In the early 1590s, the English playwright Thomas Nashe wrote a poem known as The Choice of Valentines, Nashe’s Dildo or The Merrie Ballad of Nashe his Dildo. This was not printed at the time, due to its obscenity but it was still widely circulated and made Nashe’s name notorious. The poem describes a visit to a brothel by a man called “Tomalin”; he is searching for his sweetheart, Francis, who has become a prostitute. The only way he can see her is to hire her. However, she resorts to using a glass dildo as he finds himself unable to perform sexually to her satisfaction.

Dildos are humorously mentioned in Act IV, scene iv of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This play and Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist (1610) are typically cited as the first usage of the word in publication (Nashe’s Merrie Ballad was not published until 1899).

John Wilmot, the 17th century English libertine, published his poem Signor Dildo in 1673. During the Parliamentary session of that year, objections were raised to the proposed marriage of James, Duke of York, brother of the King and heir to the throne, to Mary of Modena, an Italian Catholic princess. An address was presented to King Charles on 3 November, foreseeing the dangerous consequences of marriage to a Catholic, and urging him to put a stop to any planned wedding ‘…to the unspeakable Joy and Comfort of all Your loyal Subjects.” Wilmot’s response was Signior Dildo (You ladies all of merry England), a mock address anticipating the ‘solid’ advantages of a Catholic marriage, namely the wholesale importation of Italian dildos, to the unspeakable joy and comfort of all the ladies of England:

You ladies all of merry England
Who have been to kiss the Duchess’s hand,
Pray, did you not lately observe in the show
A noble Italian called Signor Dildo? …
A rabble of pricks who were welcomed before,
Now finding the porter denied them the door,
Maliciously waited his coming below
And inhumanly fell on Signor Dildo …
This ballad was subsequently added to by other authors, and became so popular that Signor became a term for a dildo. In the epilogue to The Mistaken Husband (1674), by John Dryden, an actress complains:

To act with young boys is loving without men.
What will not poor forsaken women try?
When man’s not near, the Signior must supply.
Signor Dildo was more recently set to music by Michael Nyman for the Wilmot biopic, The Libertine.

Many other works of bawdy and satirical English literature of the period deal with the subject. Dildoides: A Burlesque Poem (London, 1706), attributed to Samuel Butler, is a mock lament to a collection of dildos that had been seized and publicly burnt by the authorities. Examples of anonymous works include The Bauble, a tale (London, 1721) and Monsieur Thing’s Origin: or Seignor D—o’s Adventures in London, (London, 1722). In 1746, Henry Fielding wrote The Female Husband: or the surprising history of Mrs Mary, alias Mr. George Hamilton, in which a woman posing as a man uses a dildo. This was a fictionalized account of the story of Mary Hamilton.

Dildos may be seen in some examples of ancient Greek vase art. Some pieces show their use in group sex or in solitary female masturbation. One vessel, of about the 6th century BC, depicts a scene in which a woman bends over to perform oral sex on a man, while another man is about to thrust a dildo into her anus.

They are mentioned several times in Aristophanes’ comedy of 411 BC, Lysistrata.

LYSISTRATA
And so, girls, when fucking time comes… not the faintest whiff of it anywhere, right? From the time those Milesians betrayed us, we can’t even find our eight-fingered leather dildos. At least they’d serve as a sort of flesh-replacement for our poor cunts… So, then! Would you like me to find some mechanism by which we could end this war?
Herodas’ short comic play, Mime VI, written in the 3rd Century BC, is about a woman called Metro, anxious to discover from a friend where she recently acquired a dildo.

METRO
I beg you, don’t lie,
dear Corrioto: who was the man who stitched for you this bright red dildo?
She eventually discovers the maker to be a man called Kerdon, who hides his trade by the front of being a cobbler, and leaves to seek him out. Metro and Kerdon are main characters in the next play in the sequence, Mime VII, when she visits his shop.

Page duBois, a classicist and feminist theorist, suggests that dildos were present in Greek art because the ancient Greek male imagination found it difficult to conceive of sex taking place without penetration. Therefore, female masturbation or sex between women required an artificial phallus to be used.

The D.2 Stone Dildo is hand sculpted from polished Absolute Black Granite. The slightly twisted smooth shaft curves gently into a broad, flattened head for a fuller feeling and firmer stimulation.

Hand crafted piece with a broad, flattened head and angled/twisted shaft aimed at those who like to feel greater fullness from penetration inwards, as well as those who like/want more pressure across a wider area.

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Both ends can be used. The handle provides a smaller alternative to deeper penetration. The handle arches nicely and combined with the angle of the shaft you can stimulate the g-spot area using this end too.

Absolute Black Granite (Gabbro)
Weight: 422 gram
Origin: Shanxi, China
Age: Appr. 500 million years

Circumference: 12,5 cm

The etymology of the word dildo is unclear. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) describes the word as being of “origin unknown”. One theory is that it originally referred to the phallus-shaped peg used to lock an oar in position on a dory (small boat). It would be inserted into a hole on the side of the boat, and is very similar in shape to the modern toy. It is possible that the sex toy takes its name from this sailing tool, which also lends its name to the town of Dildo and the nearby Dildo Island in Newfoundland, Canada. Others suggest the word is a corruption of Italian diletto “delight”. It has also been noted that the word dildo has similarity to “dill”, a pickled cucumber, which is a vegetable that has been used as a natural dildo.

According to the OED, the word’s first appearance in English was in Thomas Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines or the Merie Ballad of Nash his Dildo (c. 1593). The word also appears in Ben Jonson’s 1610 play, The Alchemist. William Shakespeare used the term once in The Winter’s Tale, believed to be from 1610 or 1611, but not printed until the First Folio of 1623.

The phrase “Dil Doul”, referring to a man’s penis, appears in the 17th century folk ballad “The Maids Complaint for want of a Dil Doul”. The song was among the many in the library of Samuel Pepys.

An olisbos (pl. olisboi) is a classical term for a dildo, from Greek ὄλισβος. i.e. a dildo that was usually made of leather. A godemiché is a dildo in the shape of a penis with scrotum.

In some modern languages, the names for dildo can be more descriptive, creative or subtle—note, for instance, the Russian фаллоимитатор (literally “phallic imitator”), Hindi दर्शिल्दो darśildō, Spanish consolador “consoler” and Welsh cala goeg “fake penis”.
Dildos in one form or another have been present in society throughout history. Artifacts from the Upper Paleolithic which have previously been described as batons were most likely used for sexual purposes. There appears to have been hesitation on the part of archaeologists to label these items as sex toys: as archaeologist Timothy Taylor put it, “Looking at the size, shape, and—some cases—explicit symbolism of the ice age batons, it seems disingenuous to avoid the most obvious and straightforward interpretation. But it has been avoided.”

The world’s oldest known dildo is a siltstone 20-centimeter phallus from the Upper Palaeolithic period 30,000 years ago that was found in Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm, Germany.

The first dildos were made of stone, tar, wood and other materials that could be shaped as penises and that were firm enough to be used as penetrative sex toys. Dildo-like breadsticks, known as olisbokollikes (sing. olisbokollix), were known in Ancient Greece prior to the 5th century BC. Chinese women in the 15th century used dildos made of lacquered wood with textured surfaces. Nashe’s early-1590’s work The Choice of Valentines mentions a dildo made from glass.

There have been many references to dildos in the historical and ethnographic literature. Haberlandt, for example, illustrates single and double-ended wooden dildos from late 19th century Zanzibar. With the invention of modern materials, there appeared the possibility of making dildos of different shapes, sizes, colors and textures.

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