The history of sex toys and what they tell us about ancient women

https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/living/2025/0110/1489456-the-history-of-sex-toys-and-what-they-tell-us-about-ancient-women/

by austinallegro • 2 years ago

22 17 2 years ago

rte.ie

treetalker• 2 years ago

"Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take a live fish and put it in their vagina, keeping it there for a while until it is dead. Then they cook or roast it and give it to their husbands to eat, doing this in order to make the men be more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days."

I'll stick with microplastic-laden seafood, thanks.

bryanrasmussen2• 2 years ago

I'm guessing you're a man, so, evidently they did not tell their husbands if they were making them more ardent in their love, and thus you would not really have that choice.

sombragris• 2 years ago

Extremely light on "history", it is more like a sermon.

drewcoo• 2 years ago

It is a queer woman meaning to "correct" history.

If it feels "like a sermon," you're likely not of the flock.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

But our ancient relatives did indeed use sex toys before the modern development of what would become the vibrator in the late 19th century

Of course, in those days, more forward planning was required, as it would take the steam engine at least an hour to get up to pressure.

dylan604• 2 years ago

that's a steam punk concept I never thought about

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

Steampunk authors typically assume that that one got solved, I think (I believe, before small steam engines became irrelevant, that there _was_ some progress in that direction).

bot403• 2 years ago

Of course living by a river and powering a waterwheel was vastly preferred to the steam engine here until steam technology caught up through miniaturization and tighter manufacturing tolerances.

hulitu• 2 years ago

Fascinating read. Has almost nothing to do with history (only 2 or 3 stories) but a lot of men bashing.

I would have expected what the title promised. We learned in history that the human society, is, since some a couple thousand years, a patriarchal one. We haven't evolved: Women are expected to make children and men to die in wars so the rich get richer.

neilv2• 2 years ago

The title alone sounds like it's work-inappropriate.

sheepdestroyer• 2 years ago

The concept of work-inappropriate is laughable. Just don't be on internet if that the kind of work environment you have to endure.

readthenotes1• 2 years ago

Can you claim to be working if you're browsing the internet for random articles?

neilv2• 2 years ago

HN is mostly a tech industry thing, maybe even mostly a techbro thing.

One of the reasons you wouldn't post a link to "The history of sex toys and what they tell us about ancient women" on the engineering Slack at work, is the same reason you wouldn't want to upvote it on the front page of HN.

Imagine an engineering team including a female engineer, and that gets posted to the Slack. Probably she was aware of industry's sexism problems, but maybe she felt accepted as a peer professional by her teammates, until she saw her teammates engaging with that post, rather than indicating that was inappropriate. I can only guess that she might feel disappointed and alienated by her teammates, among other thoughts.

But some might object, oh, but this is for the curious hacker spirit in all of us. OK, 19 hours in, let's look at the top-voted comment. Nope, it's quoting something from the article about superstitious insertion of fish into a woman's anatomy, before serving it to the man, and making a dismissive joke comment about preferring microplastics in modern fish.

"What's the matter, Sally Engineer, can't you see this is a valuable hacker curiosity discussion, and you shouldn't be uncomfortable that your teammates think it's appropriate in this context?"

Accidentally doing something, but then deciding it's improper, and correcting it, is one thing. That can even be a net positive, if people learn from it. But being told someone else thinks it's improper, and going into obstinate, combative mode, is a different thing.

bryanrasmussen2• 2 years ago

Due to this approach, women's lives are often lost to history - especially their intimate lives. One example of this is an antler bone found with 28 notches engraved on its side. Male archaeologists proclaimed the item was used by male farmers to count cattle; modern female archaeologists suggested it was used for tracking menstrual cycles instead.

follow the link on antler bone and learn that evidently nobody knows what it was used for.

anyway, in following the scolding moralistic tone of the article I read it all and I learned that evidently gay men did not exist during any of these ages of the earth and all sex toy usage was by the women. Hoist by their own petard, ironic that.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7• 2 years ago

I think this article says a lot about the tendency for historical evidence to become instruments of imagined narrative rather than elucidating anything based in reality.

However, there is a lot mentioned in the article that isn't "ancient" history, and overall the headline kind of fails to deliver, not surprising.

bebopfunk• 2 years ago

It reminds me of Motel of Mysteries by David Macaulay. In the 4000s an archeologist finds a perfectly preserved motel room. The book is his sketches and field notes on the contents of the room. Every conclusion drawn is wrong and somewhat humorous. A read through it will really change your views on archeology.

tomohelix• 2 years ago

Interesting how this is not yet flagged while Paul Graham's piece a few days ago was flagged almost instantly and required manual approval to stay up.

Imo, both are heavily opinionated albeit in opposite direction. And both having little to do with HN/tech in general. Graham's article/blog is more informative though, i.e. have more evidences to support his points, compared to this. Also at least PG is much more relevant to HN than whoever wrote this article. Yet the treatments were very different. I guess there is a strong bias to those who like to hit that flag button.

The history of sex toys and what they tell us about ancient women

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