A Brief History of Dildos 

"Thou ... madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them." — Ezekiel 16:17, KJV

Along with notable human achievements such as the invention of the plow and the wheel, we should also celebrate a much older innovation, by tens of thousands of years: the dildo. In 2005, a team of researchers from Tübingen University, in southwest Germany, unearthed a foot-long, 4 inches circumference, polished siltstone phallus from the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm. Dated to 28,000 years ago, it's now exhibited in the Blaubeuren Museum of Prehistory, labeled "Ice Art – Clearly Male."

If you're bothered by the vision of someone pleasuring themself with a length of hard cold stone (a far cry from today's silicon devices), you can take heart from this recently re-classified wooden object (see photo) from the Vindolanda Roman fort a mile south of Hadrian's Wall in northern England. The wall was built around AD 125 by the order of Emperor Hadrian to solidify Roman control of most of present-day England and Wales, while acknowledging that pacifying the tribes living in today's Scotland was impracticable, given the Romans' limited military resources ("Voices from the Past: The Vindolanda Tablets," Nov. 18, 2021).

The wooden object, found in a ditch by researchers from the University of Newcastle in 1992, was originally, and sweetly, classified as "a darning tool." Newcastle University archaeology senior lecturer Rob Collins was baffled by this, saying, "it's kind of self-evident that it is a penis. I don't know who entered it into the catalogue. Maybe it was somebody uncomfortable with it." At this point, it seems to be unique, being the only known life-size Roman dildo ever found. It's just 6 inches long, although researchers say it was originally larger, having shrunk with age. (This writer can empathize.) The ends are very smooth, "indicating it was used for something over a period of time," as the press release coyly put it.

(As an aside, size does matter, though perhaps not in the way male readers might expect. A 2015 study employed dildos of many sizes to learn the average size that a sample of 75 women preferred for their partner's penis. Results: 6.3 inches long, 4.8 inches girth, i.e. just slightly larger than average.)

Although no other Roman dildos have been found, they are frequently depicted in Roman art, particularly at Pompeii, the city in southern Italy buried under ash from Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. There, graphic representations of dildos (and much else) abound, leaving no doubt exactly how they were to be used. Similarly with the ancient Greeks. More than 400 years earlier, Athenian audiences would have been tickled pink, so to speak, by Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata. The titular heroine persuades the sisterhood to deny sex to their menfolk until Athens and Sparta make peace, advising them to instead use "our eight-fingered leather dildos. At least they'd serve as a sort of flesh-replacement for our poor cunts."

So dildos have come a long way, no pun intended, from the Upper Paleolithic to today's do-it-yourself models using 3D printers. I'll leave with one bit of trivia, to illustrate how far this country hasn't come with respect to sexual Puritanism. In 1998, the State of Alabama passed a law banning the distribution of "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs." Nine years later, the US Supreme Court left the law intact.

Barry Evans (he/him, [email protected]) thinks that calling dildos "toys" belittles female sexuality.