Tamara Straus, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, February 22, 2008

Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm: Documentary. Directed by Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick. (Not rated. 74 minutes. At the Roxie in San Francisco and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. For complete movie listings and show times, and to buy tickets for select theaters, go to sfgate.com/movies.)

Among the humorous highlights of “Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm,” a documentary about the history of the vibrator, is Betty Dodson – the “masturbation movement godmother” – proclaiming, “Independent orgasms will lead to independent thoughts. Once a woman has given herself her own best orgasm, she’s on a roll.”

Although such assessments may seem overblown to the current generation of sex-positive women, this doc is a reminder that female sexual satisfaction is a fairly recent concept and one that remains taboo in the more conservative and religious areas of the country.

The movie starts with the tragicomic legal saga of Joanne Webb, a churchgoing Texas housewife who, in 2004, was busted for selling vibrators to two undercover cops. In Texas, up until this year, it has been a felony to sell sexual devices. Webb, a sales associate for Passion Parties, was just trying to make a few extra bucks for her family. Instead, she was summoned to jail. Within a year, her husband had a nervous breakdown and they were forced to declare bankruptcy. All because of some vibrators.

Filmmakers Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick’s point is that even a generation after the sexual revolution the female orgasm is seen as a mystery, a threat and, in the most extreme cases, something to subjugate.

The bulk of their film is devoted to the groundbreaking research of Rachel P. Maines, whose 1999 book “The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction” charts how vibrators were used by 19th century doctors to massage women to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria, that hodgepodge of illnesses that included “reading French novels while tightly corseted.”

At first the therapeutic technique was manual, then electronic, and eventually it left the doctor’s office altogether when companies like Sears, Roebuck Co. and General Electric Co. began mass-producing a variety of home massagers that retailed for $5 to $15. But once they showed up in 1920s porn, the instruments went underground until they were rediscovered by feminists like Dodson, who held women’s sexuality workshops in the 1970s, promoting the power of vibrators.

“Passion & Power” proceeds in the usual documentary fashion with a parade of talking heads interspersed with archival photos. Maines, who is shot in a musty Victorian parlor surrounded by a variety of antique vibrators, has a hard time reining in her academic jargon – she describes the vibrator of the 1880s as a “deskilling, capital labor substitution innovation” – but her findings are extraordinary.

However, it is Dodson, the New York sexologist, who is the true star of the movie. She describes with great poignancy and bravado how she was “dumber than s-” about her own sexuality until she began talking with women and men about female pleasure. Then she became a sex activist, holding workshops and writing books. “Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon I’d masturbate for three, four hours,” Dodson says. The vibrator would get so hot, “I learned to hold it with a potholder.”

Omori and Slick work hard to keep the laughs coming in their film, although there are too many images of volcanoes erupting, flowers blooming in slow motion and vulva-like jellyfish fluttering through the water to get across that, yes, women do reach orgasm – especially with vibrators.

“Passion & Power” may lay it on too thick with its You Go, Girl! message, but in the end it does bring to life a remarkably amusing and strange secret history.

— Advisory: Sexual content.

E-mail Tamara Straus at tstraus@sfchronicle.com.

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Momma found the trailer!