Men’s Health Blog

Mr. Wonderful…

He’s such a fucking paradox. And he’s ripping my heart out of my chest. Here is this man who is so crazy about me, and so into me… that he can’t touch me.

Tonight I hit the ground so hard it’s not even funny. He hadn’t been feeling well. He said something to me about how he was sorry it wasn’t the night it should have been. I said it was fine and I hadn’t really expected anything.  That I know not to expect things. I think this came out of me wrong. I have been going to see Mr. W and kind of training myself not to expect sex so I wouldn’t feel let down if nothing physical happened between us. I know his sex drive is kind of low and that he’s kind of getting back into the swing of things in that department. But I think he heard I know you aren’t going to fuck me, so why bother.

This started some real hurt feelings between the both of us and things escalated. I didn’t cry, I stayed in control of my emotions and I thought things out as I was saying them, instead of just flying off the handle from a place of pain.

The last time we’d fooled around, it was incredible. It was last Thursday and we were very caught up in one another. He even said to me wait, I thought the last time we did something it was pretty great. I agreed. Yes! It was, but that was a week ago. We’ve been together for ONE MONTH and we’re down to fooling around once a week? Once a fucking week? Why am I starting to feel like I have to beg for it? This is the honeymoon stage where we’re suppose to go crazy and be wild and crazy in love. What happened!

I think the part that got to me is when Mr. Wonderful scared the shit out of me by saying he doesn’t really think about sex. Something to the effect of having to build the need for it. I sit here and think about touching him and being with him all of the time. He doesn’t think about that?  And my heart just snapped. I’m actually starting to cry just thinking about it. Am I that awful that he has to rev himself up to try and fool around with me. He has to think and focus his energy to WANT to touch me? I can’t take it. I can’t believe it. I just can’t fathom how he could be so in love with me and not want to have the intimacy that comes with it.

He makes these promises that kill me inside. Last time I saw him he said I promise the next time I see you, we’ll fool around. I was fine with that. When I heard it again tonight – not so fine. Tonight he said I promise I won’t sit in my arm chair anymore when you’re here – I only cuddle up in bed with you. But the thing is, he completely forgot that he made this promise to me once before. He’d said it one late night to me when we were having the same type of talk. I think it hurts so much because he is the one person in the world I want so badly to believe and trust.  Ugh, more tears, my heart hurts.

I wish he had this need that I have for him. I crave this man. I don’t think he gets that it is his intelligence and personality that makes me want to sleep with him, it’s him, all of him. He says he wants to show me how much he loves me, but he’s not sure how.

I spend my life living with 3 guys. Two of which are walking hard ons that have spent the last few years trying to find ways to get into my pants. I had no interest. I hated sex. I hated my Ex, who in the last 2 years started to slowly physically turn me off completely. I turned him down constantly begging him to stop asking for it. This relationship with Mr. Wonderful is starting to feel like my karma.

I’m going to be spending tomorrow with my very best friend Claudia. I think this is exactly what I need. I’m sure spending time with her will help tremendously. I need to not feel this heart ache now. It’s paralyzing, and I need to maintain the balance in my life. Oh Mr. Wonderful – if you are out there, please learn to show me love before you push me away.

By Harry van Versendaal

Sales of Viagra, the famous blue pill used to treat male impotence, exceeded $460 million worldwide last year. Imagine how much money could be made from producing a pill for the other half of the globe’s population: women. It’s no surprise that the world’s pharmaceutical companies are locked in a race to come up with a pink Viagra.

Liz Canner joined the race in 2002. That was when the 42-year-old filmmaker from Vermont, in the USA, was recruited by Vivus, a small pharmaceutical company based in California. Her job was to edit erotic videos for women used as test subjects in the development of an “orgasm cream” designed to cure something called “female sexual dysfunction.” In the process, she discovered that “sexual dysfunction” was a catchall term with little scientific value. But there was little point in creating the drug unless the industry first created the condition. As a medical researcher says in the film: “We’ve come up with the drug. Now we have to come up with the disease.”

The fruit of her nine-year research, a 78-minute documentary called “Orgasm Inc,” exposes efforts by the pharmaceutical industry to medicate female sexual desire – from cosmetic vaginal surgery to Dr Stuart Meloy’s push-button orgasmatron – putting women’s health at risk for profit.

