From unripe bananas to dried camel dung coated in resin - people in ancient Greece and Egypt turned out to be creative in finding sexual aids. Alternative materials used to carve dildos included stone, leather or wood. The world's first (discovered) dildo was found in Germany and dates back 28,000 years. The 20 cm long stone object was not only used as a sex toy, but also to ignite fire.

The term dildo came up about 1400 AD, and comes from the Latin word "dilatare", which means "to open wide" and the Italian word "diletto", meaning "delight." During the Italian Renaissance approximately 100 years later, sexual aids were typically made of leather and were used with olive oil as a lubricant. It might sound like a lot of fun, but it was not at all about that, as history has it.

For a long time, sexual intercourse equated to penetration until the man achieved orgasm. This male-centered worldview ignored that penetration alone is not satisfying for women and quite insufficient in bringing them to orgasm. Men's strategy? Labeling female desire a disease - "hysteria" - and prescribing treatment: marital sex, water jet therapy or horse rides.

The hysteria "illness" was a pandemic: it was cited as the most common disease across the ages, only sometimes overtaken by fevers. And where do you go when you are ill? Doctors or midwives would also conduct genital massages to "cure" hysteria - in a time when masturbation was forbidden. As no one really wanted to use their fingers on female genitalia, the invention of "medical aids" accelerated.

Rich women particularly would regularly return to be "treated" for their "disease." Doctors soon realized the need to make treatment more efficient (read: treat more patients = make more money). It was in Victorian England that Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator in the 1880s. With inventions like his, female orgasm could be reached within 10 minutes.

At the turn of the 20th century, companies were producing vibrators for personal use. Next to tea kettles, bread toasters and sewing machines, ads in women's magazines promoted them as "health aids." Doctors were not at all in diletto of this development. Critics feared women might not need men to have orgasms anymore. Turns out, men don't need women for that either.

The vibrator lost its innocence as a socially camouflaged health aid during the 1920s when it was used as a sex toy in porn. The 1950s famous Kinsey study on sexuality proved what women had known for centuries, something that then was undeniable: that more than 70 percent of women don't orgasm purely through penetration. This gave vibrators new ad strategies, promising 50 orgasms in a row.