People...I’m a total wanker. A passionate and dedicated masturbator. I’ve been enjoying ménage à mois’ since I was old enough to hold a squiggle-wiggle pen. And I’ll most likely continue enjoying them until my body is dragged into a cryogenic space chamber at some point in 2065.

As a white Australian, I don’t really have any culture of my own. I’m the direct product of every coloniser who came before me. So sometimes the only way I can feel a connection with humanity is to focus on the more universal experiences. Which is lucky for me, since members of the masturbation clan can trace our lineage back to the start of time. It’s a rich, thick history full of innovation and invention, heroic advocates and devious villains determined to bring us down. So let’s take a walk down the memory lane of wankers who have gone before us…

Prehistoric sex toys

Many articles on the history of masturbation or sex toys will tell you that the earliest evidence we have is some dildo-like objects from the Neolithic and Paleolithic period (around 30,000 years ago).

This is technically correct, in that these euphemistically titled “Ice age batons” are pretty obviously dicks.

But the definition of a dildo, is ‘an object shaped like an erect penis used for sexual stimulation’. So while we have the first half of the equation, we have no way of confirming the second.

Were prehistoric ice maidens diddling themselves with stone dildos? Or were they objects of worship like the Venus of Willendorf, made to symbolise some lofty concept like ‘fertility’ or perhaps just an early form of selfie or dick pic? We’ll probably never know.

Ancient civilisations & mythology

What we do know, is that by 4000 B.C.E we have art demonstrating humans mid-wank. This isn’t surprising given how many emerging cultures feature wanking as central pillars of their mythology.

The Sumerians believed masturbation was good for your health, regardless of your gender, and were known to do it both alone and with their partners. Their god, Enki, managed to create the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with his cosmic jizz.

Not one to miss out on the cosmic jizz, the Egyptians credited it as the reason for all of existence - the god Atum appeared out of the void of Nu, and since he found himself in the midst of nothingness, decided to relieve his loneliness by masturbating. His ejaculation resulted in the first god and goddess who then became the parents of everything else in the world. Meanwhile in India, a Hindu myth has Shiva being masturbated by Agni, who then considerately swallows his semen.

Our friends in Ancient Greece weren’t afraid of a good fap either. It featured heavily in their theatre productions and on their pottery. According to mythology it was Hermes who invented our most beloved pastime. Apparently his son, Pan, was sulking because he couldn’t get Echo into bed, so his dear old dad showed him how to rub one out and get some relief - blue balls be gone!

The famous Cynic, and lovable jar-dwelling troll, Diogenes of Sinope was said to have provided a public demonstration of masturbation, for those who were unclear on the particulars. While doing so he pointed out;

“If all men were like myself, the Trojan war would never have happened!”

Apparently this wasn’t a one time thing; the dude could regularly be found having a fiddle in public. When people asked “Ew, why?” he would reportedly reply;

“If only it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing my belly.”

The Greeks were also down with women masturbating, and there’s plenty of art and writing making reference to it. Greek women were often shown using dildos or artificial phalluses made of leather, ivory or even wood.

In fact, dildos were so popular at this time, that the Ionian city of Miletus in Asia Minor was known as THE place to go for all your dildo needs, or ‘olisbos’ as they were known at the time. The dildos of Miletus were made from wood or pressed leather and were covered in olive oil before use.

In roughly 2000 BCE a dude called Onan pops up. God decides that Onan’s brother, Er, is “wicked” but refuses to give us any of the juicy details on why before smiting him. With Er dead, his widow Tamar has no kids. Apparently this is now Onan’s problem and he’s pressured into marrying his dead brother’s wife. Onan’s dad tells him to get Tamar pregnant. Onan is having none of that shit and does a “Duke of Hastings”, pulling out and "spilled his seed on the ground" so no one has to sleep in the wet spot. God is pretty specific on his feelings about this, so Onan gets smote.

There’s a lot of debate about which part of Onan’s behaviour really pissed God off - was it refusing to do as he was told, was it having sex with no intention of reproducing, was it because he had a duty to his brother to produce an heir, or was it because he wasted perfectly good sperm? Either way, Onan’s name will go down in history as a euphemism for masturbation.

But Onan isn’t the first biblical reference to masturbation - that honour belongs to Ezekiel 16:17 where our eponymous narrator accuses the people of Jerusalem;

“You also took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver, and you made for yourself male idols and engaged in prostitution with them.”

Coming into the Common Era

At the start of the Common Era (CE) we see the emergence of the Kamasutra, an Indian text that covered sexuality, eroticism and emotional fulfillment in life.

Contrary to the way it’s represented in Western media, it was never a guide to sex positions. It covered things like courtship, how to find a partner, how to flirt, how to have a happy marriage and when it was appropriate to have an affair.

So, basically the original Savage Lovecast.

On the topic of masturbation the Kamasutra advised that women should wank away, but men should abstain.

This was because a man’s ejaculate was believed to contain life giving substances, so wasting it would leave him depleted of these important nutrients. Women however were seen as having unlimited fluids, and masturbation would help to regulate their metabolism and keep diseases away.

