MDM:  Liz, thank you very much for taking this interview, we’re delighted to feature your great work in this special issue. You’re an award-winning filmmaker who also happens to be a thorough researcher and, overall, a professional who’s always been very determined in her work, always in favour of human rights. Some of your documentaries, like  Symphony of a City (2001), Bridges (2004), Hidden Tribe (2006) cover issues such as homelessness, police brutality, corruption, injustice, greed...

What’s the most fundamental change in your viewpoints or beliefs, if any, that this kind of work could have provoked within yourself?

LIZ CANNER: After over a decade of producing documentaries on human rights issues such as genocide, police brutality, and world poverty, the violent images from my movies were giving me nightmares and making me depressed about the state of humanity.  In order to change the script in my head, I decided my next project would be about something that was not painful.

Pleasure itself seemed like a safe topic, specifically, the science of female pleasure.  Plus, it would give me much better dreams.

Then, strangely, while I was in the middle of shooting the movie, I was offered a job editing erotic videos for a pharmaceutical company that was developing an orgasm cream for women.  The videos were to be watched by women during the clinical trial of their new drug.  I accepted the job and gained permission to film my employers for my own documentary. 

I thought the experience would give me access to the secretive world of the pharmaceutical industry and insight into the latest scientific thinking about women and pleasure.

I did not set out to create an exposé, but what I uncovered at work compelled me to keep filming and investigating.  This insider perspective allows the film to scrutinize the culture within the pharmaceutical industry which has been perverted to place the drive for profit above our health. So much for pleasure…

MDM: First day on the job, what were your impressions and what were your initial plans for the documentary that you had in mind to make?

LIZ CANNER: On my first day editing erotic video for Vivus, I worked with Kim Airs, a friend and porn consultant.  We digitized footage and discussed the pornography we were watching.  Kim knew lots of dirt on the porn stars and had plenty of personal encounters to share.  I was concerned that women would not be turned on by some of the material and thought a lot about ways to tone down the male gaze elements. I was also curious about this new disease that Kim and Vivus kept talking about called female sexual dysfunction.  I had never heard the term before.

I wanted to learn more so I gained permission to film my experience on the job and my employers. I was hoping to document new scientific breakthroughs in the understanding of female sexual response and pleasure.  Instead, I discovered that the pharmaceutical industry is not only in the business of developing drugs.

MDM: ‘Orgasm Inc.’ is tremendously funny, hilarious at many points; Was this humorous take a consciously planned angle to somehow ‘dulcify’ the bomb-dropping effect of a document that, let’s not forget, is evidence-supported by several years, EIGHT if we are correct, of investigation, witness accounts, testimonies, interviews, experts, documentation, filming…?

LIZ CANNER: I employed satire and wry humor in Orgasm Inc. to make the viewer feel more at ease with an uncomfortable topic. Although, sexual dissatisfaction is something that most people experience at some point in their lives we rarely discuss it in a public forum. In addition, the film documents the comedic tone of the main characters themselves. Many of them use humor in their work around sexual issues. This includes everyone from my employers at the pharmaceutical company Vivus to Dr. Leonore Tiefer, the founder of the FSD-Alert Campaign.

MDM: Normally, sexual dysfunction is down to physical malfunction in a very small percentage of cases, being sociocultural and psychological causes the real roots of ‘the problem’ in the majority (if not in all) of the cases. Psychological analysis takes time and can be an emotionally painful process and attacking the sociocultural root is also intimidating as it takes a lot of courage to think differently to those who surround you on a daily basis. In your opinion, what’s been the single most damaging sociocultural ‘rule’, ‘belief’, ‘norm’, to women living in western countries?

LIZ CANNER: The most damaging sociocultural belief (that was debunked by the feminists in the 60’s but still seems quite prevalent) is that women are supposed to have fabulous vaginal orgasms every time they have (heterosexual) intercourse. One of the women in my film, Charletta, underwent painful surgery to have an Orgasmatron device installed in her spine. The only thing that it did was make her leg kick out uncontrollably.  Needless to say, it did not work.  It turned out that Charletta actually had no trouble climaxing, but wanted it to happen during sex with her husband in what she considered a “normal” way. She was thrilled when I told her that most women don't climax through intercourse alone.

According to Charletta, her idea about what her sex life was supposed to be like came from the movies. In our society, we're constantly bombarded with images of fabulous sex in the media and the message that we should have orgasms every time.  This is just not accurate.  Researchers have found that 70% of women actually need direct clitoral stimulation in order to climax.

Charletta had been told by the doctor that she had female sexual dysfunction because she was not having orgasms during intercourse.  The idea that there's sexual dysfunction implies that there's a norm. However, there is nothing that says what functional is. There is no norm, no medical study that says that woman should be having five orgasms a month during intercourse or 10 sexual thoughts a day in order to be healthy. So this idea that you can be dysfunctional is problematic.  If you create something that appears that there is a function that women should be living up to, it's quite dangerous.  I think that all of us have complaints. I mean, who doesn’t want to have an orgasm whenever they want?

MDM: It’s kind of obvious that the most a person obsesses about something, the furthest he/she is from ‘getting’ it. Wouldn’t it be funny if the only 'remedy' needed to achieve orgasm was to forget about ‘having to achieve it’?

LIZ CANNER: FSD and ED marketing push the idea of optimal performance and achievement during sex in a purely physical way. As you so astutely point out, this kind of pressure often has the opposite effect. Relaxing and becoming less goal oriented can make sex more enjoyable and, ironically, orgasmic.

MDM: As you also well pointed out in one of the interviews you’ve had with other media, some of the experts brought in to debate the uncovering of the money-making schemes behind many of the 'discoveries' made by the pharmaceutical and medical industries (as if there was something to debate there) that ‘Orgasm Inc.’ shows, have been experts employed by those very same companies. Moore’s ‘Sicko’ dipped into the reality of the financial business of health, you are providing an insider lense, what is it going to take for the public to realise that not all they’re sold, in fact, perhaps 80% of what they’re sold, may not only be useless to better their health but cause them even worse health conditions in the long-run?

LIZ CANNER:  It’s all about education.  This is why I have spent the past year and a half trying to get my film out there.

MDM:  And aren't we grateful for your persistence. They say persistence is key... maybe it is so in terms of getting an orgasm, too. Liz, this is a difficult question…Have you ever been... maybe ‘threaten’ is an exaggeration, but perhaps..somehow ‘intimidated’ in order to discourage you from the completion of a project?

LIZ CANNER: I was raised on the belief that in order to have a functioning democracy you need to have a well-informed citizenry.  This means that the media needs to be free of censorship of all kinds.  I know from my own experience how difficult it has been to create work that is critical of the government and/or big business.  There are a lot of forces in place to try and stop these projects from being made and seen. I can’t go into the details but there have been a number of projects where intimidation tactics have been used to try and get me to either change the projects perspective or just not release it.

MDM:  After a multi-award winning round of festivals, private educational screenings and speaking engagements, ‘Orgasm Inc.’ is currently being and/or will broadcast in some of the main television channels of countries such as Canada, France, Spain, Finland, Brazil, Israel, Italy, Japan…and is finally hitting US theatres on the 11th of February. For what you’ve been witnessing during this past year, what kind of reaction do you anticipate from mass audiences?

LIZ CANNER: I’m hoping for a mass orgasm.

MDM:  (Laughing out loud) We certainly recommend watching this documentary. Liz, what’s next?

LIZ CANNER: I’m finally making a documentary on pleasure.