You needn’t be well versed in the language of electrical love devices to find the documentary Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm a fascinating, funny, and educational tour de force into the evolution of what many women consider a commonplace appliance: the vibrator.

Produced and directed by Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori, the independently funded documentary is a titillating mix of history, feminism, technology, and sexual pleasure. Based on Rachel P.Maines’s book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, the film starts with Maines describing her own serendipitous foray into the history of vibrators. A needlework scholar, she discovered 20th century advertisements of vibrators in women’s magazines, which piqued her interest into how and why these devices came about.

Since the time of Hippocrates, doctors began diagnosing women with “hysteria,” a broad disorder that encompassed such symptoms as fatigue, anxiety, erotic fantasies, and abdominal heaviness. They prescribed sex, horseback riding, or an extremely bouncy carriage ride as treatment—or they called in the midwife to give the patient a uterine massage. During the Victorian era, when a woman’s corset was expected to be as tight and proper as her morals, “hysteria” was treated in the doctor’s office with a clitoral and vulvar manipulation. The women would have a “hysterical peroxism” (a.k.a, an orgasm) and go home feeling much relieved.

However, a doctor’s time, then and now, is expensive and precious. When the first electromechanical vibrator was introduced around 1883, Maines dubs it a “deskilling capital labor substitution”; that is, it replaced a skilled laborer with technology, making it readily accessible and cheaper. Though the first vibrators were expensive (around $200—a modest home was $300) and clunky (there is five-foot-tall prototype), technology soon caught up.

The toaster and the vibrator were contemporaneous electrical inventions, both sold directly to consumers through such venues as the Sears Roebuck catalog. Selling massagers and vibrators carried no stigma; General Electric even made a model. Touted as “marvelous health aides,” they came with various attachments, and ran about $5–$15 a pop.