An erotic fresco in the Lupanar, Pompeii. Photo / Getty Images
It turns out that a recently discovered Roman erotic device is not the earliest - or the strangest. Rowan Pelling reports.
In the murky mid-1990s, I started working for two art dealers with a lucrative sideline in artistic smut, who had started a company called the Erotic Print Society. I was once looking for a pen in one of their desk drawers (our office motto in those pre-MeToo days was “Come and rummage through my drawers”) when I came across a smooth ivory appendage with fancy carving on its blunt end.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked my boss. He replied: “If you mean, ‘Is that a sex toy?’, I’d say, ‘What else could it be?’” He then told me it was Parisian, from the late 19th century, and had quite possibly “been sampled by Marcel Proust”.
The question “what else could it be” has been raised once again this week, after a 2000-year-old wooden “darning tool” that was discovered in 1992 at the site of the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland was recategorised this week as a dildo; or, if not that, a detachable phallus from a statue that people might have touched for good luck. Either way, as Rob Collins, Newcastle University’s senior lecturer in archaeology, put it: “It’s kind of self-evident that it is a penis.”
Looking at the photos and the business end of the object, it’s hard to disagree with that expert assessment. Especially when you’re told the carving is “six and a half inches” in length – apparently it would have shrunk a little over the years – which is very much on the human scale of things, including the shrinkage.
The real question is why anyone would be surprised that the Romans made sex toys. Two and three-dimensional likenesses of phalluses were ubiquitous in Roman culture and are seen across pots, mosaics, pendants, sculptures and walls. The Suburban Baths in Pompeii are famed for their erotic wall paintings, which demonstrate there’s nothing new under the sun in terms of human sexual ingenuity, and include one scene of lesbian lovemaking involving a dildo.
The Greeks were equally free with phallic imagery and references. Most students of Classics are quick to note that Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, which has women going on sex strike to try to stop the Peloponnesian War, features a line that Loeb Classics translates as: “Ever since the Milesians revolted from us, I haven’t even seen a six-inch dildo”. And original productions of the drama would have featured actors sporting erect leather phalluses to demonstrate the men’s growing frustration.
But these were nowhere near the first examples. A team from Tubingen University unearthed a siltstone phallus that dates back 28,000 years in Hohle Fels Cave, in 2005. They could not prove its use was sexual, but the size and smoothness of the polish suggested it might be. Meanwhile, the museum caption was refreshingly unambiguous: “Ice Art – Clearly Male.”
More recent examples include two hollow bronze phalluses found in a Han dynasty tomb dating from 206-220 AD, which their curator described as “definitely made for use, and we can speculate based on their various bases how they were worn… the ones we have here might have been laced into place with leather or silk thongs, though it’s not clear if they were designed for men or women”.
Goodnight from a bronze dildo from the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) 🎋🎋🎋🎋🎋🎋 pic.twitter.com/4cfxcSkdy5
— Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) January 26, 2017
The existence of sex toys has been evident throughout every subsequent era – if not always as happily as you would hope. There’s the chastening case of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, who was drowned in the Rhine for the crime of “female sodomy” in 1477, after dressing as a man and (according to witness reports) using a dildo made from red leather on her female partner. A happier train of thought is the fact these ersatz phalluses were clearly intended for sexual pleasure, as the word dildo is thought to have originated in Renaissance Italy from the word diletto, meaning delight.
But it wasn’t until the 1880s that there was a seismic leap forward in erotic possibility, with the advent of the first electric massage devices intended for intimate use. The physicians who wielded them on women patients had scant interest in female pleasure, but were in fact seeking a convenient, non-manual way of performing a pelvic massage to the point of “hysterical paroxysm” (aka orgasm). This was the physician-approved remedy for the long-observed problem of “hysteria” – which was diagnosed after observation of various symptoms including anxiety, depression, irritability, aggression, abdominal “heaviness”, frigidity, sexual fantasies and mood swings. Or what would now be swiftly diagnosed as sexual frustration.
It took some while for these vibrating mechanisms to make their way out of the doctor’s consulting room and into domestic bedrooms, meaning women of an empirical bent found their own solutions. In the 1950s, when electric washing machines first became common domestic appliances, some housewives reported sitting on them for good vibrations. Vacuum cleaners and hairdryers were also the subject of discreet experimentation.
But the real game changer was the near-legendary Hitachi Magic Wand, which was first exported to the US in 1968. Although the Wand was marketed as an all-round massage device for alleviating tension and sore muscles, the late sex educator Betty Dodson immediately realised it could revolutionise women’s pleasure - and some women are still enthusiasts for it.
After that, the market for sex toys proliferated and the first woman-only operation, Eve’s Garden, opened in New York in 1974. Back in Britain, Ann Summers opened its first store in London’s Marble Arch in 1970. It was designed to be welcoming to both sexes but the products were increasingly targeted at female customers over the decades, spurred on by the runaway success of the Rampant Rabbit. The pink, vibrating double-action stimulator gained household name recognition in 1998 after Sex and the City’s demure Charlotte fell in love with her Rabbit toy.
This side of the Millennium quite a few noted designers have been involved in the development of sleek, sculptural sex toys – take Tom Dixon, whose sleek, black “Bone” went on sale in Liberty’s in 2002 for £199 (about NZ$384).
But for many women, London’s greatest sex-toy moment came with the opening of Sam Roddick’s upmarket erotic boutique Coco de Mer in Covent Garden in 2001. Designed like a glamorous lingerie shop, Coco turned sex-toy shopping into a sensual delight all of its own, marketing silk slips alongside vibrators and artisanal bondage gear. Coco de Mer was also at the vanguard of selling sex toys online.
The emporium’s current owner and CEO Lucy Litwack told me sales went through the roof during lockdown, when many career women were suddenly spending more “me time” at home. The past decade also saw a further evolution in women’s pleasure, with a new genus of toys like Coco’s “Stimulator” which have sophisticated “suction” intensities, alongside vibration speeds. More thrilling still, the newest toys can be operated remotely via a phone or PC.
Litwack declares the future of pleasure is female and it’s difficult not to agree with her. The design of sex toys has been revolutionised by women’s involvement in both their design and purchase. Far fewer look like old-style phalluses; there are many more curves involved. And despite glum predictions of Austin Powers-style fembots, Kate Devlin, the author of Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots, says there’s no reason why AI-driven pleasure devices shouldn’t take women-friendly form – with demand being fuelled by the drive to reduce the “orgasm gap”.
Litwack agrees, pointing out that while almost all women reach orgasm when using a sex toy, only 39 per cent do during sex with a male partner.
Whatever the future shape of sexual pleasure, there’s one thing all women can be grateful for: the modern sex toy, unlike its Roman predecessor, won’t give you splinters.
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