Before Aisling Chin-Yee set out to make her latest documentary, she had never heard of a drug for women’s sexual dysfunction. “I never had even considered it as an option,” she says. Such a drug does exist—and it took more than a decade to bring it to market. The Montreal-based director, writer, and producer dives deep into this story in The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs, and Who Has Control, streaming now on Paramount+, just in time for International Women’s Day. 

The film tells the story of Addyi—the women’s equivalent of Viagra, created to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Beyond the countless systemic barriers that entrepreneur Cindy Eckert faced in her efforts to bring Addyi to market, the film opens up urgently needed conversations about women’s sexual health, bodily autonomy, pleasure, and gender bias in healthcare.

Part of what drew Chin-Yee to the project was the opportunity to shed light on the unmistakable double standards that exist in healthcare for women. If you compare Addyi’s years-long journey to similar drugs used to treat male sexual dysfunction, the bias is clear. Viagra was fast-tracked for FDA approval, and once it hit the market, Chin-Yee tells us, everyone was talking about the little blue pill. “If you were cognizant of what was going on in 1998, it was literally everywhere,” she says.

Meanwhile, women with low libidos were suffering in silence for decades. But when Addyi came into the picture, it didn’t receive anything near the positive response that Viagra did. “It was not met with like, ‘Well, finally, there’s a solution for women,’” Chin-Yee says. 

The Pink Pill outlines how Addyi was initially rejected by the FDA, with many of the federal agency’s concerns rooted in gender biases and paternalistic notions about women and their sex drives. Even after finally receiving FDA approval for premenopausal women in 2015, Addyi faced strict regulations, scrutiny about side effects, and unfair portrayals in the media, all of which majorly impacted public perception of the drug. Its necessity was constantly challenged—with doctors, media, and even other women raising the question—why would women need something like this?

The documentary answers this question by sharing the stories of several women whose lives were changed by Addyi. Many of these women faced constant minimizing of their sexual health concerns from doctors, partners, and friends. “It ran the entire gamut of shame, dismissal, and pain to real rage and anger at essentially being medically gaslit,” Chin-Yee says. 

Once these women found Addyi, the transformation, Chin-Yee tells us, was remarkable. “When one reclaims their pleasure and their joy and that connection that they have to their bodies…there’s really a confidence and an empowerment that goes along with it. Because if you have agency in your body, it bleeds into other parts of your life.”

 

 
 
 
 
 
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The visionary women behind The Pink Pill are just as inspiring as the women it features. In addition to Chin-Yee as director, and an all-female crew, the film is executive produced by Abby Greensfelder’s Everywoman Studios and Docs for Change, a collaboration between Julie Bristow’s Catalyst and Joanna Griffiths‘ Knix Fund, a philanthropic arm of Knix.

When making The Pink Pill, Chin-Yee knew the conversation had to include the systemic discrimination facing the 2SLGBTQ+ community and people of colour. “We can’t have the conversation about women’s sexual autonomy…if we’re only talking about cisgender straight women,” Chin-Yee says. The core issues raised in Addyi’s story—equality, bodily autonomy, systemic bias—are directly connected to the plights of many marginalized groups, including recent attacks on trans rights in the United States. “All of these things intersect in the way that we get treated in the medical office and in an examination room,” Chin-Yee says.

Chin-Yee’s filmography is marked by a proclivity for telling stories centring marginalized voices. In 2013, she was a producer on Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Jeff Barnaby’s film about Indigenous children from the Red Crow Mi’kmaq reservation forced to attend residential schools. Her feature debut in 2019 was the intimate drama The Rest of Us, telling the story of two widows who reconcile their relationship after losing the same man. And her last documentary, No Ordinary Man, co-directed with Chase Joynt, reclaims the story of trans jazz icon Billy Tipton through the lens of trans folks living today. 

“The stories that I’ve gravitated to…have always been from the point of view of someone that we haven’t seen so much in the mainstream,” she says. The Pink Pill isn’t her first time leading an effort to amplify women’s voices that have been silenced. In 2017, Chin-Yee co-founded #AfterMeToo, a movement born out of a need to address sexual violence in Canada’s film and television industry. Alongside her co-founders, Chin-Yee organized a symposium of industry professionals and experts, and released a report with recommendations on how to handle sexual misconduct and support survivors. 

“It was really a groundswell of anger and empowerment,” Chin-Yee says. “It’s a societal epidemic that needed to be addressed, and so the best way that me and my community could address it was through discussing how it exists in the film industry, and what can we do to change that and help survivors.”

Chin-Yee will further her commitment to supporting women and other marginalized communities with her upcoming projects. “My first love is directing fiction films. So I have a project that is going to take place on the Camino de Santiago, another female-driven project that’s a drama,” she says. Her next documentary tells the story of how two young Ghanaian men immigrated to Canada through America, facing ICE and detention along the way—another timely story that embodies Chin-Yee’s passion for centring unheard voices.

Films like The Pink Pill have the potential to have an incredibly powerful, real-world impact. Following the film’s world premiere at DocsNYC in November, the FDA approved Addyi for menopausal women in the US. The drug has been approved for premenopausal women in Canada since 2018, and for postmenopausal women since 2021. 

But with the massive systemic injustices the film highlights, there is still so much to reflect on, and so much to be done. What will it take to eliminate gender bias in healthcare? How do we continue the fight for bodily autonomy while our rights are being stripped away? And when will we finally start speaking openly about sex and female pleasure? 

We asked Chin-Yee what she hopes viewers will take away from The Pink Pill. “I mean, they should have a lot more sex!” she laughs. “But the best thing for me when people watch this film is that they leave it really empowered with knowledge or with tools to be able to go, ‘Oh my gosh. I never knew that I could even ask a doctor about my sex life. No one’s ever asked me about how great my orgasms are in a medical scenario. I didn’t even know that I could want more for myself.’”

The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs, and Who Has Control is streaming now on Paramount+.