To Dildos…and Beyond

To Dildos…and Beyond

By Silverhawk

Sex toys can be grouped into two main categories – the gozintas and the gozontas. It is the “gozinta” version we’ll take a closer look at today. Yeah, I know I wrote that with a dangling participle, but guys, our dangling participle and the lack thereof is part of the reason these toys exist.

The “gozinta” category is comprised, as the name would suggest, of toys designed to be inserted. As also might be supposed by the name, gozinta items are mostly designed for female use since females have a matching gozonta.

So, how did it all start?

My guess is that a woman many thousands of years ago was out one day gathering wild gourds and duck eggs for a gourd soufflé. It was the first week of the aurochs season, and her mate had been away with the rest of his buddies hunting for the last five days. He probably wouldn’t be back for another three, but she wanted to be prepared with a side dish to go with the aurochs rib eyes he’d promised to bring back and grill over the fire.

She was starting to feel pretty tense because back then, women didn’t know sex was for reproduction. They thought it was just a way to keep hubby coming back to the same fire every night that also made women feel all warm and girly inside. She was missing that warm and girly feeling.

She picked up a gourd that was strangely long and slender, stared at it for a while, ran her fingers over the rounded tip and bumpy surface, and then mused, “It looks like a dick, so it oughta do the trick.” And thus, the secret women have kept in their bed table drawers for centuries was born.

Replicas of the human penis have been found that date back to the Paleolithic period. They were carved from stone and polished to a very fine, smooth finish. The male archeologists who found them identified them as either sharpening stones for stone tools or religious artifacts. Their female assistants just grinned and said, “Whatever you say, Professor. Oh, by the way…can I borrow one of those for a while?”

We know ancient Greeks had dildos because dildos were weaponized in a play by Aristophanes. It seems there was a war going on and the women decided it was time to stop it. Their method of stopping it was simple. They would just keep their legs closed until the men gave in and stopped fighting. Of course, that meant the women wouldn’t get to have any of those magic moments they loved so much either, but they had a solution for that. Enter the dildo, stage right.

Men in ancient Rome weren’t all the heartless, go-out-and-kill-some-heathens-for-fun-and-then-fuck-all-their-women guys they’re always made out to be in the movies. They worried constantly, well, when they weren’t slicing and dicing some heathens or fucking their women, that their wives would develop hysteria while they were away. See, everybody knew hysteria was caused by the lack of sperm, and without her husband to give her an ample supply, a woman would go bonkers almost overnight. Those kind, caring, Roman men gave their wives “olisbos” to stave off that nightmare.

Since olisbos were made of stone or lacquered wood, they didn’t have any sperm to give, but apparently that didn’t matter to the Roman men. I don’t think it mattered much to the Roman women either. It’s more probable they thought three times in one night was better than only once and then having to sleep on the wet spot after hubby rolled over and started to snore.

For years, a fable has circulated that Cleopatra used a gourd dildo filled with bees to get her jollies, but that’s probably just that, a fable. If she’d gotten carried away and the bees somehow escaped, all those little stingers would probably have damped the mood. Maybe not. though. Cleo was reputed to be a little different.

She did, however, receive the gift of a carved wooden phallus inlaid with gold from Julius Caesar. There is no mention in the historical record of who posed for the supposed “sculpture”. Given how much he thought of himself, it wouldn’t surprise me if old Julius hired a couple “fluffers” to keep things standing tall and posed for it himself.

It was probably a momento of the time Caesar and Cleo were under seige at the palace by Arsinoe IV. When you’re under seige, there’s not much to do and we know Julius and Cleo got busy because she had a son named Caesarion. Mark Anthony was second in line for Cleo’s charms, but he made up for it by knocking her up three times to Caesar’s one. He probably burned Caesar’s gift out of jealousy, because it has never been found.

Other cultures were more inventive. The ancient Chinese weren’t worried about their women becoming hysterical. They were worried they’d start to like each other more than men, and so gave them dildos made of cast bronze. Yes, ladies, they would have been as cold as that medical device your doctor likes to use and you hate, though I’ve read some of you more adventurous ladies sorta like that icy feeling.

