Throwback Thursday - When Your Archeological Dig Turns Up Something Fun
Today, in my search for old time sex toys, I discovered this nugget that appeared in the Daily Mail today.
The headline, and the bullet points below it, are absolutely everything I needed today.
Leather sex toy from the 18th Century is discovered by archaeologists at ancient Polish training arena for swordsmen
- The 250-year-old toy was made from leather with a wooden head
- It was found during excavation of an ancient toilet in Gdansk
- Archaeologists also discovered swords during the dig
I absolutely love these bullet points. It's 250 years old. It was found in a toilet. They also found swords. There you go - what else do you want to know?
Oh, perhaps you would like a picture.
Clearly, this picture was taken immediately after they pulled it out of the toilet. It could use a bit of a clean up.
What is very cool about this is that both the archeologists and the writers of this story don't try to call this anything other than a dildo. Often, when somebody finds a huge phallus on a dig, they call it a 'statue of unknown provenance' or 'an object, potentially used in fertility rituals'. Dude, it's a dildo. And maybe they were used in fertility rituals too - who knows, but they were highly likely to have been used for fucking oneself or one's partner.
Probably because the lateness of the date on this, only 250 years ago, and the fact that it was found in a toilet in a military training camp, they really can't call it anything else. So they just cut to the chase here. They also acknowledge that a lot of items that have been found in much earlier times - in spite of what academics seem to want to call them - were dildos.
'For thousands of years, phallic objects have been used symbolically as a means to boost fertility and ward off evil spirits - but their use as sexual aids has a long history, too'
I like that a lot. People have, obviously, been having sex since humans arrived on this planet. And we have known for a very long time that human sex has always served many purposes, only one of which is procreation, and many of which involve just fun and pleasure. To that end, we've been making sex toys since shortly after we figured out how to make anything.
It's the modern view of sex that makes us shy away from the reality of finds like this. Given what I've seen of sex-themed art and objects throughout history, it's pretty clear that most earlier cultures were a lot more laid back about sex than we are today. It was just a part of life. No big deal at all.
So soldiers in Poland 250 years ago made and used dildos. Cool. But I'm glad that sex toy making has advanced so much that we don't need to use dildos made out of leather and clay.