A history of sex and sex toys

Contents

Pre-History
Recorded History
The advent of the sex toy

abstract:

Chart the human race’s sexual trail from ape to present day, picking up the ‘sex toy’ along the way.

Sexual behaviour through the ages.

Little is known of human sexual behaviour prior to recorded history but our evolution from ape to present day man has left a huge void between animal sexual drive and our modern day complex sexual attitudes and behaviours. We no longer rely upon an innate drive towards sexual activity for nature’s purpose of procreation and we have developed the ability to partake in a sexual encounter for many reasons including, emotion, attraction and of course, simply the enjoyment of sexual activity.

Mankind’s history of sexual activity of course began with our separation from apes and we can therefore assume a period of sexual activity akin to them. The strongest male of the group would be the sexual master and take his pick of all the females at will. It is probable that this changed along with the increase in human intelligence as dominant males began to realise that females could be used as a commodity, a practice that continues to this day in some parts of the world.

As humans began to emigrate throughout the ancient world the sexual habits must necessarily have changed and mathematics can tell us a little about this. i.e.

You have;

2 parents
4 grandparents
8 great grandparents
16 great great grandparents
32 great great great grandparents
etc.

Go back more generations and you will find that a few thousand years ago you had several million ancestors. More than was the population of the earth at that time!!

Now, go back to the birth of the human race some 2 million years ago and you should have literally billions of ancestors, but of course at that time there were only two humans.

This dilemma gives us a clue to the sexual habits of man during the last two million years. The answer of course is that in your ancestral list names appear more than once.

It can therefore be assumed that during pre-recorded history incest was a normal way of life in the small groups spreading out across the globe. The dominant male procreating with the female members as they hit puberty, fathering many children to which he was also likely to be the grandfather and even great grandfather. This way of life seems to have changed only with the advent of ancient and modern civilizations on the grounds of religion or morality and more recently due to medical knowledge on the dangers of incestuous parenting.

This, of course was a natural way of life to the people of the time. Unfortunately nothing else can be gleaned about sexual habits from this but it is safe to assume that other sexual behaviours existed, as they did in early recorded history, such as homosexuality, bestiality and domination. All of which are depicted in early writings and art from ancient civilizations.

Recorded History:

Throughout recorded history sex has held huge importance in society from the earliest civilizations in the form of erotic and sexually explicit cave paintings to today’s advertising and pornography industry.

This significance of sex through recorded history cannot be underestimated. Many ancient peoples including the Chinese held that rain was a metaphorical representation of male ejaculation, thus the sky became masculine and the earth, soaking up the rain, became feminine. In India, the ancients adopted sex as an art and an extension of spirituality through great works such as the kamashastra and later the renowned kamasutra. These works combined very explicit sexuality with spirituality becoming a religion to followers.

From the kamasutra:

A man who climaxes too swiftly
should arouse his lady
by caressing her clitoris with his fingers
and flooding the well
of her yoni before he enters her.

The advent of the sex toy:

The earliest recorded use of sex toys dates back over a thousand years from Asia with the advent of ‘ben-wa balls’. Chinese ladies would apparently insert ivory balls into their vagina and rock back and forth until an orgasm was achieved. The reasons for them doing this is unclear but from the early evidence of the use of sex toys it was probably a method of relieving ‘stress’

There are recordings of phallic shaped ‘toys’ made primarily from leather dating back to ancient Greece, but the modern day and the all new electric vibrators didn’t appear until the 19^th century. Even then they were only manufactured as medical or ‘massage’ instruments. Doctors of the time would use them in the treatment of hysteria, a peculiar disease of the time which only affected women !

Hysteria, from the Greek hysterikos, was first used by Hippocrates who surmised that women suffer from this hysteria due to irregular movement of blood from the uterus to the brain and as far back as biblical time’s women were wilfully masturbated as a cure for this affliction. This tradition carried on into the Victorian era when women were thought incapable of sexual arousal and any sign of ‘hysteria’ would result in a visit to the doctors for treatment which consisted of rubbing the patients clitoris until all signs of the hysteria had gone. Not surprisingly this ‘treatment’ became very popular among the sexually suppressed Victorian ladies and Doctors soon began to look for alternate remedies. This led to the introduction in the late 1800’s of first the steam vibrator and later the electro mechanical vibrator.

Vibrators have of course, since, evolved into a huge array of sex toys such as butt plugs, clitoral and G-spot stimulators.

The blow up doll has its history in exploration and warfare. The earliest known dolls were made of cloth and given to French and Spanish sailors for ‘company’ on their journey’s and the first true ‘blow up’ dolls were developed for the German and Japanese soldiers prior to the second world war to provide ‘relief’ to soldiers exposed to an all male environment for long periods.