Better than an apple, I guess.

Also around 2000 years ago, during the Han dynasty, people in China were putting their sex toys inside their burial tombs. Some scholars have speculated that the discovered butt plugs weren’t for a sexual purpose, but were there to ‘seal up’ the corpse to prevent leakage. Which seems legit, until you notice the amount of penis detail on the jade objects. If you’re just plugging holes, why does it need to be so specifically dick-like?

In 500 CE Japan developed a brilliant masturbation innovation in the form of Ben Wa balls (or ‘rin no tama’ in Japanese). Originally crafted from metal and possibly containing mercury, they were inserted into the vagina to create additional stimulation. There are varying arguments as to whether they were initially created to be used during sex, or if they were intended for solo use. Either way, we have writings from across Asia referencing their use as a masturbation aid.

Once we reach the middle ages we start to see that old chestnut ‘Onanism’ popping up as the go to term for ‘masturbation’ instead of being used to mean ‘coitus interruptus’ or ‘pulling out’.

God’s treatment of Onan certainly set the tone for the way Christianity viewed masturbation.

The best summary of the Christian argument against wanking comes in the 1200s from St Thomas Aquinas (#NotMySaint), who eloquently advised that masturbation was a worse sin than rape, incest, and adultery, because at least in these other sins procreation is still a possibility.

Apparently not every Christian got that message though. At least not according to Pietro Aretino (#PietroForSainthood).

In the 1550s Aretino wrote about nuns using dildos to “quell the gnawing of the flesh”. No wonder the dude ended up being known as the father of pornography. His poem ‘Dialogues’ is considered the first literary work of porn, and with content like nun wanking it’s good to know our modern smut hasn’t strayed too far from his foundations.

And presumably modern nuns haven’t either.

But it wasn’t until the 1680s that we finally got to see the word ‘dildo’ appear in print. Thanks to Thomas Nash’s poem “The Choosing of a Valentines”

“Henceforth I will no more implore thine aid,

Or thee for ever of Cowardice shall upraid:

My little dildoe shall supply your kind,

A youth that is as light as leaves in wind:

He bendeth not, nor foldeth any deal,

But stands as stiff as he were made of steel;

(And plays at peacock twixt my legs right blithe

And doeth my tickling swage with many a sigh;)

And when I will, he doth refresh me well,

And never makes my tender belly swell.”

Modern masturbation machines

A dildo is all good and well, but let’s be honest, some of us can’t climax without a little mechanical assistance.

During the reign of Louis 15th, one Pierre Chirac, a physician at Versaille, noticed that many of his patients with melancholia experienced improvements after travelling by ‘mail carriage’. This led him to speculate that perhaps vibrations could help to cure such diseases.

Jump cut to 1734 when The Abbot of Saint-Pierre and an engineer by the name of Duguet created the ‘tremoussoir’, a vibrating chair meant to simulate the experience of riding in a mail carriage. But the technology was still far from being used in a sexual context.

By the 18th Century the anti-onanism crusade had hit a high point, one that lasted through to the Victorian era. A Dutch theologian going by Dr. Balthazar Bekker, (clearly next year’s supervillain to watch) advised that those who succumbed to the “heinous sin of self pollution” could expect to suffer:

“Disturbances of the stomach and digestion, loss of appetite or ravenous hunger, vomiting, nausea, weakening of the organs of breathing, coughing, hoarseness, paralysis, weakening of the organ of generation to the point of impotence, lack of libido, back pain, disorders of the eye and ear, total diminution of bodily powers, paleness, thinness, pimples on the face, decline of intellectual powers, loss of memory, attacks of rage, madness, idiocy, epilepsy, fever and finally suicide.”

During the Victorian era the list of masturbation-induced ailments was expanded to include impaired morals, depression, social failure, tuberculosis, blindness, insanity, and early death. To combat this, many physicians and entrepreneurs conceived of a vast number of anti-masturbatory devices to help aid individuals in their moral quest to keep their hands off their fun bits. These devices wouldn’t have been out of place in the Spanish Inquisition, with such delightful contraptions as spermatorrhea rings, straightjacket pyjamas, erection alerts and tiny little suits of armour designed to fit over the penis and testicles.

From your Sears catalogue you could order rings to fit along the base of the penis, with spikes along the inner lining to prevent erections. In truly desperate cases, chronic masturbators would simply have their foreskin stapled shut, or were castrated.

Which is where John Kellog comes to the rescue, with his invention of Cornflakes (yes, you read that correctly). He believed the cereal would lessen the sex drive and therefore diminish the practice of masturbation, which he described thusly,

“Neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism.”

Which is why to this day I insist on staring at a box of Cornflakes while I rub one out.

In 1859 a physician called George Taylor came along and told the public that almost 25% of women suffered from “female hysteria”.

Hysteria was the first mental disorder attributed solely to women and helped cement the“bitches be crazy” shit we’re still dealing with in healthcare today.

Physicians used female hysteria as a catchall to explain away pretty much any ailment that could be conceived of. The physician George Beard catalogued over 75 pages of symptoms and considered it an incomplete list.

