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.

It wasn’t until their appearance in erotic magazines and pictures that the idea of a vibrator as a medical device was debunked, its “social camouflage” blown. Vibrators then went underground, and the film jumps to the 1960s, when women’s liberation, the pill, and Betty Dodson, the “godmother of masturbation,” put female sexuality and the vibrator front and center. Dodson gives candid interviews of her own initial shame regarding her vagina, which she thought abnormal, to her discovery that an electrical barbershop tool could induce amazing orgasms. For her, masturbation is not just for pleasure, it is empowering. “Independent orgasms, I guarantee, will lead you to independent thought.”

We also hear from feminist pioneer Dell Williams who started one of the first sex toy stores in the 1970s. She now appears to be in her own 70s, and her grandmotherly stature mixed with her rational approach to sexuality make female orgasms and vibrators seem as natural and normal as peanut butter and jelly.

Yet we learn they are not. In 2003, Texan Joann Webb, a Chamber of Commerce member, wife, and mother of three, was arrested for selling vibrators at a Passion Party. Though her case was dismissed, up until 2006, it was still a felony to sell devices that stimulate the genitals in Texas, Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia. Given the legal and extremely lucrative sale of drugs like Viagra and Cialis, one can’t help but hear the double standard calling.

Though many of the issues broached in this film could incite indignation and outrage in its audience, the movie is fun, informative, and exciting. It doesn’t encourage you to get rid of your lover; it encourages you to introduce a new friend into the bedroom—an electrical one. Since 70 percent of women don’t have orgasm through coitus—the traditional definition of sex—the film enlivens the notion of sexual satisfaction and how to get it.