been particularly successful. Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, gave up on creating a similar product for women after eight years of research because, the company said, women's sexual problems were too complex to be fixed with a pill that targeted the genitals. Vivus also gave up on its attempt to create an orgasm cream for women. One highly touted product, Intrinsa, a testosterone patch from Procter & Gamble, was rejected by a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in 2004 because of safety and efficacy concerns (it became available in Europe three years ago). On June 18, the FDA will hold a hearing on the drug flibanserin, from the German manufacturer Boehringer Ingelheim, which was initially tested as an antidepressant. It didn't lift mood, but it did heighten sexual interest and reduce inhibitions—which led the company to test it on women who were suffering from a lack of sexual desire. The results, presented late last year at the Congress of the European Society for Sexual Medicine in Lyon, France, showed that women in the North American part of the trial who took flibanserin for about six months increased their number of "sexually satisfying events" (including orgasm) to an average of 4.5 from 2.8.
That may sound impressive, but consider this: women in the placebo group increased their average to 3.7. Is the difference between 4.5 and 3.7 significant enough to justify approval and overcome any potential health risk? That's what the FDA will have to decide. There may be cheaper and faster ways to reduce inhibition—like a glass of wine and a more attentive partner. And the European women didn't experience the same benefit as their North American sisters, perhaps because they already are less inhibited. One of the heroines of Canner's film is Leonore Tiefer, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. Tiefer calls herself a "sexologist": she has been studying human sexuality for four decades. She led a campaign against Instrinsa's approval and hopes that Orgasm Inc. will inspire people to "come down to Washington to raise a little hell" during the flibanserin hearing. Tiefer argues that no single drug could possibly cure all of women's sexual problems because there are so many potential causes for a woman's inability to enjoy sex. Male impotence is essentially a mechanical problem that can be cured by a medication that enables erection. But women may turn away from sex for many reasons: physical, emotional, psychological...
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