Dildos! Dildos! Dildos!
Dildos! Dildos! Dildos! Taylor Weidman/Courtesy of Getty Images
Last night while walking through Mari Nagaoka's show during the Capitol Hill Art Walk, there was an item that I kept returning to, thinking about, in one of their carefully and intimately rendered drawings. I even mentioned it in the preview I wrote of the show. The object of my focus was the dildo firmly planted on a copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, next to a metal weed grinder in this painting. Maybe it was the way Nagaoka brought dignity to an object that can often look a little garish, a little veiny, like a disembodied body part—which I guess it is.

It brought to mind my bright magenta dildo that I chose in a moment of panic, as it was the only color outside of black and "flesh" and, not wanting to make a statement about race or feel like I was "choosing sides" regarding my own identity, I bought the alien penis over Caucasian and African-American penis. The neurosis is distinctly my own though.

My thoughts then drifted to the history of the dildo. This object isn't a creation of some sort of relatively modern sexuality, but one of the oldest tools—yes TOOLS—that people kept near and close for centuries. We've been fucking ourselves since forever. We've been getting fucked by these things for just as long.


Take this phallus for example: it was found in the Hohle Fels Cave near Ulm in Germany in 2005. The BBC reported that it's made of siltstone and is dated to be around 28,000 years old in the Upper Paleolithic period. Fuck me.

It should be noted that scientists think this ancient dildo could have also been used not for the slobbering vaginas and/or anuses of our Ice Age ancestors, but maybe for shaping flints. I mean—why not both? I know we have all had fantasies of the erotic possibles of electric toothbrushes, shower heads, cucumbers, pies, etc. It feels good knowing that the pervs who came before us did too.