“Orgasm Inc” won the Best Feature award at the Vermont International Film Festival and Best Feature Documentary award at the Southeast New England Film Festival, while The Independent magazine last year named Canner one of the top 10 independent filmmakers to watch. The film will be screened at the Orpheas open-air cinema on Kos on Friday, September 3, at 8.50 p.m.

Canner spoke to Athens Plus about the industry of female pleasure.

How did you get involved in this project?

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 had decided my next project would be about pleasure; specifically, the history of the science of female pleasure.

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 expose 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…

How easy was it to make this film? What were the main obstacles you had to overcome?

It is not easy to make a documentary about the secretive pharmaceutical industry and the media’s collusion with it. It has been quite stressful.

You spent nine years on this project. Has it given you a new perspective on the issue of female orgasm – or lack thereof?

The biggest secret about orgasms is how rarely women actually have them during 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 percent 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 women 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 makes it appear 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?

Your film contradicts past reports that some 43 percent of women suffer from sexual dysfunction. Do you think the figure is arbitrary?

All over the media you hear that a shocking 43 percent of women suffer from female sexual dysfunction. I first heard this statistic when I was working for the pharmaceutical industry in the early 2000s and it surprised me. If so many women had female sexual dysfunction, why didn’t my mother tell me about it and why weren’t my friends talking about it? In fact, I had not even heard of the disease until I took the job with the pharmaceutical industry.

In “Orgasm Inc,” I investigate the history of the 43 percent statistic. It turns out that it was taken from a sociology survey that was conducted in the early ‘90s to find out what people’s sex lives were like. It was never meant to measure the number of women with a disease. Using exaggerated statistics like that manipulates women. It also says to Wall Street that there is a large market for this drug.

Do you think this is a case of disease mongering, as it were, i.e. of the industry trying to convince people there is something wrong with them?

The media talks about female sexual dysfunction as if it always existed — when in fact it was a term that came about in the late 1990s. When Viagra was released, it was such a blockbuster drug for men that companies like Pfizer began to think that there was also a big market for women. The problem was, in order to develop a drug, the FDA required that there be a clearly defined disease. Pfizer and a number of other drug companies sponsored the first meetings on FSD. In the end, 18 of the 19 authors of the definition of the disease had ties to 22 drug companies. This definition is extremely broad: Almost any sexual complaint you have, whatever causes it, will fall into this disease category.

It’s a bizarre disorder, because you have to self-diagnose and you have to be distressed by it. So in other words, if you never felt an iota of sexual desire in your life but it didn’t bother you, you don’t have the disease. If you never had an orgasm but it didn’t bother you, you don’t have the disease. There are real physiological conditions that can cause sexual problems such as hysterectomies and diabetes. I think we can’t ignore that. But for the most part, most of women’s sexual problems are caused by sociocultural conditions like past sexual abuse, relationship problems and stress due to overworking.

Could it be that men are simply looking for ways to make up for their failure to stimulate women?

In the United States, part of the problem is the lack of comprehensive sex education for both men and women. In most sex ed classes, the full genital anatomy is not taught. The clitoris, the most sensitive part of the female body, is not mentioned because it is taboo to talk about pleasure. It was surprising to me how many women and men do not know where the clitoris is.

While shooting your documentary, you witnessed the development of a number of treatments. Did any of them seem to work?

In “Orgasm Inc,” I followed the pharmaceutical industry over a period of nine years as they raced to develop a female Viagra. I kept hoping that they would discover a magic bullet but most of the products currently in clinical trials do not work much better than a placebo (sugar pill) and the side effects for many of them are quite horrific – including breast cancer and cardiovascular problems. Part of the problem is that sexual experience is really complicated and based more on context than biology.

In the press you read: “Men have their Viagra, women want theirs too.” I’d love to know which PR firm came up with this slogan, because it is very effective. The question is what do women need Viagra for? Most of women’s sexual problems are not caused by a physical medical condition but are the result of sociocultural issues. So, I think the only way that most women will be satisfied with their sex lives will be if they can take a product that makes them feel comfortable about their bodies; that ends sexual abuse toward women; that creates equality in the workplace; that creates equality in relationships; that gives women good sex education so they can fully know about the clitoris and about how their bodies function. Why can’t we take a pill like that?

