pharmaceuticals

Orgasm Inc.

barbara — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

The orgasm. Feminists laud it, good lovers work hard to give it, pharmaceutical companies make it a business model. The inability to experience an orgasm is thought to be as devastating as the inability to delight in the joy of wine, sunrise, spring flowers, and other wonderment. But this is hardly an overstatement. Last week in London, I had the sheer privilege of attending a hugely popular talk by a doyenne of second wave feminism, Shere Hite. Her most well-known publication, The Hite Report, was a groundbreaking feminist version of the Kinsey report, a comprehensive study on female sexuality in '70s America that overturned all taboos of its day.

Hite contends that the traditional model of sexual intercourse privileges male pleasure and disregards any sense of pleasuring women to the point of orgasm. Not climaxing is tantamount to self-abnegating one self's right to wholeness, and women have long been denying their selfhood by committing to the patriarchal rituals of sex, argues Hite. She does have a point of course about the significance of pleasure, but her assertion that the “lack of sexual satisfaction is another sign of oppression of women” poses serious implications on how women must rethink sex. Woe betide the women who feel inadequate when they have difficulty getting sexually aroused, much less with orgasm during intercourse.

And so the many women who were once frustrated, frigid and unfulfilled are now medically certified as casualties of a new epidemic—female sexual dysfunction (FSD). But in a pill-popping culture such as the U.S., help is at hand and pharmaceutical companies are quick to exploit cultural expectations and women's most intimate insecurities. In Orgasm Inc., by first-time documentary film-maker Liz Canner, we are treated to the dizzying unravelling of pharmaceutical businesses devoted to the “female Viagra” and its role in creating, as it were, female sexual dysfunction (FSD). Canner is initiated into the shams and often shambolic world of drug companies through an invitation to edit an erotic video used during a clinical trial conducted by Vivus, a company dedicated to developing a cream for sexual arousal.

But when Canner delves deeper into Vivus's business plan, some things are amiss. Women on both active drug and placebo appear to be equally aroused when subjected to erotic videos, but Vivus goes ahead anyway pushing to get themselves on the market. Not that Vivus's drug was initially designed to treat male impotence really mattered, as the researchers placed their bets on a hunch that it can turn women on as well. It appears that the business of discovering a cure for the purported female sexual dysfunction is masculinist and penis-centred at best, one that is isolated as a problem related to the sexual organ and a matter of hormonal imbalance. There is little reference to how women get on with their partners in the bedroom, the happiness or lack of it in relationships, history of abuse, and lack of self-esteem. Furthermore, cultural expectations which are mistaken as "universal" sexual norms prescribe that sex without orgasm is a sign of abnormality.

Canner interviews other pharmaceutical companies that have also been founded on dubious science and run by “research” consultants who aren't able to explain in definitive terms what FSD is and react as if they are assailed by trick questions. When promoted by drug company-backed doctors and scientists who frame sexual inadequacies in often obtuse and intimidating language, lay persons beset with perceived medical disorders are like putty in their hands. The stage is thus set for a no-nonsense competition—a race—to win FDA approval and multiple million-dollar glory.

Soon companies dropped one-by-one off the race like flies due to unconvincing science, including a strong contender, Intrinsa, a trans-dermal testosterone patch. It did not, however, stop Instrinsa from being sold in the European Union. Fallacies poised to eternally discredit FSD notwithstanding, very few could stand in the way of the monstrously indomitable spirit of pharmaceutical companies. Like Hite's grand manifesto, much of drug research posit that desire and pleasure are like a switch within an autonomous body. I raised my hand to ask Dr. Hite about women who were unable to experience orgasm yet live happy and fulfilled lives, to which she struggled to offer a coherent answer other than there are no two ways about how important sexual satisfaction through an orgasm is.

Suffice to say, I felt equally dejected by her response and the outcome in Canner's thought-provoking film as the mystery of female sexuality is thrown further into abyss. How helpful is the medicalisation of perfect sexuality when desire, pleasure, and fantasy are made to fit a disease model, a model designed to reinforce crude normal/abnormal typologies? Yet we are besotted by medical science but unaware of its cultural and moral underpinnings that are adept at demonising “bad” bodies. Canner's film peels away much of the objectivity purported by pharmaceutical science, sexology, and medicine, and invites us to reassess the social values of health and happiness in radically new ways.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, March 9th 2011

Black Dogs and Blue Words: Depression and Gender in the Age of Self-Care

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Kimberly Emmons

Rutgers University Press

Jerry Seinfeld jokes that pharmaceutical companies could save time by naming all of their antidepressants “Cramitol” (“Cram it all”). Kimberly Emmons would likely agree. Her eye-opening Black Dogs and Blue Words opens up an original, potentially life-changing perspective on antidepressants and the companies who market them. Emmons, an English professor at Case Western Reserve University and an expert in medical rhetoric, offers shocking and persuasive evidence that women are not only the targets of these ads, but have become complicit in the targeting.

