The history of sex toys and what they tell us about ancient women

Dr Caroline West is a sex educator and host of the Glow West podcast, which focuses on sex, sexuality, and the body. Here, she writes about the earliest sex toys invented, and what they can tell us about how history remembers women.

During a recent trip to London, I had the honour of finally visiting the Vagina Museum. This delightful museum is an inclusive space that celebrates vulvas, vaginas, and advocates for self-acceptance and equality.

The museum had curated a wonderful satirical exhibition showcasing items such as menstrual products and staging them as if future archaeologists and curators had misinterpreted their use, or simply not considered how women used the item.

In the photo below, a mooncup - which is inserted into the vagina to collect menstrual blood - has been categorised as a chalice belonging to a male warrior, used 'to drink the blood of the owner's enemies as a symbol of victory in battle'.

This exclusion of women's experiences from the construction of the past is known as androcentrism, an approach that centres men's stories, bodies, battles, and lives as the standard in the human experience.

Due to this approach, women's lives are often lost to history - especially their intimate lives. One example of this is an antler bone found with 28 notches engraved on its side. Male archaeologists proclaimed the item was used by male farmers to count cattle; modern female archaeologists suggested it was used for tracking menstrual cycles instead.

Male Victorian archaeologists could not comprehend that women would masturbate or use sex toys, and labelled anything that could be a dildo as a 'ritual sculpture’, according to the Vagina Museum. When the sexually graphic murals of Pompeii were discovered, they were kept for white upper class men's eyes only in Victorian museums - women being, of course, much too delicate to see themselves in artistic form or to see sex depicted in sculpture or mosaic.

This lack of consideration of the sexual purpose of objects continued on to recent times. In the 1990s, one excavation in the UK found a phallic shaped object that became categorised as a darning tool, although its use as a sex toy is now acknowledged.

This erasure of sexual history and, in particular, women’s sexual lives has meant that the opportunity to learn about female sexuality in women's own words has been minimised and fractured, its shattered parts excluded from male dominated history.

But our ancient relatives did indeed use sex toys before the modern development of what would become the vibrator in the late 19th century, and their use can tell us so much about sex and society through history, if we just look outside the museum and between the lines.

Sexual history has to be found in different ways outside mainstream history books, but sex toys have existed and been enjoyed by all genders throughout human history.

Many were made of materials that perished over the centuries. The Ancient Greeks used a stuffed leather phallus known as olisboi, and which can be seen depicted on pottery examples. In the middle ages, dildos were widely used enough that a side industry of strap-on harnesses flourished. Because many of these harnesses were custom made by leather crafters, the proof of this existence for these bedroom accessories has been found in receipts for purchases.

These scraps of paper contain a glimpse into a culture where sex toys were normal, and that women were using harnesses to turn their sex toys into a strap on dildos to penetrate other women with.

Queer women's history is often excluded from the history books, so these crumbs offer us a way to find out how people engaged with their sexuality and desire despite what official institutions proclaimed.

We can also spot clues to sex toy usage in cases where people were told what was considered acceptable sexuality by churches. Historian Dr Eleanor Janega has researched religious pamphlets published in the 10th century in Europe, which outlined each sin and stated the appropriate penance. Priests used these guides to dole out the appropriate penitence to the sins professed before him in the confession box.

These fragments that have survived a millennia tell us what sexual acts had to be warned against, and sex toys were part of that forbidden pleasure. They encourage the priest to ask the sinner:

"Have you done what certain women are accustomed to do, that is, you have fornicated with yourself with the aforementioned device or some other device? If you have done this, you shall do penance for one year on legitimate holy days."

These penitent materials also suggest that some more unusual items were used as sex toys and techniques of sexual arousal or at least featured in the thoughts of priests enough to make them part of doctrine, according to Dr Janega. A question considered acceptable for the priest to ask was:

"Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take a live fish and put it in their vagina, keeping it there for a while until it is dead. Then they cook or roast it and give it to their husbands to eat, doing this in order to make the men be more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days."

Interestingly, Dr Janega notes that these pamphlets give us clues about how sex was viewed at the time, and the existence of sex between women, not to mention how stylish they looked while doing so.

Sex toys were considered to be spiritually wrong because they did not lead to procreation. As such, they were considered to be sodomy. The vagina was to be solely occupied by a procreating penis, not a pleasure toy, according to these moral standards of the time.

As we unpick androcentrism and allow more women's voices to be heard, we can build a more accurate picture of what human history has been, including human sexual history, women's resistance to control over their sexuality, and their challenges to patriarchal institutions.

All because of centuries old dildos and their fashionable accessories.