Some of these were hollow and enabled the user to make realistic squirts of stuff at just the right time. Those are still on the market today, though they’re made of silicone rubber now. They come with a tube and a squeeze bulb you can fill with whatever trips your trigger and the rubber ones warm up a whole lot faster.

The worry about women liking their dildos too much is and has been present in a lot of men, and has resulted in misinterpretation of archeological artifacts since men have been digging up things from the past. The male archeologists couldn’t admit that any woman would choose a bone…uh…bone over the real thing, so the dildos they found were usually classified as some sort of religious object.

I suppose some women probably did worship them back then. Some women seem to do so today. That’s understandable. They’ve always been an always-ready, never-messy way of easing those feelings women weren’t supposed to have.

Not much changed about dildos over the next several centuries except for the discovery of rubber. Rubber dildos were a lot better than wood or stone because they were flexible, but other than size variations, dildos were pretty much the same fake cocks they’d always been. Then electricity happened.

For years before electricity was captured in batteries, and before any electrical mains had been installed anywhere, doctors had been handling the problem of “female troubles”. Those troubles were many and varied, but the cure for them all was the same. The doctors of the time handled the treatment by handling the afflicted… literally. Yes, a distraught woman could schedule a doctor’s appointment and have her problem solved by the skilled fingers of a trained medical professional.

I would suppose that was a very popular class in med school. I’d have taken that class four times.

Anyway, a woman would go to the doctor, partially undress, and have her tensions and anxieties relieved through the inducement of “hysterical paroxysm”. That was the approved medical term for making her grab the sides of the examining table until her knuckles turned white, shake like a stop sign in a hurricane, and gasp for breath for a minute or so.

Now, as any guy and probably more than a few lesbians will tell you, that finger therapy can get almost painful for the therapist after a while, and some women did take quite a while to get cured. Doctors were developing carpal tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow and that was affecting their golf game, so they had to start spacing out those appointments. It looked as if the world would become a never-ending nightmare of terrified doctors hiding out from hordes of zombie-like hysterical women roaming the streets in search of those magic fingers.

There were a few medical instruments invented to help. They looked more like old fashioned egg beaters with a dildo instead of the mixing blades, and all that hand cranking must have been just a hard on a doctor as the more manual method.

There was one early attempt to improve the ergonomics of the doctor’s workplace by using steam power. Yes, you read that right – steam. The device consisted of a small boiler, a small steam engine, and some other mechanical stuff.

The engine connected to the crank shaft.
The crank shaft connected to the stroke rod.
The stroke rod connected to the dildo.
O’ hear the word of the Lord.

I suppose a few women did feel like they were hearing that word, but it’s hard to imagine very many did. I mean, the steam stroker was as big as a microwave oven and had to fit between the woman’s thighs. It would have been hot as hell and would have blown out steam all the time.

Fortunately for all, right after the inventions of the electric tea kettle, toaster, sewing machine, and fan, some enterprising soul put a small weight on one side of a small fan motor shaft to unbalance it. When he turned it on, the damned thing buzzed like a really pissed-off rattlesnake. He put a handle on one end and a smooth, rounded tip on the other, and the vibrator, the device that would save countless doctors from a life of wrist pain and put a smile on the faces of countless women, was born.

Doctors were the first users, well, they were the first to apply the device anyway. There’s no record that any doctor used a vibrator to shake his stiffy into submission, but men will be men, so it’s likely some did. I mean, after spending all that time groping around in man’s favorite playground, they’d have to be feeling some stress, wouldn’t they?

Anyway, women still had a tendency to suffer from that old hysteria thing and once the new miracle cure became known, many required therapy more than just once a week. That therapy was faster with the vibrators so doctors could treat more patients in the same amount of time and still have wrists flexible enough for a relaxing round of golf on Wednesday afternoon.

Soon after that, “personal massagers” began appearing on the market. The first were nearly identical to the medical version and were advertised to relieve muscle cramps, stiffness, and soreness. Women just grinned, convinced hubby they really needed to install electricity, then brought one home and hid it in the laundry room.

