A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, according to the Australian journalist and politician Irina Dunn, riffing on “Man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Well OK, maybe a woman doesn’t need a man as such, but surely she needs something to at least substitute for a man; more specifically, she needs something like a man’s penis inside her. I mean, everyone knows (everyone, that is, who has checked out porn websites) that all lesbians use toys to get off. Without a man, they have to make do with the next best thing, that new invention called the dildo.

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I jest. I have been told on personal authority (and five minutes googling “lesbian dildo” confirms) that while some lesbians (and, gasp, straight women) use dildos for their own pleasure, most don’t. Porn sites showing women thrusting dildos into their vaginas are designed to fulfill men’s fantasies, not women’s. No surprise there.

Batteries not included. (Tübingen University)

As far as the “new invention” goes, this polished stone schlong found in the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm, Germany about ten years ago is 28,000 years old. Until this unmistakably realistic eight-inch penis was found, archeologists often euphemistically labeled similar (but not quite as realistic) relics as “batons.” It’s still somewhat unusual—many stone age female statuettes have been found, male not so many.

You won’t go far checking out dildos from a historical perspective without encountering Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” written about 411 BC. The eponymous heroine engages on a personal mission to end the Peloponnesian War by persuading women on both sides to withhold sex from their men until the war ends. Here she is encouraging the sisterhood to keep up their peacemaking task (translation by George Theodoridis):

Lysistrata: Tell me, please, all of you: Do you not miss your husband’s pricks? Your sons’ father? I mean while he’s away at war? I know very well that all of you have your husband away at the moment. Not one of them is here with you. Isn’t that so?

Caloniki: Mine, in fact, the poor bugger, has been in Thrace for the last five months. Guarding that idiot of a general, Eucrates.

Myrrhini: And mine, seven months at Pylos.

Lampito: And if mine ever manages to steal away for a quickie, they rush over, nab him by the handle and quickly whisk him away back to the front!

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…

GOU 37-4 1896 illustration (Aubrey Beardsley)

So was Aristophanes just going along with the tired old trope that women need penetration to be fulfilled? Or was he just as clueless about female sexuality as guys are today?

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Barry Evans gave the best years of his life to civil engineering, and what thanks did he get? In his dotage, he travels, kayaks, meditates and writes for the Journal and the Humboldt Historian. He sucks at 8 Ball. Buy his Field Notes anthologies at any local bookstore. Please.