267: SEX TOYS R US

Or, here, Were Us.

As German so economically puts them, Sexspielzeugen.

For general survey, Hallie Lieberman’s Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (2017; cf. Spectator review, 16 Dec 2017).

More exotically, Deborah Miranda, “Dildos, Hummingbirds, and Driving Her Crazy” – online.

I dedicate this essay to the good people of Dildo, Newfoundland, also to the people up the road at Ass Rock, plus Pennsylvanians inhabiting the towns of Blue Balls and Intercourse.

There’s a website on which one person seeks the Latin word for Dildo and is told by an anonymous answerer that there isn’t one since there were no such devices in the ancient world – rest of this piece shows what nonsense that is.

Before getting down to ancient business, must mention Rod Liddle’s claim ( Sunday Times, 11 Feb 2018) that 100 Germans a year die from wanking, or as they put it, Selbstbefriedigung.

This Liddle bit of learning is amplified by the 100 Russians who annually expire from skull-crushing by falling icicles – expect Putin’s head is hard enough to escape this fortean doom.

Various websites describe bizarre dildoinduced deceases. My favourites include the Kansas teenager whose mother’s ‘big, black double-ender’ was too much for her; the several cases of wankers electrocuted by anally-inserted devices; the Canadian whose ‘aqua-eroticum’ machine fatally let him down during a sub-aqueous selfpleasuring session.

Of course, some of these emanate from dubious sources, inspiring disbelief. But reliable litanies are provided by the multiauthored Autoerotic Fatalities (1983) and Ehrich-Sheleg, Autoerotic Asphyxiation: Forensic, Medical and Social Aspects (2006). And, remembering MP Stephen Milligan with his electric flex, plastic bin-liner, and orange, is anything impossible?

Archæologists have found objects back to the Palæolithic Age made from stone, tar, wood and other materials classifiable as dildos. Most exotic are those fashioned from camel dung – I fancy any modern users faced with this would get the hump.

The Greeks credited Miletos as dildoinventor. This raffish town is also credited with the double bed, Pericles’s bluestocking mistress Aspasia as leading brothel-monger, and pornographic novels eagerly devoured to their moral detriment (says Plutarch – think American soldiers snapping up Henry Miller in post-war Paris).

There are two words for the thing in Greek: Baubon and Olisbos – latter sounds like a Portuguese city. Neither is found transliterated into Latin, whose term is Fascinum. The Victorian lexicographers Liddell & Scott could not bring themselves to say ‘dildo’, confining their definition to Latin penis coriaceus – what Gibbon called “the decent obscurity of a learned tongue”.

However, early Christian writers did not shrink from calling a spade a spade, e.g. Arnobius, To the Peoples, bk5 chs24-6; Augustine, City of God, bk6 ch9 & bk7 ch21; also, the Byzantine Dictionary-Encyclopædia

Suda. Dildos are several times mentioned (no surprise) in Aristophanes’s ‘Sex-Strike’ comedy

Lysistrata (411 BC), passages abounding in Greek ‘FourLetter-Words’ and Milesian emphasis.

Dildo scenes also appear in Greek vase paintings. Notably, a sixth-century depiction of a woman bending over to fellate a partner, while another man sticks one up her bottom (John Boardman,

Athenian Red-Figure Vases, 1975, p85) – don’t recall Kenneth Clark showing this one in his classic TV series Civilisation…

Most detailed descriptions occur in the sixth and seventh Mimes of Herodas (3rd cent BC), only rediscovered on a papyrus in 1890, first edited by Walter Headlam who died forteanly from a twisted bowel after a day at

Lords – Howzat! – online translations available.

In Mime 6 (cf. Jacob Stern’s online article), two women, Metro and Koritto, lament the loss of a dildo that has been circulating among other users, including poetesses Nossis and Koritto. In Mime 7, they hurry along to a cobbler called Kerdon (a trade name), famous for his skilled manufacture of ‘Widows’ Delights’ – would have been a star worker for Ann Summers.

Since the names Metro and Koritto connote Mother and Daughter, some speculate a hint at female incest. According to Jean Goodwin, “Mother

Daughter Incest”, Child Abuse and Neglect

(v3 1979 pp953-7), this is extremely rare – she could only find a single authenticated case.

In Roman times, Lucian (2nd century AD) describes the use of what look like strap-on dildos: Dialogues of the Courtesans 5, para292; The Loves (authorship disputed), ch28. Martial – He would! – has a poem (bk1 no90) about this activity by the woman Bassa. Forberg’s Manual of Classical Erotology (1884, v2 p160) appends this curious note: “Germany, I have lately heard, has been ringing with complaints about this abuse” – some sour krauts?

Petronius ( Satyricon, ch130) describes how ‘sex therapist’ OEnoethea tries to cure the narrator’s ‘erectile disfunction’ thus: “She rubbed a leather dildo with oil and ground pepper and crushed nettle weed and began inserting it gradually up my anus…”

Some patients might have preferred to stay impotent. It reminds me of the finale of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge (novel 1968, film 1970) where Myra anally rapes her ‘stud’ Rusty with a strap-on dildo. Since Vidal was a classicist who said that when he read Petronius “an electrical current was turned on”, there may be a literary link here.

Seneca’s lurid litany ( Natural Questions,

bk1 ch16) of the sexual activities of Hostius Quadra includes his delight in anal penetrations. I gather from secondary sources that a woman dildo-ing a man is known as ‘pegging’ – you live and learn… Possible etymology from ‘Pego’ (Cock), a penile term common in Victorian erotica such as the memoir My Secret Life and the porno-mag The Pearl.

Dildos were the principal classical erotic sex toy. Their users would have envied our multifarious modern refinements. They did, though, devise other stimulants. Various sources (e.g. Lucian and Pliny) describe a young sailor so besotted with the famous statue of Aphrodite Knidia that he attempted intercourse with it, evidenced by his semen stains – a variation on what is now known as ‘Pygmalionism’; cf. Mary Beard’s “How Do We Look?” and “The Eye of Faith”, her TV (also pamphlets) contributions to the revived Civilization series.

“Fort was never concerned with sex” – Theodore Dreiser, quoted by Steinmeyer (p124).