Written by Alicia Deroussen, founder of Adopt1Toy — no-taboo advice, delivered with kindness.
A few years ago, I received a supplier shipment with a small book about the history of eroticism tucked inside. I opened it out of curiosity one evening and didn't close it again until 2 a.m. What I discovered blew my mind: humans made objects intended for pleasure long before inventing writing, the wheel, or pretty much anything else taught in school. Thirty thousand years of ingenuity in the service of pleasure. Not bad for a species often described as prudish.
Since then, I've dug deeper. From archaeological museums to Victorian medical archives, passing through America's first feminist shops in the 1970s — I reconstructed the timeline no one teaches you in history class. And since I spent eight years selling sex toys and listening to my customers' questions, I had an extra reason to understand where these objects we love so much came from, and why they still fascinate us.
The Prehistory of Pleasure: When Our Ancestors Carved Their Desires
The oldest known phallus to date was discovered in Hohle Fels Cave, Germany. Carved from red deer antler around 28,000 years ago, it measures 20 centimeters. Archaeologists initially tried to interpret it as a percussion tool or ritual accessory — academic prudishness dies hard. But the object's shape, dimensions, and careful polishing eventually spoke for themselves.
In ancient Egypt, resin and wooden phalluses were found in women's tombs — perhaps a way to ensure pleasure in the afterlife. The Greeks, meanwhile, made olisboi from tanned leather or baked bread, coating them with olive oil. They appear in depictions on Attic vases, often with unmistakable irony — the Greeks didn't take sexuality seriously in the moral sense of the term; they treated it with the frankness of people who had not yet invented Judeo-Christian guilt.
In Rome, bronze or terracotta phalluses served a dual purpose: objects of pleasure and protective amulets against the evil eye. People wore them as pendants and hung them on the doors of their homes. The erect penis was a symbol of fertility and good fortune, not shame. A radically different worldview from what was to come.
The Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Pleasure in Secret
With the rise of Christianity in Europe, pleasure objects didn't disappear — they went into hiding. Medieval archives (those that survived the bonfires) mention wax, wooden, and sometimes ivory dildos circulating discreetly among women of the wealthier classes. The Church condemned them, ecclesiastical courts confiscated them, and yet they persisted.
The Renaissance brings a little color back to the picture. Aretino, the sixteenth-century Italian libertine writer, describes in his Ragionamenti women using leather phalluses with a nonchalance that would still make some YouTube commenters blush today. In China and Japan, erotic texts and prints from the same period show objects designed for female and male masturbation, made from lacquer, jade, or horn.
What stands out when you read all this is that human desire has never waited for moral permission to organize itself. It simply worked around obstacles with varying degrees of elegance.
The Nineteenth Century: When Medicine Took Possession of Female Pleasure
This is the chapter in the history of sex toys that I love telling in the shop because it reveals something quite astonishing about how society treated women's bodies for so long.
In the nineteenth century, doctors commonly diagnosed women with an affliction called “hysteria” — a catch-all term for any nervous condition, agitation, melancholy, or behavior considered deviant. The prescribed treatment? A “pelvic massage” performed by the doctor until “hysterical paroxysm” (in plain English: an orgasm). It wasn't considered sexual — female sexuality was officially nonexistent according to Victorian medicine. It was therapeutic.
The problem was that it was time-consuming, exhausting for doctors, and in high demand. Hence the invention, around 1880, of the first steam-powered mechanical vibrators, followed by electric ones. Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville is often cited as the inventor of the electric vibrator, although the history is more complex and contested. These medical devices, marketed in mainstream catalogs as massage appliances, sold very well. They appeared between mixers and fans in advertisements of the time.
It wasn't until the 1920s, when vibrators began appearing in erotic films, that the connection with sexuality became impossible to deny — and their sale disappeared from mainstream catalogs for several decades. Morality had caught up with technology.
