by Robert Evans
Coffee had a brief, terrible period of repression. But since then it’s flown to every non-Mormon corner of the globe. No one gets sewn into bags and drowned for drinking it today. Coffee has won hearts and minds across the world, and it’s not hard to see why. Whether you’re a revolutionary, a king, a godless intellectual, a cleric, or a soldier, you can appreciate the value of staying awake and tasting something delicious at the same time.
Quiz time! Name one object or activity that human beings haven’t found a way to sexualize. Take your time now. Think real hard—I’ll wait right here.
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OK, so I’m going to assume most of you are Internet-savvy enough to know that there is no answer to this question. If it exists, some human beings somewhere have found a way to masturbate to it. In the early days of online pornography this fact was christened “Rule 34”: If you can think of it, someone’s made porn about it. Back in 2015 I interviewed a man who made his living writing mind-control incest erotica. There’s an entire website devoted to “sensual” stories of singer-songwriter Roy Orbison being trapped in cling-wrap.
Why do we do this?
That’s a question I’ve asked myself many, many times over years of interviewing dominatrices, pornographers, and other sex workers. I’m sure it’s a question you’ve asked yourself on at least one late, lonely night plumbing the Web’s dark depths. It makes total sense that people are turned on by the asses, hips, breasts, thighs, biceps, etc., of their preferred gender(s). Why do we sexualize so very many things that have nothing to do with the human body, or copulation?
The answer to that question may lie in the history of podophilia, known to its friends as the foot fetish. One 2007 study by researchers from the universities of Bologna, L’Aquila, and Stockholm, “Relative Prevalence of Different Fetishes,” found that feet are the most commonly fetishized nongenital part of the human body. As many as half of all paraphilias related to the human body involve the feet.
The word paraphilia is an important one to understand. You may like your girlfriend’s feet, but that “like” doesn’t raise to the level of a paraphilia unless you’re somewhat dependent on interacting with, or fantasizing about, her feet in order to achieve orgasm. The “dependency” that comes with a paraphilia can be fairly mild, or it can be all-consuming; some people find that being tied up adds to their sexual experience . . . and a few can’t get off without ropes around their body.
There are a variety of theories for why the foot fetish seems to be the most common paraphilia in the whole sticky encyclopedia of human eroticism. In Phantoms in the Brain (1998) the neurologist V. S. Ramachandran proposed, “The reason is quite simply that in the brain the foot lies right next to the genitalia.”
See, the parietal lobe of your brain holds what’s known as the “body image map.” This is essentially where your brain stores all the information about how each part of your body moves and feels. It’s part of why phantom limb syndrome exists—even if you lose a leg, that leg still exists in your brain’s body image map. And for whatever reason, feet are adjacent to the genitals on the body image map. Dr. Ramachandran suspects that “cross-wiring” between the two might be responsible for the foot fetish’s bizarre ubiquity. (He also reports that some patients with missing limbs report achieving orgasm via their phantom feet.)
Dr. Ramachandran’s theory may explain why the foot fetish is so common. But it doesn’t help us understand why our species sexualizes such a dizzying array of nonsexual things. There’s no “being punched by an obese eunuch dressed as Batman” region of our body image map, but you can be damn sure someone in the world has masturbated to that exact fantasy. Sexual paraphilias play too large a role in human life to not confer some sort of evolutionary benefit.
In 1998, Dr. James Giannini gave us the first look at what that benefit might be. His landmark paper, “Sexualization of the Female Foot as a Response to Sexually Transmitted Epidemics,” collated centuries’ worth of references to sexual fetishes in literature and art. Giannini and his colleagues noticed that the foot fetish in particular seemed to peak right alongside the great STD outbreaks in history. In the thirteenth century, gonorrhea leapt into prominence thanks to armies of horny, condomless Crusaders. At the same time, medieval writers and poets started writing long, detailed love letters to the human foot. In the sixteenth century, when syphilis reared its ugly head, the foot fetish found itself in the limelight once more.
Giannini and his team noticed that the references to the foot fetish declined in frequency from thirty to sixty years after the end of each STD outbreak, and that “during all other periods, eroticism was attached to breasts, buttocks and thighs.”
While that’s all compelling data, our records of medieval-era erotica are tragically incomplete. So Giannini and his intrepid colleagues collected thirty years’ worth of smut from eight of the United States’ most popular pornographic magazines. They counted an average of between five and ten foot-focused photographs per magazine from 1960 to the mid-1980s. Starting in 1986—right as the AIDS epidemic went “viral”—that number shot off like a rocket. Researchers counted more than forty foot pictures per magazine published in 1998.
The basic data can be interpreted in a lot of ways. One hypothesis is that our brains have become better and better at eroticizing nonsense because it acts as a safety mechanism, a way to let people satisfy their urges without infecting themselves with cockplague. And while the foot fetish may be the most common of its kin, and the easiest to track in literature, it’s neither the only nor the oldest tool in our species’ erotic toolbox . . .
The Surprisingly Ancient History of Sex Toys
It’s very possible that we’ve been getting off with the aid of tools since before “we” were Homo sapiens. In fact, if the example of our chimpanzee cousins is anything to go on, the first sex toy in history was probably a leaf.
