HISTORY OF SEX TOYS

FOR ME, SEX TOYS WERE NEVER LESS TABOO THAN HAVING SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE. THE POPULARITY OF SEX TOYS HAS BEEN STEADILY RISING OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS, AND IT’S BECOME MORE AND MORE ACCEPTED TO USE THEM.

In the US, around 50% of men and 65% of women have used a sex toy at one point, but have you ever wondered how and when sex toys came about? You might be surprised to hear that sex toys date back as far as 30,000 years. Perhaps it’s fair to say that popularity has been a long time coming.

THE DILDO, THE FIRST SEX TOY KNOWN TO MAN

Dildos are known to be the first sex toys and are older than civilization, religion, and matrimony; the very first one that’s known about dates back 28,000 years and was discovered in the Swabian Jura, a German mountain range, in 2005. The dildo is made out of rock, eight inches long and three centimeters wide. The dildos that followed were made out of stone, tar, wood, bone, ivory, limestone, and teeth and were all shaped like penises. While archeologists have tried to formulate non-sexual uses for the prehistoric dildos, the general scientific opinion now backs up that the objects were likely meant for sexual pleasure.

After the Stone Age, the ancient Greeks have been recorded to create dildos out of bread, as well as wood or pressed leather, which was smeared with olive oil before use. In their culture, masturbation was healthy and normal, which backs up the idea that dildos at the time indeed served a sexual purpose.

During the Western Han dynasty (206 C.C. – 220 A.D.), people buried bronze dildos with the bodies in their tombs. It was believed that the spirit of the dead would live on in the tomb, and thus important possessions were left alongside the bodies. While the toys were used for sexual pleasure, they were also essential to achieve a peaceful and loving afterlife. It was believed that “the female and male spiritual principles could be achieved during sex. In this regard, sex, especially if it was pleasurable and lasted for a sufficient amount of time, had a real spiritual dimension.”

By the 16th-18th century, dildos started being more scandalous. Thomas Nashe 16th century poem The Merrie Ballad of Nash, His Dildo, describes a scenario in which the speaker is so excited to see his lover that he ejaculates as soon as he sees her. She’s dissatisfied and whips out a dildo from under her bed. She praises it for always standing stiff and avoiding the risk of impregnation and gets herself off in front of the humiliated man. Unsurprisingly then, dildos were outlawed and confiscated at English customs from 1670. It became so bad that women were prosecuted for owning and making dildos in the absence of men.

It’s in modern times that both societies’ attitude towards sex toys changed, and the right material for the dildo was found. During the 1960s and 1970s, most dildos were made out of rubber, which was more comfortable than stone but not strong enough to stand a good wash. Gosnell Duncan created the first silicone dildo in 1970 with the aim to provide medical aid for people with disabilities. Instead, it became a sex toy, which can now be found in any form and shape you like.

Two of the most popular dildos on Adam and Eve are Adam’s 10 Inch Dildo and the Big Shot Squirting Vibrating Dildo. The former is designed to resemble a real penis and comes complete with balls. The latter dildo has all the same realistic features but also comes with a vibrating ejaculator.

Other toys that date back to before the modern era can be found with the Araucanian people in South America, who stimulated their clitoris by binding bundles of horsehair together. During the Ming dynasty in China, Baoding balls were created for meditation purposes, but they later became Ben Wa Balls, used for sexual stimulation. Chinese aristocrats are also reported to have enjoyed jade butt plugs and bronze strap-ons, going back as far as to the Han Dynasty. Dyak men tried to increase the pleasure of their partners by piercing themselves with bamboo and ivory. After the 17th century, sailors started experimenting with sex dolls by dressing bundles of straw in women’s clothing. Following this, in the era of industrialization, vibrators finally came about.

THE ORIGIN OF VIBRATORS

The first vibrator was recorded in France in the 18th century. It was a handheld and wind-up contraption and called a Tremoussoir. In 1869, the American physician George Taylor created a steam-powered version of a vibrator called the Manipulator, and in 1880, Dr. Joseph Granville invented an electromechanical version. Unlike the uses of sex toys nowadays (though I suppose a wand can be used for non-sexual back massages), it has been suggested that the vibrators of the 19th century were not intended for sexual pleasure. Rachel Maines, a historian and a former visiting scientist at Cornell University, wrote in her book The Technology of Orgasm that doctors treated female patients by stimulating them to orgasm to treat “hysteria,” classed as a medical condition at the time. Vibrators, she proposed, weren’t meant for female pleasure but for the ease of male physicians.

However, the claimed origins of the vibrator might not be true. Ten years after the publication of Maines’ book, Hallie Lieberman, author of Buzz, a popular history of sex toys, went through Maines’ book and found significant errors. In one passage, Maines describes how a vibrator can speed up the massage process, quoting a 19th-century physician. The quote says that a doctor without a vibrator “consumes a painstaking hour to accomplish much less profound results than are easily affected by the [the vibrator] in a short five or ten minutes.” Lieberman points out that vibrators were patent medicine, used for many types of titillating massages such as for “the intestines, kidneys, lungs, and skin.” Thus there is an argument that the vibrator was invented as a labor-saving massaging device and not specifically to treat female hysteria. Nonetheless, there are images of medical massager’s which look eerily similar to what we have come to know as sex toys.

In 1910, battery-powered vibrators started being available to the consumer and were advertised as general health and beauty cure-alls; women were promised that “all the pleasures of youth… will throb within you.” By 1918, vibrators started coming with attachments, described as “aids that every woman appreciates,” and in the late 1920s, vibrators first appeared in porn films, having lost its previously medical purposes.

For a few decades, vibrators stopped being advertised. Instead, massagers were discreetly advertised in weight-loss ads. It took until 1973 for the vibrator to return at NOW’s Sexuality conference; it was reintroduced by Betty Dodson, who became a huge advocate for the Hitachi Magic Wand.

In 2009, the first peer-reviewed study on the vibrator found that people who used vibrators lived happier sex lives, with about 53% of women and 45% of men having once used one.

Source: History of Sex Toys