Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control’ on Paramount+, a Documentary About the Uphill Battle to Produce ‘the Female Viagra’

By John Serba

The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs and Who Has Control (now on Paramount+) has the potential to be a doozy of a Capitalism Movie. Director Aisling Chin-Yee’s documentary tells the long, winding story of filbanserin, a.k.a. Addyi, a drug that treats hypoactive sexual desire disorder in women, and has been dubbed “the female Viagra” – and that story is inevitably a thorny tangle of sexual politics, gender politics and regular old politics-politics. It’s about science and belief in the world of American healthcare and pharmaceuticals, and thanks to that word “American,” also ultimately about profit and loss. The film spends a lot of time with the developer of Addyi, entrepreneur (and now billionaire) Cindy Eckert, who faced an uphill battle to prove the necessity of a drug that would improve the sex lives of women, in a world where such products for men were plentiful.  

THE PINK PILL: SEX, DRUGS AND WHO HAS CONTROL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: “I took on the government for women’s sexual pleasure, and I won,” Eckert declares. But if it had been easy, this would be a far shorter documentary. Chin-Yee opens the story by establishing systemic bias, asking a variety of medical professionals what they learned about female sexual health in med school. The answers range from nil to near-zero to almost-nothing. One calls it “the orgasm gap,” as instruction emphasized male pleasure but offered no discussion of female libido. No surprise then, that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quickly approved male impotence pill Viagra in 1998, and while the media made us feel awkward by putting a brave Bob Dole on TV to talk about his struggle with the condition, the medical establishment dismissed women’s diminished and problematic sex drive as “all in your head,” and prescribed hot baths, a glass of wine, some time away from the kids and other grossly condescending methods of gaslighting.

We meet a unicorn in Dr. Irwin Goldstein, one of the very rare medical doctors with expertise in sexual health. Note, that’s not reproductive health, which is the baby-birthing realm of obstetricians and gynecologists, but sexual health, which addresses the emotional and physical benefits of pleasure. Within that latter category is hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), which causes a significant, sometimes sudden dropoff of libido in women, which unsurprisingly affects their relationships and mental health. Wikipedia (but surprisingly, not this documentary) tells me six million women in the U.S. suffer the disorder (and some men have it too, but that isn’t mentioned in the film either). And it’s not psychological. “It’s biology,” Eckert says. It’s “all in their heads” in the most literal sense, that the part of the brain that says hello, it’s time to go has shut off.

So Eckert and her private, independent company Sprout Pharmaceuticals – who previously produced a male sexual health product and got it approved – developed Addyi to turn it back on. It went through trials, and we meet a variety of women with HSDD who give positive testimonials. But when Eckert brought it to the FDA for approval, she was stonewalled. Eckert addressed the FDA’s questions and criticisms, and spearheaded an awareness campaign framing the rejection as a product of sexism – and was stonewalled again, accused of creating a disorder to profit on a cure, that the benefits were minimal compared to the side effects. Meanwhile, the number of similar approved drugs for men hit a couple dozen, so Eckert kept pushing, finally getting Addyi approved, after which people still insisted all women need to get revved up is a few chapters of 50 Shades of Grey. But she sold Sprout to big-pharma corp Valeant for a billion dollars. And then Valeant jacked up the price and fumbled the launch, so Eckert had to keep on pushing. A woman’s work is never done.

Photo: Paramount

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Lump The Pink Pill in with similar feminist docs like RBG and Reversing Roe. 

Performance Worth Watching: Lawyer Josephine Torrente, an ally for Eckert’s awareness campaign, HAS to be aware of her phrasing when she says she got involved because the FDA’s rejection “rubbed my fairness button the wrong way.”

Sex And Skin: Plenty of clinical discussions of sex, with diagrams and some archival film clips.

Our Take: I’m shocked that Eckert isn’t a producer of The Pink Pill, as the film often functions more as an editorial than objective journalism. She’s placed at the nexus of reasonable, if occasionally vague and anecdotal, arguments for gender equality in U.S. health care. She therefore functions as the film’s protagonist, and her time and financial investment in Addyi tends to undermine the greater mission of gender equality. Granted, Eckert could have taken her billion and bought an island and disappeared, but she continued to fight for the bigger cause, regaining rights to produce the drug after Valeant dropped the ball. That’s obviously a point very much in her favor. But this documentary, which center-frames Eckert and paints her as a perennially pink-clad feminist warrior, tends to be two things at once: An ego stroke with a societally righteous bent. 

So the film teeters toward propaganda, even though it probably doesn’t need to. The film sometimes feels more like a mouthpiece for a product with the potential to help many women instead of an exploration of a larger societal problem that uses the story of Addyi to illustrate it. A greater societal problem that’s addressed in the film’s final moments, when it illustrates how issues with sexual health have been buried in the regressive avalanche of current politics that reversed Roe vs. Wade and sent women into a reactionary spiral. The uphill battles for equality continue, depressingly so.

In a likely attempt to maintain a level of accessibility, The Pink Pill doesn’t bog itself down with the minutiae of the biological chemistry of sex. It treats the biological and psychological importance of sex as a given, addressing the topic in vague terms and bolstering it with a variety of emotional testimonials from HSDD sufferers. Sometimes the film does a better job of arguing against the system that repeatedly greenlit drugs for men with minimal scrutiny than arguing for the existence of HSDD and the drugs to treat it. If the evidence is there, why not present it in a more solid and convincing fashion? That undermines Eckert’s frequent assertions that the science backs her claims; Chin-Yee’s failure to dig deeper and build a stronger foundation for the argument runs counter to scientific and journalistic methods.

I say all this under the notion that, in the long run, constructive criticism of ideological allies is more valuable than the motivational call-to-action that the film becomes in its final moments. As an educational piece that puts a spotlight on issues that have long been pooh-poohed and ignored, The Pink Pill works: HDSS is far from the household term that male impotence is, despite being similarly problematic conditions. The difference between sexual health and reproductive health will be new to a lot of people, told via sturdy, credible expert commentary. And the film underscores the societal bias against women in political and media spheres. As ever, two things can be true: You can agree with the broad strokes here even while you question the method presenting them.

Our Call: Some journalistic rigor would make The Pink Pill a much stronger documentary. But it’s nonetheless informative, and further illuminates America’s ugliest issues with gender equality and human rights. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.