Dildo - Dildos in Culture

Dildos in Culture

Dildos may be seen in 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' comic Mime VI, written in the 3rd Century BC, is about a woman 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 certain Kerdon, who hides his trade by the front of being a cobbler, and leaves to seek him out.

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.

In the early 1590s, the playwright Thomas Nashe wrote a poem known as The Choice of Valentines, Nashe's Dildo or The Merrie Ballad of Nashe his Dildo but this was not published at the time, due to its obscenity. The poem describes a visit to a brothel by a man called "Tomalin". However, the prostitute he hires resorts to using a dildo as he finds himself unable to perform sexually.

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, which was later set to music by Michael Nyman for the Wilmot biopic, The Libertine, 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.

Dildos are obliquely referred to in Saul Bellow's novel "The Adventures of Augie March"(1953) : "....he had brought me along to a bachelor's stag where two naked acrobatic girls did stunts with false tools". A dildo called Steely Dan III from Yokohama appears in the William S. Burroughs novel The Naked Lunch (1959). The rock band Steely Dan took their name from it.