Sex Toys (Dildos)

Essay by onvinhtanCollege, UndergraduateB, November 2004

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From ancient times to today, sex toys have been around to accompany the lonely or the adventurous. With each passing day the dildo has become more and more socially acceptable. Even though most of it's use is still among females, males have had fun with them as well. Times are changing and with it, the views and uses of the dildo are as well.

The creation of sex toys, in general, has been traced back to Asians with more than one thousand years of use. The invention of the dildo is still puzzling historians. However it's popularity is due all the way back to the ancient Greek city of Miletus. Today dildos are enjoyed by couples, but in ancient Greece it was for the lonely ladies. The word dildo came from the world "diletto" an Italian word meaning to delight. They were hardly delightful compared to today's standard. They were usually made of wood or leather requiring large amounts of olive oil to be applied for comfortable use.

The more modern rubber dildos did not appear until around the 1950s.

Dildos have always been used for sexual purposes, but vibrators have a little different story. When vibrators were first developed, their use was hidden under the guise of "female hysteria" from Greece meaning "suffering uterus". Symptoms of "suffering uterus" involved anxiety, irritability, and sexual fantasies. Nowadays we would say that the woman was horny, but during Greece's Victorian period women were not considered sexual beings. They were treated by vibrating the patient's clitoris until they experienced relief. As years passed, magazines advertised dildos and vibrators to cure "female hysteria" by yourself at home. Vibrators and Dildos were seen as medical tools perfectly acceptable by society. More ad's appeared tailored to men explaining that vibrators helped keep wives healthy and pretty.