By PATRICIA YOLLIN
Chronicle Staff Write

July 22, 2007 -- Bay Area filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori never imagined that it would take more than seven years to make a documentary about one electrical appliance. They were wrong. Their subject was the history of vibrators.

"Passion & Power: The Technology of Orgasm" premieres at Lincoln Center in New York on Saturday July 28 and will be screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October. The cast of characters includes two feminist pioneers, a homemaker arrested for selling vibrators at Tupperware-like parties in Texas and Rachel Maines, a scholar who in 1977 stumbled upon turn-of-the-century ads for the device while researching needlework patterns.

Slick and Omori make it clear that these instruments of pleasure were more than a sexual tool -- they were political, social and subversive as well. Nobody is more aware of that than Maines, who wrote an article on vibrators for the June 1989 edition of Technology and Society. The magazine's advisory board insisted her article was a hoax perpetrated by the editors of the journal as a parody.

The article led to a book, "The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction." Published in 1999 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Maines wrote that gynecological massage had been a standard medical treatment for "hysteria" -- viewed as the womb's response to sexual deprivation -- since antiquity. In the 1860s, an American physician created a steam-powered device. Two decades later, a British doctor invented the electromechanical vibrator. It could take more than an hour of manual labor to induce orgasm in patients. With the aid of the vibrator, this could more profitably be achieved in less than 10 minutes.

In 1899, the vibrator was introduced as a home medical appliance and appeared in magazine advertisements by 1904. Sexuality was never explicit in the ads and the utility of the product for female masturbation was thus consistently camouflaged. However, when vibrators started popping up in erotic films in the 1920s, their cover was blown. Most of the ads disappeared and vibrators went underground, resurfacing decades later with the help of the feminist movement, the sexual revolution and Betty Dodson, who is known as the "godmother of the masturbation movement."

In the documentary, Dodson recalls how a male lover suggested that they experiment with a barber's scalp massager. It produced spectacular orgasms that led to a crusade on her part to show women how to use vibrators. Her message was consistent: "Independent orgasm, I guarantee, will lead to independent thoughts."

The movie also presents footage of a much younger Dodson in 1974 at the groundbreaking Women's Sexuality Conference in New York City. That gathering was coordinated by another feminist pioneer, Dell Williams, at the request of the National Organization for Women. In "Passion & Power," she describes how a boyfriend discussed the concept of the clitoris with her. "I didn't even know I had one," Williams said. The filmmakers said it was inspiring to get to know Dodson and Williams, who opened Eve's Garden, a store in Manhattan for women's sex toys, in the early 1970s. Slick said, it was reassuring to learn that these icons had plenty of insecurities -- such as when Dodson confesses in the film that she used to think she was deformed because she had "elongated inner lips." The documentary includes other women who haven't played by the rules, as Slick put it.

excerpted from:
"The Making of a Feel-Good Film"
By PATRICIA YOLLIN
San Francisco Chronicle July 22, 2007