The Evolution of Implements of Human Self-Pleasure

How Long Have Humans Been Using Dildos?

The YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) isn’t just a great late 1970’s gay disco anthem, it’s an organization that did its best to outlaw sex toys, contraception, and erotic materials during the mid-19^th Century. As a member of a vice society, it helped in the arrest of those selling “obscenity” or “obscene goods.”

When it teamed up with Anthony Comstock to form the Commission for the Suppression of Vice, it took on the monumental task of ending masturbation and other forms of sex for pleasure without intention of procreation. In addition to being a grave sin, Comstock was convinced that self-stimulation was a “lethal vice” and that explicit literature had inspired his friend to suicide.

With the support of the YMCA, Comstock successfully took aim at “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy” materials sent through the United States Postal Service. This included not just saucy magazines but “any cast, instrument, or other article of an immoral nature,” as well as any contraceptive or abortifacient. Those found guilty faced steep fines and/or up to 10 years of hard labor.

But it wasn’t always this way.

It’s been said that the internet was made for porn, and who am I to say otherwise? Everything, it would appear, was made for porn, at least initially. Cave walls, for instance. Northern Spain has erotic drawings created at least 40,000 years ago and it’s not alone in that regard. The Chauvet caves in what is now France features explicit art from no later than 30,000 years ago. Caves in Arnhem Land, Australia showcase smut that originated more than 28,000 years ago. This is also when the oldest known dildo was made from siltstone and eventually several of them were found in the Hohle Fels Cave, Ulm in what is now Germany.

Because companies like Adam & Eve, Tantus, Lelo, CalExotics, or Rascal didn’t exist during the Neolithic Era, people worked with what was available. Anyone who thinks that ancient people weren’t kinky, horny, and creative has not had an opportunity to learn the glorious truth about our predecessors. In addition to siltstone, the earliest dildos were made of materials like stone, tar, wood, bone, ivory, and as weird as it sounds, teeth.

Egyptian paintings from 3,000 BCE depict women wearing large dildos around their waists in honor of the god Osiris. A probably apocryphal but highly intriguing urban legend tells the tale of Egyptian queen Cleopatra, who we all remember from epic motion pictures. According to the unlikely story, she ordered her servants to bring her a carved-out gourd filled with bees.

Once placed against her queenly bits, the buzzing of the increasingly irritated bees is said to have worked as a kind of vibrator. While this is highly improbable, it’s well within reason that she may have taken matters into her own hand with the help of polished wood or stone instruments of vaginal invasion.

And then there were the ancient Greeks, whose women would bake olisbokollikes, hard bread sticks, and use them as dildos. For this and other sexual romps, olive oil served as the perfect lube. Other phallic items were constructed from leather and wood. Interestingly enough, it was the ancient Greeks who were among the first to refer to masturbation devices as “toys.” Because exposure to sperm was considered essential to a woman’s mental and physical health, ancient Greek husbands would often gift their wives with what was called an olisbos if they were going to be separated for long.

For those whose sexual impulses needed a more immediate solution or weren’t able to access even these simple kinds of stimulators, we find ancient texts presenting a variety of vegetables, fruits, and other oblong objects as options for self-pleasure. In fact, the word dildo is a descendant of the Italian word diletto, which means “to delight” or dilatare which means “to open wide.”

Art, literature, and music were not all that flourished during the 14^th Century Italian Renaissance. More monied women with high libidos invested in beautifully designed silver, ivory, or precious material dildos. England was not as welcoming when its Renaissance began to wane during the 17th Century. Men feared the implications of women having ready access to insertables that would never go soft or not be in the mood.

This is disappointing since in the early 1590s, English playwright Thomas Nashe wrote a bawdy poem about a man who locates his sweetheart at a bordello, where she uses a glass dildo to get herself off after intercourse with him. Of course, the poem was deemed obscene and had to be passed around surreptitiously. Approximately 20 years later, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were the first writers to use the term dildo in printed works.

Meanwhile, in Japan, erotic novels called shunga discussed the use of dildos as a playful sexual activity that required careful shopping, masturbating, and admiring in bulk.

Obviously, there is still a world of people with genitals whose histories we don’t yet know because we haven’t yet found their toys, their cultures have not been prioritized, or prudish academics haven’t identified their toys as such. But we know more about how our distant ancestors found satisfaction in their naked shared and alone times than we ever have before. Or at least the information is available to those who bother to seek it out.