If you're a pharmaceutical company with a new drug to sell, it helps to have a disorder to treat. If one doesn't exist, why not just create one or borrow an existing disorder?

That's an issue explored in a new documentary with the titillating title "Orgasm Inc." It's a sometimes amusing look at drug firms' efforts to develop the female version of Viagra -- the proposed solution for what they label "female sexual dysfunction."

Is female sexual dysfunction a disorder? Yes. But does 43 percent of the female population have "some kind of sexual dysfunction," as the drug companies posit? No. Has that stopped Oprah, Dan Rather and even WebMD from quoting that figure? Um, no.

That number, the film states, comes from a survey done in the early 1990s, and the results have been misinterpreted.

The survey asked women about common sexual difficulties, such as a lack of desire at times. If they answered "yes" to any of the questions, they were categorized as having "Female Sexual Dysfunction." The Chicago sociologist who conducted the survey, Ed Laumann, later explained that a lot of the women in the 43 percent were "perfectly normal" and responding in a "perfectly reasonable" way to challenges and stress.

Pharmaceutical companies couldn't resist that potential audience, however, as veteran documentary filmmaker Liz Canner says she discovered about a decade ago when she decided to take a break from making films about genocide and human-rights violations to create a movie on a lighter topic: what history and medicine say about women and pleasure.

In 2000, Canner came across Vivus, a Mountain View, Calif., company, that hired her to edit erotic video for use during the clinical trial of their orgasm cream for women.

"I thought I'd be getting the latest information, and that they must be making a scientific breakthrough," Canner says. After all, Vivus had a track record, having made millions on an injectable drug for erectile dysfunction. The company's stock skyrocketed before tanking when Pfizer's Viagra pill took the country by storm.

Another viewpoint on 'Orgasm Inc.'

On screen

"Orgasm Inc." will be shown at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Capitol Theatre, 1390 West 65th St., Cleveland.

83 minutes. Adults only.

At 8:40, the theater screens "American Grindhouse," a new documentary tracing the history of exploitation films from the early 1900s to today.

Admission, regularly $9, is only $6 for those who also saw "Orgasm Inc."

Later, Canner was invited inside Vivus with her cameras, and soon found a story emerging. Indeed, the company was developing a cream -- called Alista -- but it had to prove to the Food and Drug Administration, which had acknowledged that female sexual dysfunction might be a "developing disorder," that the cream worked.

Canner's reporting would take nine years, and the resulting movie is a comprehensive look at how women can be persuaded that they are abnormal sexually, especially by corporations and clinics looking to make money.

Canner also looks at Procter & Gamble, which was coming out with a testosterone patch designed to "help" women with sexual responsiveness; a doctor in Atlanta who had invented a device called the "Orgasmatron" that he was surgically implanting in women's spines; and clinics that were sprouting up to perform "cosmetic" surgery on women's genitalia.

What Canner found is that a lack of sex education -- "a lot of people seem to be getting most of what they know about sex from Internet porn" -- leads to massive misunderstandings about women's sexual organs and women's responsiveness. (She does acknowledge that a small percentage of women have medically induced sexual problems caused by hysterectomies and diabetes, for example.)

In general, though, "We expect and we want -- and think we need -- a pill for everything," says Canner. And we believe "that science is doing us wrong if they're not providing it."

No problem there, she points out, as pharmaceutical companies have a big profit motive. Unlike in the European Union, companies in the United States can advertise directly to consumers and create the demand for them.

The heroine depicted in "Orgasm Inc." is Leonore Tiefer, a professor at New York University, who is working to bring attention to the "medicalization" of something that probably isn't female sexual dysfunction, she says, but a normal ebb and flow of desire -- or choosing the wrong partner.

Tiefer and her supporters form picket lines and show up to offer another perspective at FDA hearings for the pill and patch. Well-known Cleveland physician Dr. Steve Nissen is one of the doctors who makes a cameo at the pivotal FDA hearing.

One of many fascinating parts of Canner's film is its historical look at women's sexuality. It seems that in the 19th century many women were diagnosed with something known as "hysteria." Doctors began treating these women by hooking them up to a vibrating machine.

Soon, more and more women in the late 1800s were diagnosed with hysteria, and began availing themselves of such treatment.

"Then, as now, a diagnosis creates the problem, and then someone creates the cure," Canner says.

As farcical as that seems now, it was a far more innocent way to deal with female "problems." Today, such responses have gone as far as being medically invasive. Consider the growing prevalence of labial reduction surgery, Canner says.

She posits that this is a response to women's desire (or their partner's preference for them) to look like the porn actresses who have had such surgery.

Women are told -- even sometimes by their doctors-- that there is something wrong with the way their genitals look.

The result? Canner's film is blunt. "It's the Wild West of surgery," she says. "It's not being regulated, and franchises are being sold so that doctors can get into it."

While some women in the United States decry the genital mutilation perpetrated on women in Third World countries, the film notes, a similar thing is going on in this country, only it's called cosmetic surgery, Canner says. She quotes a British medical journal that states, "the practice of female genital mutilation is on the increase nowhere in the world except in our so-called developed society."

And here, apparently, women pay thousands of dollars for it.