The practice of leaf clipping was first observed in 1987, among chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Mahale Mountains. Leaf clipping boils down to “male chimps biting down on dried leaves to make girls look at them.” Here’s how it was first described by a chimp researcher, Toshisada Nishida (quoted by Christopher Boesch in “Innovation in Wild Chimpanzees”):
A chimpanzee picks one to five stiff leaves, grasps the petiole between the thumb and the index finger, repeatedly pulls it from side to side while removing the leaf blade with the incisors, and thus bites the leaf to pieces. In removing the leaf blades, a ripping sound is conspicuously and distinctly produced. When only the midrib with tiny pieces of the leaf blade remains, it is dropped and another sequence of ripping a new leaf is often repeated.
The leaf being bitten is never eaten, and the sole purpose of the behavior appears to be that it makes lady chimps pay attention, allowing the male to, hopefully, seal the deal with his personality (chimpsonality?). Now, leaf clipping doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to, say, a basement full of bondage gear or a drawer full of vibrators. But it’s very much related to both of those things: Leaf clipping is the first evidence we’ve ever found of nonhuman primates using a “tool” for the sole purpose of getting laid.
We’ll never know the exact form of the first sex tool that our prehistoric, possibly prehuman ancestors developed. The oldest example of a sex toy archaeologists have yet discovered is a life-size siltstone penis from Hohle Fels cave in Germany’s Swabian Alps. Hohle Fels contains some of the oldest known artifacts of human history; that Paleolithic dildo is believed to be at least twenty-eight thousand years old.
Archaeologists have found evidence of dildos all across recorded human history. The double-ended dildo dates back at least as far as the ancient Greeks; the use of dildos was frequently depicted on vases and in popular comedies. Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata, which focuses on the women of Athens going on a sex strike to force an end to the Peloponnesian War, contains one of the first references to a sex toy in the history of literature:
Not even the spark of an adulterer has left. For since the Milesians betrayed us, I have not even seen a dildo eight fingers long.
According to Marguerite Johnson and Terry Ryan’s book Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature, “eight fingers” is about five or six inches long. In that line, the character Lysistrata is complaining that the war’s privations have left Athenian women without even tiny dildos to satisfy themselves. The “marital aids” she’s speaking about in that passage were likely made out of leather. But the Greeks didn’t limit themselves to just one material: They also made disposable, edible dildos out of breadsticks.
The olisbo-kollix (literally: “dildo-baguette”) likely served a number of purposes. We have artistic depictions of women carrying unusably large penises made of bread for, presumably, ritual religious purposes. But there are also multiple depictions of much smaller olisbo-kollixi that seem to have been meant for more . . . practical uses (at least, according to ancient sex expert Vicki León, in The Joy of Sexus). Leather and smooth stone dildos would’ve been limited to the wealthier echelons of Greek society. But bread wangs gave peasant women a cheap, discreet way to service themselves, which—bonus!—doubled as a snack when they were done. Presumably, the occasional yeast infections were seen as an acceptable trade-off.
Historical dildos haven’t always been fun, either. In Ming dynasty China (1368–1644), a woman convicted of adultery might be forced to mount a ceramic dildo attached to a saddle and ride that fake dick until she died. It’s worth noting that old China also had its share of less murder-y sex toys, including metal dildos constructed to release liquid in order to simulate ejaculation.
The history of sex toys doesn’t begin and end with fake cocks. We’ve been indulging our less obvious fetishes via elaborate tools for thousands of years, too. If you’re into being whipped or flogged, you might be interested to know that your particular kink dates back at least as far as 490 BCE.
The “Tomb of the Whipping” is an Etruscan noblewoman’s tomb in Tarquinia, Italy. The inside walls are decorated with a variety of depictions of wine, dancing, music . . . and a lady getting whipped on the ass by two men. Let me clarify: She’s being whipped by exceedingly erect men. She appears to be taking it up the back door with one of them, and performing oral sex on the other. Spend ten minutes on Google and you’ll find thousands of modern-day depictions of this exact act.
The passing centuries have brought our species only more and more erotic options. Erotic asphyxiation actually started in the seventeenth century as a pre-Viagra cure for erectile dysfunction. The rubber/latex fetish likely kicked off with the first rubber mackintosh raincoats, released in the mid-nineteenth century to an ad campaign filled with attractive young ladies in rubber rain gear. The early twentieth century brought pulp “detective” comics and movies filled with images of beautiful women bound in rope and fitted with gags, inspiring a new generation of sex toys—and on and on the cycle goes.
Our species owes a debt to kink, but it’s not a debt many people are willing to acknowledge. You won’t find any high school textbooks detailing how the foot fetish or the breadstick dildo helped ancient humans avoid the plague. But fetishes have played their role in human development, even though some cultures have been pretty aggressively against the whole concept of “pleasuring” yourself.
The War on Masturbation
Our understanding of the human sexual record is warped by the fact that virtually all of that record comes from men. The Kama Sutra (400–200ish BCE) provides a wonderful historical record of sex life in ancient India, including some of the earliest writing on BDSM in history:
There are no keener means of inflicting passion than acts of tooth or nail.