Now at this is the point you might be thinking “Ah yes, hysteria, the condition they treated with masturbation and vibrators”. Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but actually no.

Hysteria itself was actually often believed to be caused by masturbation. The theory of “vibrators were invented by doctors to treat hysteria” comes from the speculation of scholar Rachel Maines, in her 1999 book “The Technology of Orgasm”. Her theory so appealed to popular imagination that it actually got turned into a stage production and in 2011 was released as a film.

Maines’ theory hinged on the idea that doctors were using ‘pelvic massage’ to induce ‘hysterical paroxysms’ in female patients (basically jerking them off to orgasm), but that these bumbling old timey doctors were so ignorant about women that they didn’t recognise that what they were doing was in any way sexual.

Now, this theory presents a bit of a problem, since the Victorians were actually kind of sex-obsessed. These are the people who were so freaked out by masturbation that they invented an entire sub-genre of BDSM devices to keep people from diddling themselves and yet somehow neither the doctors nor the women recognised what was happening?

These were also the same Victorians who produced a book called “The Art of Begetting Handsome Children” that extolled the virtues of foreplay thusly;

‘When the husband cometh into his wife’s chamber, he must entertain her with all kinds of dalliance, wanton behaviour, and allurements to venery. But if he perceive her to be slow, and more cold, he must cherish, embrace and tickle her; and shall not abruptly (the nerves being suddenly distended) break into the field of nature, but rather shall creep in by little and little, intermixing more wanton kisses with wanton words and speeches, mauling her secret parts...’’

Believe it or not, the Victorians actually cared a lot about sex.

For every kinky cock cage they invented, they produced just as many items of literature teaching the importance of sexual pleasure - for both parties.

Maines theory (and her less than ideal system of quoting sources) has been thoroughly taken to task by Hallie Lieberman and Eric Shatzberg in their paper, “Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm.” Since the publication of their paper in 2018, we’re, thankfully, seeing more content dispelling the misinformation.

Joseph Mortimer Granville is largely credited with creating the ‘modern’ vibrator. But when you look at his patent submission you can see, it looks nothing like a modern vibrator. He used his vibrator design to treat his, exclusively male, patients. Other variations of vibrator design soon followed.

The original vibrators went mainstream as a sort of wellbeing device, and soon they were available for use in the home. They started appearing in women’s magazines, being advertised to help cure wrinkles, insomnia, headaches, and improve complexion. There were a million different shapes and designs on the market.

But by the 1920s they all but disappear from public view. Something else started to become quite popular in the 1920s - stag films. Stag films were silent porn movies, usually produced outside of studios, and every bit as filthy as our modern offerings. Once vibrators started to appear in porn they no longer appeared in the Sears catalogues and forever entered the realm of the ‘adult’.

In the 1940s and 50s we finally gained academic insight into the world of wanking, thanks to a gent by the name of Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey provided empirical evidence to the American people that the majority of them masturbated, that they did so in a wide variety of ways, and thus far no one had died from it. But despite this, Kinsey’s reports did little to change the social stigma associated with self love.

When the sexual revolution of the 60s came around, the time was ripe for vibrators to make their grand re-entrance. This is when Jon H Tavel patents his "Cordless Electric Vibrator for Use on the Human Body" which you might notice looks remarkably similar to the ‘ladyfinger’ vibrators we can still find on shelves today.

The 60’s was also the decade that introduced us to the Magic Wand. It was marketed along the same lines as the original vibrators, as a wellbeing tool for relieving muscle aches and pains.

It was the late, great Betty Dodson who introduced the world to the idea of using it on the clitoris.And if there’s a patron saint of vulval masturbation, Betty is it;

“The most consistent sex will be the love affair you have with yourself. Masturbation will get you through childhood, puberty, romance, marriage and divorce, and it will see you through old age.”

The 1980s saw a game changing entry to the market of vulval masturbation aids - the rabbit. While I remain vehemently anti-rabbit, the design hugely influenced the shape sex toys since its debut.

In the 1990s a TV show came along that managed to bring awareness of both the Magic Wand and the rabbit to mainstream audiences around the globe - Sex and the City.

But something else also happened in the 90s, something involving Bill Clinton. And it’s not the thing you’re thinking of.

In 1994, the magnificent Jocelyn Elders is the Surgeon General and she is invited to speak at the United Nations World AIDS Day. An audience member asked her opinion on masturbation as a method of curbing risky sexual behaviour in teens. Elders responded;

“I think it is something that is part of human sexuality and a part of something that perhaps should be taught.”

Clinton fired her.

Yeah, I know. That Clinton.

As a result, the emporium of awesome known as Good Vibrations decided to honour Elders and create a public awareness campaign for masturbation.

What started out as National Masturbation Day is now International Masturbation Month and every year it continues to inform people around the world about the amazing health benefits of a good old fashioned wank.

So this May, and every May that follows, I wish you and yours a Happy Masturbation Month.

Thank you for continuing the long held traditions of the masturbation clan.

Thank you for looking after yourself. You deserve it!

P.S: If you’d like to support the site, and demonstrate your accurate understanding of vibrators and history, you could buy a cool thing here.

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