As an aside, those massagers were the forerunners of the pastime that takes the drudgery out of laundry for a lot of women – the spin cycle on a modern washing machine.

Once the “massager” was in the hands of women, they could cure themselves any time they felt the need and voila, the raging epidemic of female hysteria was over. Doctors could go back to practicing the more mundane tasks of setting broken limbs, delivering babies, and the like.

Those original vibes weighed about five pounds, and they weren’t designed very well for self-therapy. Today, miniaturization has enabled the manufacture of vibes from tiny little vibrating dildos that fit on a fingertip to several variations on the “rabbit” of “Sex In The City” fame. There are even vibes that look like ordinary lipstick, because as the old credit card commercial advised, “don’t leave home without it”.

Taking your “BOB” with you can be a bit embarrassing if travelling via the airline system. Some apparently bear a strong resemblance to an explosive device when viewed with X-rays by the ever-watchful eyes of TSA agents at airport check-ins.

It is recommended that a woman taking her mini-lover along to keep her company while she’s away remove the batteries, put him in a zip lock bag and write, “THIS IS MY VIBRATOR” in large letters on the bag. If she wants to drive the point home, there are T-shirts that say “IT’S JUST MY VIBE”. The TSI agents will get a chuckle from this and it’ll keep you from missing your flight while they dump everything in your carry-on out on the counter and inspect it in front of everybody.

The current improvements in the cell phone have spawned yet another variation of a girl’s best friend. There are now vibes controlled by a blue-tooth interface to a cell phone, tablet, or other computing device with blue-tooth capability. One benefit is the controls are readily accessible rather than attached to a cord or located on the body of the vibe itself, but there is another.

It’s now possible for a woman to insert a small vibe held in place by straps or her undergarments while her partner retains control via his or her cell phone. The wireless technology has been around for several years, but now, instead of a control box that looks much like a garage door opener, there’s an app for that.

This technology can be used for many variations on the “vibrate me until my eyes cross” theme. The wearer of the vibe doesn’t know when the cell phone holder will turn the vibe on, nor does she have any control over the intensity. The cell phone holder can make the stimulation continuous and intense, let it build slowly to the final end, and anything in between. It could end up like that scene in the movie, “When Harry Met Sally”, except for real. Hmm…I wonder if I could talk her into…no, probably not. Well, shit.

Plain old passive dildos are still popular today. The better ones are made of silicone rubber rather than plastic like the cheap rigid ones, and you can put them in the dishwasher for cleaning after use. Just don’t forget and leave Mr. Skippy sitting in the glass rack if your mother is coming for a visit. She’ll either be embarrassed or she’ll steal him. They come in sizes from “is it in yet” to “OMG, I can’t believe I took the whole thing”.

They also come in different colors too. My cock has never been purple, well, except for that one time we don’t talk about anymore, but you can buy them in that color as well as white, brown, black, and about any other color you can think of.

Just as brooms became vacuums, plain old dildos have become powered.

For the environmentally conscious woman, there are exercise bicycles with a dildo that pedaling moves up and down through the seat. Ladies, you can pedal yourself into the big “O” and slim down those thighs at the same time. How’s that for multi-tasking?

They’re expensive, but the renowned “Sybian” is supposed to be an experience like no other. It’s sort of a saddle with several attachments for massaging those hard to reach areas, and has variable speed in-and-out as well as vibration that can range from barely there to “oh fuck, my teeth are chattering”.

There are also both manufactured units and plans for do-it-yourself varieties of powered dildos that use a regular dildo attached to a motor-powered stroking shaft or to a power drill or reciprocating saw.

They’re suppose to give the user a hands-free, variable speed, super-duper, mind-boggling, fist clenching, toe curling, jelly-legs, “Oh God, I’m gonna pass out” orgasm, but I think along with the Sybian, they should be illegal. I mean, a dildo with beads that rotate inside the shaft and a special vibrator for the love button is already enough to make a guy feel insecure. How’s a guy supposed to compete with a two horsepower motor?

Image by 3dman_eu, digitally altered, cc0