Gwyneth Paltrow, feminine health legend and definitely not a snake oil saleswoman, says women should insert crystals into their body cavities to “increase chi, orgasms,vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general.” A big thank you to Goop! for coming up with a solution for so many problems all at once. I really hope she’s not thinking about using stibnite as it might cause a few issues if inserted incorrectly.
To be fair, she’s referring to the overpriced quartz eggs she sells via the Goop website. Lovely,smooth, rounded eggs of rose quartz and jade, ergonomically fashioned for ease of insertion. Warm them up, pop them in and start balancing your hormones. Worried it might get lost up there? Well, lucky for you, Gwyneth’s already thought of that. She’s had handy little holes drilled in the eggs through which the owner can thread dental floss to facilitate efficient removal of a particularly stubborn ovoid. That raises the possibility of the more flexible user perhaps combining the act of toning their front-bottom muscles, increasing their chi with some yoga and getting a quick floss of the pearly whites at the same time. All of this will set you back a cool basic forty five pounds sterling a pop -as it were- but what price better orgasms and clean teeth eh?
Despite the media fuss surrounding her more dubious health claims, Paltrow is simply one in a long line of people who, down the years, have advocated for the insertion of anatomically-ergonomic objects into bodily orifices, either for health or for more stimulating reasons.
For almost as long as homo sapiens has been able to grasp the concept of sex for pleasure rather than procreation, our species has been able to grasp sex toys. Stone, wood, bone, leather and animal dung (yes, really…) were all used in days gone by to fashion priapic implements. The Greeks even made them out of bread sticks, perhaps in case the user fancied a quick snack while self-stimulating.
One of the oldest known examples of a possible sex toy, a dildo made of siltstone, dates back 28,000 years and is referred to in an online science article as the “Ice Age Baton”. The phallus is a cool 20cm long and 3cm wide (and engraved with the words “Size Small, Made in England”). The enhanced size may speak to a time long gone when the male of the species was a tad more robust down there, or maybe they were just as prone to exaggeration as their modern counterparts.
I’m genuinely curious as to how the Baton came to be fashioned. Our stone age protagonist huddled by the campfire, exhausted by the exertion of shagging the Neanderthals out of existence, decides to carve his demanding mate a replica of his member out of siltstone? The scientists note that it was “polished to a high gloss”. Whether the litho-dick acquired the gloss through use or manufacture remains unclear.
Even older than litho-dick is the prosaically named Blanchard phallus, carved from a bison horn, which is a bit of a statement in itself. The Blanchard clocks in at 36,000 years old, 16,000 years older than the glorious Lascaux cave paintings in France and 8,000 years more than the baton. At 250mm long, it’s no shrinking violet and it’s hard (sorry) to see how it could realistically been used as an object of self-gratification unless the original owner was part Rhino.
To Cleopatra, the ancient Egyptian Queen, goes the honour of having invented the vibrator. Not satisfied by Julius Caesar’s gift of a gold phallus, she is said to have asked for a knob-shaped gourd to be filled with live, buzzing bees to spice things up a bit and possibly self-lubricate with organic lavender honey.
Where’s all this going? Well, ancient sex aids are fascinating stuff; Human ingenuity and all that. But the piece wasn’t really working for me until I realised that it illustrates just how far you can drift off topic when you start researching a piece. Something fascinating pops up on line and off you go down the research rabbit-hole chasing shadows that have little do with the original topic (which was going to be the physical uses that crystals have in our lives.)
I debated whether to post this or not because I couldn’t figure out how to wrap it up. Take it back to Gwyneth? Nah- she’s been flogged to death in the mainstream press. Techniques for egg insertion? Not something I was willing to try myself even in the name of research. Fast forward to a humorous overview of the vast selection of modern aids? No subtlety.
So there it is, a classic example of drilling down a bit too far and heading off the fairway into the rough, to mix a metaphor, but at least I learned about the Blanchard phallus.