When Hysteria was first shown at last year's Toronto Film Festival, it was met with the sort of adolescent giggling usually reserved for a biology textbook. To many, a biopic about the inventor of the vibrator was simply too titillating to bear. Second division British fop Hugh Dancy plays Dr Mortimer Granville, a plucky London physician who joins the staff of an affluent West End clinic specialising in "female hysteria". With one eyebrow aimed permanently skyward, the film lays out the specifics of the "tedious, tiring work" that will, from now on, be Granville's bread and butter: he must furnish each of his patients with a "vulva massage", known to suppress hysterical tendencies through a series of "paroxysmal convulsions".

Granville's masturbatory skills are soon in high demand among the downtrodden housewives of the Victorian upper crust, and before long his pockets are bulging. His hands, however, start to bear the brunt of this strenuous work, leaving him unable to perform his duties to completion. In a moment of sheer inspiration, he envisions a mechanised device that might lighten his workload, and the world's first electric sex toy is born.

Granville's fictionalised romance with an altruistic East End suffragette named Charlotte places the film firmly in the realm of fantasy, but the context of his tale is all too real. As a catch-all diagnosis with "symptoms" including faintness, nervousness, insomnia and "a tendency to cause trouble", hysteria was successfully used throughout the 19th century to subdue women who dared to question their lot in life, or worse, the sexual capabilities of their husbands. Yet, far from indicating how far we've come in the intervening century, Hysteria serves primarily as a reminder of how little has changed in the hundred-odd years since Granville's invention – at least where cinema is concerned.

It's more than a little depressing that Hysteria – a film set in the mid-1880s – has a healthier, more open attitude towards female sexuality than the vast majority of films set in the present day. Mainstream movies (see Vince Vaughn's IMDb entry for examples) continue to follow the narrative that sex is desired, initiated and enjoyed only by men, while women are at best passively co-operative. It's a double standard openly endorsed by the American censors, who slapped Hysteria – an entirely tame and lighthearted romcom – with the very same rating recently bestowed upon misanthropic gorefest The Expendables 2.

At the film's conclusion, Granville selflessly proclaims hysteria to be a fiction, a full 70 years before the American Medical Association would follow suit in 1952. Hollywood, it seems, never got the memo.

John Patterson is unwell