The 1960s–70s: The Revolution That Changed Everything
The real turning point, the one that leads directly to what we sell at Adopt1Toy today, took place in the 1960s and 70s in the United States and Europe. Three factors converged:
- The contraceptive pill (1960 in the USA, 1967 in France) officially separated sexuality from reproduction — fundamentally changing how women thought about their own pleasure.
- Second-wave feminism explicitly claimed the right to female pleasure as a form of political emancipation. Anne Koedt published “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” in 1970 — a text that placed the clitoris at the center of public debate.
- The first feminist sex shops appeared: Eve's Garden in New York in 1974 and Good Vibrations in San Francisco in 1977. These stores, run by women for women, radically changed the setting — this was no longer the shameful business of male pornography, but open and unapologetic sex education.
It was in this context that the Rabbit — the dual-stimulation vibrator — appeared in Japan in the 1980s before conquering the Western world in the 1990s (notably thanks to an episode of Sex and the City that many of you probably know). The market exploded. Materials evolved: hard plastic gave way to medical-grade silicone, which is safer and more pleasant.
The 2000s–2010s: Design, Quietness, and Silicone
The great revolution of those years was aesthetics. Jimmy Jane, Lelo, We-Vibe: brands that decided sex toys could be beautiful and discreet, packaged like luxury jewelry. Packaging changed, communication changed, and above all — design changed.
Medical-grade silicone became the gold standard: nonporous, easy to disinfect, soft to the touch, and compatible with every body. Vibrations became more refined thanks to high-frequency motors. People began talking about “Swedish motors” the way they talk about BMW engines — with a genuine product culture. Quietness improved too: the vibrator that hummed like a 1990s lawnmower gave way to virtually silent devices.
This was also the era when BDSM gradually emerged from the underground — kink culture found a place in the media, at festivals, and in specialty stores. Metal handcuffs, whips, and harnesses entered the shelves of sex shops that were being renovated and embracing their identity.
And then there was pulsed-air clitoral stimulation. Womanizer launched its first model in 2014 and literally triggered an earthquake in the industry. Air-vacuum technology had existed for a long time in other fields — applying it to the clitoris was an obvious idea that no one had taken so far. Customer feedback was immediate and massive. I still remember it in the shop: people came back saying, “it's different from anything I've ever tried.”
The Connected Decade: Sex Toys, Apps, and Long-Distance Intimacy
Since around 2015, a new frontier has opened up: the connected sex toy. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile apps — it's now possible to control a vibrator from the other side of the world. For long-distance couples, it's a tangible revolution in their intimate lives. For solo practitioners, it offers fine-tuned personalization of vibration patterns that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier.
In my catalog, for example, I have Oninder's Bogotá connected silicone vibrating dildo — 9 modes, a free worldwide app, controllable from anywhere. Or the Anne's Desire remote-controlled Rabbit with Watchme technology, which allows control without a direct Bluetooth connection — practical in public places for those who enjoy playing with boundaries. These products would have seemed like science fiction to the Victorian women who “treated their hysteria” at the doctor's office.
Artificial intelligence is also beginning to make an appearance: devices that learn their user's preferences and adapt patterns in real time. We're only at the beginning, but the direction is clear.
What This History Says About Us
This long journey through time reveals something quite simple: human desire is constant, universal, and indestructible. Neither bonfires, nor moralizing medicine, nor prudish advertising have managed to make the need for pleasure disappear — they have merely forced it to hide or disguise itself for a while.
What has changed, however, is women's ability to name their pleasure, claim it, and make it a priority. The history of sex toys is, indirectly, a history of feminism: every era in which women gain power over their bodies corresponds to an era in which pleasure objects gain visibility and sophistication.
I love how this perspective changes the way I run my shop. When a customer comes in for the first time, a little intimidated, I sometimes think of all those women — Greek, Victorian, and American women of the 1970s — who experienced the same desire in much more hostile circumstances. And I tell myself we're very lucky to live in an era when we can simply... choose what we like, buy it discreetly online, and try it without anyone else having anything to say.
Thirty thousand years to get here. Not bad, in the end.
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