Dildos in one form or another have existed widely in history.
Artifacts from the
Upper Paleolithic of a type called
bâton de commandement have been speculated to have been used for sexual purposes. Few archaeologists consider these items as sex toys, but archaeologist
Timothy Taylor put it, "Looking at the size, shape, and—some cases—explicit symbolism of the ice age batons, it seems disingenuous to avoid the most obvious and straightforward interpretation. But it has been avoided." The first dildos were made of stone, tar, wood, bone, ivory, limestone, teeth, and other materials that could be shaped as penises and that were firm enough to be used as penetrative sex toys. Scientists believe that a 20-centimeter siltstone
phallus from the Upper Palaeolithic period 30,000 years ago, found in
Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm,
Germany, may have been used as a dildo. Prehistoric double-headed dildos have been found which date anywhere from 13 to 19,000 years ago. Various paintings from ancient Egypt around 3000 BCE feature dildos being used in a variety of ways. In the
Middle Ages, a plant called the "cantonese groin" was soaked in hot water to enlarge and harden for women to use as dildos. were known in Ancient Greece prior to the 5th century BC. In Italy during the 15th century, dildos were made of leather, wood, or stone.
Chinese women in the 15th century used dildos made of lacquered wood with textured surfaces, and were sometimes buried with them. Dildos also appeared in 17th and 18th century Japan, in
shunga. In these erotic novels, women are shown enthusiastically buying dildos, some made out of water buffalo horns. for example, illustrates single and
double-ended wooden dildos from late 19th century
Zanzibar. With the invention of modern materials, making dildos of different shapes, sizes, colors and textures became more practical.
Ancient Greece amphora attributed to the
Flying-Angel Painter ;
City of Paris Museum of Fine Arts Dildos may be seen in some examples of
ancient Greek vase art. Some pieces show their use in group sex or in solitary female masturbation. One vessel, of about the sixth century BCE, depicts a scene in which a woman bends over to perform
oral sex on a man, while another man is about to thrust a dildo into her
anus. They are mentioned several times in
Aristophanes' comedy of 411 BCE,
Lysistrata. :LYSISTRATA :''And so, girls, when fucking time comes… not the faintest whiff of it anywhere, right? From the time those Milesians betrayed us, we can't even find our eight-fingered leather dildos. At least they'd serve as a sort of flesh-replacement for our poor cunts… So, then! Would you like me to find some mechanism by which we could end this war?''
Herodas' short comic play,
Mime VI, written in the 3rd century BCE, is about a woman called Metro, anxious to discover from a friend where she recently acquired a dildo. :METRO :''I beg you, don't lie,'' :
dear Corrioto: who was the man who stitched for you this bright red dildo? She eventually discovers the maker to be a man called Kerdon, who hides his trade by the front of being a cobbler, and leaves to seek him out. Metro and Kerdon are main characters in the next play in the sequence,
Mime VII, when she visits his shop. Page duBois, a classicist and feminist theorist, suggests that dildos were present in Greek art because the ancient Greek male imagination found it difficult to conceive of sex taking place without penetration. Therefore, female masturbation or sex between women required an artificial phallus to be used. records the interpretation which
Rav Yosef bar Hiyya gave to the Biblical reference of King
Asa of Judah having "(...) deposed his grandmother
Maakah from her position as Queen Mother, because she had made a repulsive image for the worship of
Asherah. Asa cut it down and burned it in the
Kidron Valley". According to Rav Yosef, Maakah had installed "a kind of male organ" on her Asherah image "in order to fulfill her desire", and was "mating with it every day". Rav Yosef's words are quoted by
Rashi in his own interpretation of 2 Chronicles 15:16. Whether or not Rav Yosef was right in attributing this practice to the Biblical Queen, his speaking of it indicates that Jews in 3rd Century
Mesopotamia were familiar with such devices.
Early modern period (
Félicien Rops) In the early 1590s, the English playwright
Thomas Nashe wrote a poem known as
The Choise of Valentines, ''Nashe's Dildo
or The Merrie Ballad of Nashe his Dildo''. This was not printed at the time, due to its obscenity but it was still widely circulated and made Nashe's name notorious. Dildos are humorously mentioned in Act IV, scene iv of Shakespeare's ''
The Winter's Tale''. This play and
Ben Jonson's play
The Alchemist (1610) are typically cited as the first use of the word in publication (Nashe's
Merrie Ballad was not published until 1899).
Signor Dildo was set to music by
Michael Nyman for the 2004
biopic,
The Libertine. Many other works of bawdy and satirical English literature of the period deal with the subject.
Dildoides: A Burlesque Poem (London, 1706), attributed to
Samuel Butler, is a mock lament to a collection of dildos that had been seized and publicly burnt by the authorities. Examples of anonymous works include
The Bauble, a tale (London, 1721) and ''Monsieur Thing's Origin: or Seignor D---o's Adventures in London,
(London, 1722). In 1746, Henry Fielding wrote The Female Husband: or the surprising history of Mrs Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton
, in which a woman poses as a man and uses a dildo. This was a fictionalized account of the story of Mary Hamilton. The 1748 chapbook A Spy on Mother Midnight'' depicts an innocent country girl who travels with a dildo and a copy of Rochester's dildo poem in her luggage. The
Wellcome Collection, a London museum of medicine, owns several dildos made from wood, cloth or ivory, including one ivory example possibly made in France in the 18th century.
20th century from
De Figuris Veneris (1906) by
Édouard-Henri Avril Dildos are obliquely referred to in
Saul Bellow's novel
The Adventures of Augie March (1953): "....he had brought me along to a bachelor's stag where two naked acrobatic girls did stunts with false tools". A dildo called
Steely Dan III from Yokohama appears in the
William S. Burroughs novel
The Naked Lunch (1959). The rock band
Steely Dan took their name from it.
21st century In 2017,
dark web privacy researcher
Sarah Jamie Lewis connected a vibrator (using
reverse engineering) to
Tor, the anonymity network, in a
proof of concept demonstrating the applicability of privacy technology after the fact.
Legal and ethical issues The possession and sale of dildos is illegal in some jurisdictions, such as
India. Until recently, many
southern states and some
Great Plains states in the United States banned the sale of dildos completely, either directly or through laws regulating "obscene devices". In 2007, a federal appeals court upheld Alabama's law prohibiting the sale of sex toys. The law, the
Anti-Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1998, was also upheld by the
Supreme Court of Alabama on September 11, 2009. The appeals court cited
Lawrence v. Texas, where the
Supreme Court of the United States in 2003 struck down bans on consensual sex between gay couples, as unconstitutionally aiming at "enforcing a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct." Similar statutes have been struck down in
Kansas and
Colorado. Alabama is the only state where a law prohibiting the sale of sex toys remains on the books. Some
Conservative Christians believe that the use of sex toys is immoral. The
Southern Baptist preacher Dan Ireland has been an outspoken critic of such devices and has fought to ban them on religious and ethical grounds. Ireland led an effort to outlaw dildos and other sex toys in Alabama to "...protect the public against themselves." Other Christian religious leaders such as
Evangelical Lutheran Church of America pastor Heidi Johnson, who founded a student group on sexuality at
Duke Divinity School, have a positive view of sex toys in Christian sexuality. == See also ==