Available on DVD: “Orgasm Inc.”

A nurse conducting clitorial sensation tests at the Berman Institute for Female Sexual Dysfunction in Orgasm Inc.

“What does an orgasm mean to you?” the filmmaker Liz Canner asks of several women who appear in Orgasm Inc. The answers vary, but Canner is more interested in what orgasm means to the pharmaceutical industry. And by taking a playful approach to a deeply serious subject, she explores the link between female sexuality and corporate profits with a style that’s as entertaining as it is revelatory.

Concerned that the drug industry had invented the condition known as female sexual dysfunction (F.S.D.) in order to treat it, Canner dug deeper, uncovering a race to solve a problem for which there is no clinical diagnosis. Nonetheless, having been declared a “secret epidemic” by Oprah Winfrey, and controversially endorsed as a diagnosis by the celebrity sex educators Laura and Jennifer Berman, F.S.D. had become the new E.D. (erectile dysfunction).

Nine years in the making, Orgasm Inc. walks a careful line between lighthearted exposé and gimlet-eyed journalism. Impassioned but never ranting, Canner — a veteran chronicler of human rights issues — marshals doctors and scientists, sales representatives and authors, to deconstruct the push for prescription-enhanced climax and to profile those fighting back.

The film finds its heart, however, in the lively company of Charletta, who submits to the implantation of a scary device called an orgasmatron in hopes of achieving simultaneous orgasm with her husband. The implant — whose makers credit neither Woody Allen’s Sleeper nor Wilhelm Reich’s energy accumulator — only makes her leg twitch. Luckily there is a treatment for that.