Emmons builds her case brick by brick. Although her prose is academic and dense in places, the slowly building logic and the reader’s ensuing sense of outrage make the book as hard to put down as any who-dun-it. In fact, the book is its own brand of who-dun-it. How did women become Big Pharma bullseyes? Solving the mystery requires understanding how the language of antidepressant advertising both reflects and shapes gender stereotypes. To illustrate, Emmons dissects print and broadcast ads word by word and frame by frame. She points out how words such as “excessive crying," “fatigue," “loss of zest,” and “tearfulness” have long been used in our culture to describe women’s emotions and alleged deficits, and how drug manufacturers have co-opted the phrasing to describe depression.

It gets worse. Analyzing the photographs that accompany the ads, Emmons demonstrates how they reflect our societal norms of acceptable female behavior. The ads feature sad women standing apart from their family, women whose disappointed children accuse them of being “no fun anymore,” and protective fathers with their arms around children, standing apart from mom, fixing her with baleful stares. Next frame, the woman diagnoses herself with depression. Next, she is shown at her doctor’s office requesting antidepressants, and, presto, next frame, the woman has been restored to her acceptable “gendered self.” How do we know? She reports her progress as she shops for the family groceries, or while playing with her children, or while involved in some other womanly scenario. Emmons also surveys children’s literature and that women’s magazine staple, the self-diagnostic quiz, with equally interesting and well-considered conclusions.

One of the book’s most fascinating chapters traces the history of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which, as the title implies, spells out the criteria for diagnosing psychiatric illnesses. In one of her biggest bombshells, Emmons reveals that much of the language employed by Big Pharma to describe depression is not found in the DSM. Rather, drug manufacturers have cherry-picked synonyms primarily associated with women. Women absorb the ads, diagnose themselves with depression and make a beeline for the doctor’s office. The doctor, bombarded by the same marketing and lacking the time for a more in-depth probing, agrees. Prescription signed. Pills sold. And so we circle.

But don’t think that Emmons is anti-antidepressant, because she isn’t. Her view is much more reasoned. She acknowledges the good that medication can do under the right circumstances. But she also urges women to go from a regime of self-doctoring to a regime of self-care. Emmons uses “self-doctoring” to refer to women’s willingness to buy into the pharma-philosophy that emotional and social malaise stem from chemical problems which only can have chemical solutions. By accepting this rhetoric, says Emmons, women deprive themselves of their own personal narrative, one which may have little or nothing to do with clinical depression.

In contrast, self-care involves reacting to signals that something is not right with a conscious surveying of one’s life and all its circumstances. Perhaps medication will help. Or perhaps a much more profound change is in order. Learning how we have been manipulated, our lives altered by corporate profiteering, is depressing. Pass me the Cramitol. On second thought, don’t. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Written by: T. Tamara Weinstein, July 12th 2010

In Our Control: The Complete Guide to Contraceptive Choices for Women

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Laura Eldridge

Seven Stories Press

The pill is turning fifty this year, and article upon article is being written trumpeting how hormonal contraception has revolutionized women’s lives. While this is true, perhaps the bigger story is how for many women, the pill is the default contraceptive option – despite potential side effects or inconveniences.

Laura Eldridge wants to change that. Believing that women should take control of their contraceptive health by looking at the political, medical, and social implications of birth control, she set out to write a book that both challenged and informed women about something so few of us actually talk about. Her final product, In Our Control, brings a straightforward, nonjudgmental, and honest look at the pill, the patch, the ring, and, yes, even fertility awareness methods.

In Our Control isn’t content to simply discuss contraceptive options as if they exist in a vacuum. Instead, Eldridge traces the history of birth control development, painting a backdrop of the political context and gender inequalities that are inextricably intertwined with each birth control option.

Nuanced discussions of medical side effects and precautions are deftly arranged between critiques of the medical-industrial complex. Eldridge walks readers through the thought process within her critiques, which allows the reader to become a smart consumer of contraceptive options. For example, her discussion of the HPV vaccination and the pharmaceutical industry’s rush to push it to the public is critical, yet evenhanded and well researched. The chapter on menstrual suppression drugs casts a wary eye towards the way feminist themes of empowerment have been misappropriated in advertising for such products.

While the main focus of In Our Control is on a discussion of contraceptive options, I felt the book really shined in its final chapters on the HPV vaccination, birth control options for men, environmental concerns about contraception, and international issues in contraception. It was in these chapters that Eldridge combined her inquisitive and unorthodox style of writing with a critical look at contemporary issues in contraception. I found myself unable to put the book down through these chapters.

Eldridge’s fresh voice was apparent on every page of In Our Control, and evoked the pro-woman, community-oriented feel of a volume of Our Bodies, Ourselves. By placing exhaustive information about contraception into the hands of her readers, Eldridge is ensuring that women can approach their health professionals fully armed with all of their options, enabling them to have an honest conversation about which method is best for them.Gwen Emmons

Written by: Gwen Emmons, June 14th 2010