But the Kama Sutra was also written by a wealthy man, and it contains many attitudes that are distressingly in line with the worst parts of modern pickup culture. The Kama Sutra deserves credit for emphasizing the importance of a woman’s pleasure in sex, but it also includes a downright horrifying passage that advises rendering a virgin unconscious with booze in order to take her “maidenhead.”
Sex history gets a little more democratic when we look at the ruins of Pompeii, buried in ash by the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Pompeii was basically ancient Rome’s Las Vegas, and the whole city’s sudden burial preserved a library’s worth of ancient Roman sexual mores. Frescos on the walls of Roman bedrooms and bathhouses depict many sex acts in which the woman takes a position of power, such as cunnilingus (which the Kama Sutra advises against) . . .
. . . two-boy, one-girl threesomes:
. . . and the cowgirl position (which probably went by a different name at the time):
The eruption of Vesuvius was a shitty last day for thousands of ancient Romans, but it’s been a huge boon to our understanding of the evolution of human sexuality. All those frescos would’ve been lost to time if the city had survived another few centuries. Several hundred years after Pompeii’s destruction, the Roman world found itself at the center of a war on masturbation.
In 342 CE the first Christian emperors of Rome, Constans and Constantine, passed the empire’s first laws against homosexual behavior. In 538 CE the emperor Justinian broadened this proscription to all sex acts not made for the express purpose of procreation. In his Novella 77, he urges good Christians to “abstain from suchlike diabolical and unlawful lusts, so that they may not be visited by the just wrath of God on account of these impious acts, with the result that cities perish with all their inhabitants.”
The Catholic Church has had a big problem with masturbation from the very beginning. It all seems to have come from the same origin. As the church father Clement of Alexandria explained, semen was a “divine instrument for the propagation of man,” and shooting a load of that divine instrument into a sock or another man was an affront to god himself.
European sexual mores didn’t exactly open up over the next twelve hundred years of Christianity. When the kinkier ruins of the pagan Romans and Etruscans started turning up at archaeological digs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nobility of Italy locked everything “questionable” away from the public in a hidden museum of now-forbidden art. We’re lucky they didn’t just burn it all: Many considered the destruction of Pompeii to have been a fitting punishment for ancient Roman debauchery. In 1800, the Pope officially excommunicated all the city’s long-dead inhabitants.
This museum of hidden erotic history wasn’t opened up to the public until the 1960s, when the Western world collectively decided it was time to loosen up a bit about the whole “orgasm” thing. And, oddly enough, that process kicked off with some enterprising doctors and their medicinal sex toys.
“Hysteria” is the oldest mental illness attributed purely to women. It’s a broadly defined disorder that includes everything from symptoms that sound very much like a panic attack to incredibly vague things like “excess emotion” and “erotic fantasies.” Today, we know that the symptoms of “hysteria” are caused in women and men by a variety of things. But for millennia, hysteria was the “woman’s disease,” and an incredibly common disease at that. According to some sources, such as Rachel Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm (1999) hysteria in the seventeenth century was the second most common diagnosis for women, beaten only by fever.
Old-timey doctors concluded that orgasm was the best prescription for this problem. The woman couldn’t be encouraged to masturbate, of course, because that’d be lettin’ the devil into her nethers. But such ladies were advised to swing and ride horses, and, when that didn’t work, the doctor himself would jill off for her. Physicians at the time weren’t fans of inducing “hysterical paroxysm” in every woman who walked through the door. The first vibrators were created in France, in the 1730s, to help make the medical process of getting ladies off mechanically efficient.
The vibrators that 50 percent (or more!) of the people reading this know and enjoy today are descendants of this medical
tool. It’s a story with a happy ending, but it’s also a jarring example of how deeply our attitudes on masturbation have changed. Once upon a time the human capacity for sexual fantasy kept us safe from plague. People developed dildos, some of the first tools in history, to help women masturbate . . . and thirty thousand years later, we started building tools to help doctors do the job for them.
The history you learned in school probably minimized the impact of kinky sex and pornography on human development, with one weird exception . . .
The Venus of Willendorf: 3-D Porn, or the Birth of Medical Science?
The Venus of Willendorf dates back to 25,000-ish BCE, making her the oldest depiction of a naked woman known to archaeology. We can’t know exactly why people nearly three-recorded-histories ago built any piece of art. But right now the popular consensus boils down to “it’s porn.”
Tavia Morra
The theory that the Venus was basically prehistoric smut has led researchers to make some pretty bold assumptions about ancient eroticism. Here’s how PBS describes the Venus on its “How Art Made the World” website (circa 2015):
The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable. In neurological terms, these features amounted to hyper-normal stimuli that activate neuron responses in the brain. So in Paleolithic people terms, the parts that mattered most had to do with successful reproduction—the breasts and pelvic girdle.
Note that “Paleolithic people” means exclusively “male Paleolithic people” here. PBS—and mainstream archaeology—defines “the parts that mattered” from the perspective of ancient men.