The sex toy industry is one of the few industries that is both a producer and a shower. It is worth billions of dollars and is constantly expanding with new products. However, getting to this point was not easy, and it took a long time.
When you think of sex toys, you probably think of a gadget or gadget that runs on batteries, has a USB charger, or somehow linked to an app, but in reality sex toys do exist. for centuries.
It all started in 29,000 BC. Neanderthals in the Swabian Alb region of present-day Germany started carving rocks into phallic shapes. We don’t know for sure if they used them as sex toys, for fertility ceremonies, or if they just thought it was hilarious to sculpt penis stones, but we do know that they paved the way for the modern sex toy industry. .
The creation of sex toys got a little more innovative – and a lot stranger – in 500 BC, when the ancient Greeks started making fake dongs using all kinds of materials. Some were made of brass or padded leather. Some were, for some reason, made from old bread. They called them olisbokolaime, which is almost as difficult to pronounce as it is to understand. While we don’t recommend you try this, it is definitely a waste-conscious and economical way to go. These bizarre Greeks were also the pioneers of lubricant using olive oil.
By 1300 AD, the sex toy industry was really taking off, especially in ancient China, which innovated Ben Wahh balls filled with animal sperm, cock rings made from goat eyelids and double-sided dildos. What a time to live! The real word dildo was not coined until around 1400 AD, during the Italian Renaissance. It follows from dilett o, which means pleasure.
In the 1600s, French sailors pioneered sex dolls by taking straw “women” on long, lonely voyages, calling them “traveling ladies”. Right now, even Shakespeare talks about sex toys, mentioning dildos by name in his play “A Winter’s Tale”. Naughty naughty!
In 1800s England, frail men began to label anxious or unhappy women with hysteria. Although we would like to say that this was a short-lived “medical diagnosis”, it lasted until the 1950s. Wanting to have these women Relax, he was “treated” with intense genital stimulation, among other things.
The hysteria spread like wildfire, and the doctors and their weak hands couldn’t keep up, so the story goes that they invented vibrating machines to make women cum with less effort. Back then, they called them “manipulators,” but now we know them as vibrators. The first “manipulator” was created by American physician George Taylor, but Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville created the first patent, disturbingly named the Granville Hammer.
While people these days typically use vibrators to get off, research suggests their original intention was to help relieve muscle cramps. This means that you are only half lying when you call it a back massager. Vibrators have been marketed as a bunch of different things throughout the 20th century, including scalp massagers, weight loss tools, and pain relievers. They might have worked for some of these things, but they were definitely used for other reasons.
In the early 1960s, a close friend of ventriloquist Ted Marche approached him about a problem he had: he was suffering from impotence and asked Ted to use his skills as a puppet maker to make him a penile prosthesis. As any good friend would, Ted agrees and goes to work, creating the first strap-on.
In the late 1960s, men launched into the sex toy craze, and men’s magazines began to offer inflatable sex dolls.
Around the same time, in Japan, Hitachi released “The Magic Wand”, a battery operated massager for “severe back pain”. Women everywhere have started to use it for their … uh, back pain, and the demand has skyrocketed.
A decade later, feminist Betty Dodson began demonstrating how to use the magic wand in her bodysex workshops, hailing the sex toy as a stimulant. Around the same time, inspired by an embarrassing experience she had buying a vibrator at a department store, businesswoman Dell Williams founded the first sex shop in the United States designed specifically for women. , called Eve’s Garden. The store popularized silicone vibrators that did not have the shape of a penis, which was a big deal back then, and is widely regarded as the model for the modern sex shop.
In 1983, to get around tightening obscenity laws, Japanese companies like Vibratex began making vibrators shaped like harmless (and, in some cases, adorable) things. Some were modeled after animals, including kangaroos, turtles, and rabbits, and were brightly colored. Cute!
Another major innovation in sex toys appeared in 1995 when the fleshlight was designed. Originally it was created to help collect samples from sperm donors, but the inventors quickly saw its potential wider and started selling it online.
About two years later, the first RealDoll appeared. RealDolls used silicone and mechanical seals to deliver the most realistic fake experience of being with a woman yet … far from the “travel ladies” of straw.
Today, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet and constantly evolving technological innovations, we are living in the golden age of sex toys. In fact, rResearch shows that half of adults regularly use sex toys.
We don’t know what the future holds, but we assume it’s a lot of orgasms.