Ben Franklin assures you that you don’t need to be too worried about the odd wrinkly goods. Well, you may need a basket, and should keep the lights off, but it’s still gonna be a good time.
Flexibility, I’ll give you, but shape? I must be pretty vanilla, because the only quote “exotic” dildo shapes I can think of are double-ended, or with an extension to stimulate the clitoris. Both of which seemed well within the capabilities of an ancient wood-carver.
Given the limitations of physics, biology, and human anatomy, my WAG is that humans figured out pretty much all the possible ways to get their freak on fairly early in our history.
Tastes (heh) in sex exotica vary by culture and time. Nobody had a latex fetish before latex outfits existed. It’s interesting to read Sacher-Masoch and de Sade from the perspective of noting which relationships/acts/objects/clothes they represent as erotic, and which are missing for either historical reasons or personal preference.
Yes, that was my implicit idea.
Thanks Tibby, this is exactly what I had in mind.
Should really stop revealing the xenophobic BS you read.
I don’t want to zombify an old-ish thread, but I’d like to point point out that among his contemporaries, Casanova was not particularly known for his sex life. He was primarily known for his spectacular escape from “The Leads”, a notorious prison in Venice, because soon after that escape he wrote a book about it that became a bestseller. The modern association of Casanova with promiscuity comes from his twelve-volume autobiography which describes his many affairs in great detail. But he wrote that autobiography very late in life, and it was published posthumously.
Yeah, I’m thinking religion would make it pretty much forbidden. A woman wanting to be satisfied? She’d be burned as a witch.
Not necessarily. In medieval Europe, it was believed that a woman had to have an orgasm in order to conceive a child (which was problematic in rape cases, but otherwise was good for the women). Most religions did not get weird about sex until the colonial era, when Christians and Muslims started trying to outdo each other in prudery.
If you ever decide to read his memoir, be warned: Most historians say that, when he is gossiping about other people, he is generally very honest and accurate. But don’t believe a word he says about himself.
Last time I checked, since at least the time of Maimonides, a Jewish woman had the right to divorce her husband if he wasn’t giving her enough sex. I’d consult the relevant page in Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy, but it’s packed up at the moment. I also cite Boychiks In The Hood- Travels In The Hasidic Underground. When asked if they are only allowed to have sex through a hole in a sheet, several rabbis laugh. One says “Our business is to give our wives pleasure!”
The aspect of sexual activity we can count on being the same now as it was going very far back in time is that when asked about their sexual activities people tend to lie. What lies they tell may change over time, hundreds or even thousands of years sometimes, or just until tomorrow depending on who they’re trying to impress.
The Grimm dictionary, the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language (it dates back to 1838 and was edited by the same Grimm brothers who also compiled the collection of fairytales) contains an entry for vögeln, a very vulgar German slang term for having sex. The entry lists, among other citations of literary use, an example from 1559 which reads: “wie werden die losen hůren so wol auf hartem stro gefoglet und wir frommen weyber so ubel und selten auf gůten betten”. This is a complaint (written in 16th century German spelling) made by married woman who consider it unfair that they, despite being righteous wives, get screwed so badly and so rarely on proper beds, whereas loose whores get it done to them so well on hard straw.
Which is just an anecdote I’m throwing in to say that, yes, the notion that a married woman can legitimately expect a minimum frequency and quality of sex from her husband is a very old one.
Plus, our modern idea of witch hunts in European history is heavily distorted compared to the historical truth. Intense witch trials were limited to a few centuries in the very late middle ages and early modern era, the number of people (mostly, but not exclusively, women) relative to the overall population was small (although absolute numbers were large), and by far not all trials ended in death sentences. It’s a modern myth to believe that, for much of European history, women were living under a constant risk of being accused of withcraft.
This was all covered in the stories of R.A. Heinlein.
They did, however, know about using the Cyprian scepter and the aphrodisaical tennis court to engage in gamahuche, caudle-making, ride below the crupper, board a land carrack, play at rumpscuttle and clapperdepouch, and many, many other idiomatic expressions for sex acts.
[ETA: Whoops, I’m a year rather than a week out of date in replying to this post, gotta read post timestamps better.]