Isn’t there a percentage of women, however small, that do suffer from some form of sexual dysfunction?

The thing about sexual experience is that our sense of satisfaction comes from our expectations. In other words, if women think that they should be having an orgasm every time they have intercourse, then a lot of women are going to believe they have sexual problems. If women think they should have the same libido at 60 as they had at 20, a lot of women are going to think they have a disease.

Right now, there is a cultural shift going on and medicine is changing our expectations but this is not a new phenomenon. In our grandmother’s time, women with low desire were said to suffer from frigidity. During the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, the pathologizing and medicalizing of woman’s sexual experience was challenged and resisted. Terms such as nymphomania and frigidity were no longer used. Recently, the clocks have been turned back. Low desire is now called hypoactive sexual desire disorder (a subset of FSD) and there are quite a number of drug companies racing to find a nose spray, pill, cream or patch to cure it. By the way, I find it very curious that they’re working on a desire drug for women. Would anybody think to develop a desire drug for men?

It is important to note that some women do suffer from a real physiological problem when they experience a lowering of their sex drive. Radical hysterectomies and some antidepressants affect libido. However, the majority of women do not suffer from a disease. For many of us, our libidos are influenced by everyday life experiences such as aging, our sense of body image, the health of our relationship, stress, and past sexual encounters.

You have taken your film to many film festivals. What has been the response to your work?

It has been exciting taking “Orgasm Inc” to film festivals. We have had many sold-out shows and received a lot of positive feedback. There have been quite a number of times when women have come up to me in tears after a screening and told me that they learned things about their sexual response that they did not know and they feel relieved to discover they are healthy and normal.

Have you had any reactions from the pharmaceutical companies?

When we showed “Orgasm Inc” at Lincoln Center in New York, a woman who works for the pharmaceutical industry stood up and denounced the film. The audience grew annoyed with her and booed her down. It was quite a tense moment.

Are you working on a new project?

My next project is finally going to be about female pleasure. It is called “The Hidden History of O.”

This drug sold as a natural enhancement for erectile dysfunction.  However, it has been shown to cause abnormal heart rates in some men using the products. Doctors are now advising their patients to stop using the product until more data is available.

Enzyte contains a blend of ginkgo, ginseng and goat weed. No one knows exactly which ingredient causes the heart problems. So far, Enzyte has not issued a statement in response to the study or addressed any concerns about the possible heart rhythm problems.

This was reported in a credible medical journal, Archives of Internal Medicine in 2010.

The Waring signs of diabetes drugs have come again with another amazing report released in the L.A Times 

The Billion dollar Diabetes drug ACTOS is discovered to be  just as danger as the drug Advandia which was removed because it caused heart attacks in Diabetics!

Both of these drugs make BILLIONS$$ of dollars for the drug makers.  The FDA  works with the drug makers to make billions before the drug is recalled.  we have stated clearly on this site that diabetes drugs ruin the heart muscle.

HOW THE DRUG COMPANIES WORK NOW REVEALED

This is the way it works..the drug is approved…makes billions then ”you” the diabetic gets sick from the drug it is then recalled. HERE IS THE SECRET The drug makers do not mind so much the recall because they have made  maybe 100 BILLION before it is pulled of the market. Then comes the diabetes drug warning signs  AFTER YOU HAVE HURT YOUR HEART.

Here is the quote from the LA TIMES

Here is how much they make while you still live with diabetes.  Sales of Avandia, as high as $3.4 billion in 2006, have fallen to about $1.1 billion this year, while those of Actos have climbed to about $4.6 billion. But new results reported Monday suggest that the cardiovascular risks of the two drugs are about the same.

The drug makers have not responded to SPIRIT HAPPY’s calls about this and the FDA is also silent.  Our diabetes cure without drug is now in 13 countries because it works. The SPIRIT HAPPY DIET has spread by word of mouth to now 5 continents!  The popularity of SPIRIT HAPPY is not from advertising. We do not advertise outside of this site.  It is the tons of people who have tried the SPIRIT HAPPY diet and stopped their medications that has spread the word.  

The danger warning signs of diabetes drugs are real!  Please wake up…the FDA will still approve ALL the BILLION  dollar diabetes drugs until the drug companies make enough….then will come the recall of the drug.