The ancient sex toys made from goat eyelids
Sex really is the great equaliser in our history.
At first, you might look at the vast history of ancient humans doing weird sex stuff with whatever they had to hand, sneer dismissively and think that nothing more conclusively proves how far we’ve progressed. After all, who would be comfortable wearing a condom made out of pig intestines or jacking off to a particularly bawdy poem? That is entirely beneath us, you might think. Only on the surface, though, because deep down, you must know that the only thing that’s changed since then is our options.
All it takes is a cursory glance at the headlines about what people are doing with their AI chatbots and curiously shaped fleshlights to know that, really, nothing has changed. The vast, vast majority of us are just as driven by getting off as we ever were. If we were unlucky enough to be born thousands and thousands of years before the present day (and yes, before you say anything, that would be the unlucky option for basically anyone), we would still do anything we could with whatever we had to hand.
Yet still, with all the understanding I can muster, I still can’t really get why someone looked at a set of dismembered goat eyelids and thought, “I’ve got the perfect place to put you.”
That’s right, while some people think being a historian is a dry, stuffy and boring job, there are some historians who get paid a decent wage to dig up a bunch of artefacts, dust them off, and come to the conclusion that people used dismembered goat eyelids as cock rings.
These discoveries come from 12th-century China, otherwise known as the Second Jin Dynasty. As you can imagine, this was a patriarchal culture when wealthy men were encouraged not just to take a wife, but several concubines too and have as many kids as possible with all of them. Again, I can’t stress enough how being born in the past is the unlucky option for the vast majority of people. Thus, male sexual aids were fairly commonplace. Gotta keep that performance up somehow as the years overtake you.
One of the most commonplace was cock rings made out of the particularly elastic eyelid of a goat, in many cases with the beast’s long eyelashes still intact. An addition that many historians speculate is for the woman’s pleasure. Again, some people think that being a historian doesn’t rule all the time, and I fundamentally don’t understand those people.
What’s more, there’s actually reason to believe that these aren’t the first cock rings used by humans, just the first discovered. The famously horny folks of ancient Greece have depicted a number of men in their art whose cocks are adorned with something very much not there since birth (we hope), so perhaps Chinese men of the 12th-century were simply copying the behaviours of others.
One way or another, we know for a fact that this isn’t “backwards” or “uncivilised” behaviour because, and I really hope you’ve finished your lunch when you read this, you can still buy goat eyelids that have been treated for this kind of use. It’s apparently dead easy, just soak them in water for about ten minutes to make them extra stretchy, then away you go.
Honestly? Ten minutes spent on the wrong side of Reddit and 4chan will show much, much worse things than a sex toy made from part of an animal. Perhaps there is a cultural regression in the attitudes towards sex between 12th-century China and the present day, just not in the way you might assume there is.
