10 Historical Masturbation Techniques

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French aristocrat and all-around libertine pervert, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), is the godfather of sadomasochism. Beyond his BDSM proclivities and love of sodomy, the Marquis De Sade engaged in the sort of strange, fetishistic, and degenerate sexual techniques that would only make it into our most hardcore pornography. Once considered insane and put in mental institutions for 30 years, the Marquis de Sade has now become a sexual hero. One of his most infamous stories (and something he was arrested for) was the story of the him masturbating into a chalice in front of a prostitute while antagonizing God. The sperm was supposed to be like the semen of Christ. He also put communion wafers in the prostitute's genitalia, and is known for masturbating crucifixes.

Consider this: There was God, or a god, and that god was totally alone. One day, he managed to create the birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees, and sexed-up humans in his own image. This story isn’t just a Judeo-Christian one. Lots of ancient religions and cultures subscribe to something similar. The best (and honestly the most logical) was that our world was created by a lone god masturbating the rest of the world into existence. In Egyptian mythology, that god is Atum. Some stories say that Atum was a serpent (phallic symbol) in the river of Nun (which stands for Nothing). He contained both female and male qualities, therefore making him hermaphroditic. After masturbating, Atum created Shu and Tefnut who are the grandparents of Isis and Osiris. Atum managed to create the world without an Eve and he still messed it up. According to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Atum will take back his masturbation progeny and drown everything in the waters of Nun. He sounds a little bitter. 

Masturbation was historically considered to be an ancient symbol of abundance. While some cultures and religions viewed semen as something to hold in, many cultures saw masturbation as a way to summon agricultural fecundity. Ancient Middle Eastern pagans would engage in orgiastic mutual masturbation sessions during the harvest. The key was to ejaculate at the same time, therefore summoning beneficent energies from the gods of life and land. Although pagans deem sex as a sacred act, using auto-eroticism as a form of alchemy to bolster sex magic was totally natural.

Although Islam might consider masturbation a terrible sin, the masturbatory art of Jelqing supposedly originated in the ancient Middle East. (No wonder it's called the Fertile Crescent.) This form of masturbation was used for penis enlargement. Jelqing is basically an aggressive form of manual fluffing. It's also kind of dangerous and can apparently lead to “pain, irritation, scar formation, and blood vessel tears. That risk is increased if the penis is hard. Maybe the jelqers back in the day had warrior-style genitalia that could withstand hard pulling. Or maybe jelqers just had better technique. Either way, unless you’re a Zoroastrian prince, don’t try this one at home. 

Some ancient Greeks thought that both men and women had to ejaculate in order for a child to be born, so women were encouraged to masturbate. In Taoism, sex should only take place if a woman is aroused, therefore making masturbation somewhat necessary. Similarly, Renaissance artists often depicted women with sex toys and in provocative sexual positions to emphasize fertility.

In Taoism, “single cultivation” occurs when a man masturbates, and instead of ejaculating his “jing,” his maleness is converted to “qi” (energy), and then absorbed into the spine and turned into “shen” (spiritual power). Masturbation with ejaculation is seen as something that will weaken the man, especially the kidneys which are considered the center of spiritual energy. A man could also “reverse orgasm,” which could be totally dangerous and cause infertility and other issues if semen is redirected to the urinary bladder. Usually this occurs with a medical issue, but Taoists have learned that stimulating the perineum with tons of pressure can make it seem like you didn’t orgasm at all. The ejaculate just comes out in your urine. Other philosophies that encourage orgasms without ejaculation for the sake of energy conservation are Karezza and certain kinds of Tantric masturbation. 

The Latin etymology of the word masturbate references “defilement,” “dishonor,” and, of course, the “hand.” Despite all that, the ancient Romans were kind of nonchalant and even joked about masturbation. Ancient Pompeii graffiti read “when my worries oppress by body, with my left hand, I release my pent up fluids.” That’s because if an ancient Roman was going to masturbate and not just take a pale-skinned, red-lipped slave boy, he’d do it with his left hand. The left hand was considered the “sinister” hand, but intellectuals like Ovid, Pliny, and others, knew that the left hand was “a mistress in Venus” and a good metaphor for self-love and self-stimulation. 

Bees in the trap? More like bees chillin’ in Cleopatra’s vibrator. Apparently, the Egyptian queen, revered and plundered by many men, had a vibrator circa 54 B.C. that was basically an empty gourd full of bees. There is no physical evidence of this sweet sex toy, but Cleopatra was known as a sex fiend. It's important to note that she died from the bite of an asp, and snakes were also once used as makeshift vibrators as well. Obviously, vibrators have evolved over the centuries. There was the Victorian hand-crank of the 1890s, a steam-powered contraption named “The Manipulator” made by an American doctor, another steam-powered one named the Chattanooga that was so powerful two men had to operate it. There was also an electromechanical vibrator made first by Dr. Granville to help with Victorian "hysteria." They were sold to women in catalogs like Sears as “blood stimulators” and more. All these would have made Cleopatra and her bees blush. 

For a few centuries (namely those buffered by the end of the Edwardian and Victorian eras), the repression of sexuality led to warped views on the female libido. Even female doctors at the time, such as Dr. Elizabath Blackwell, admonished masturbation. When male doctors discovered that the clitoris was the main cause of female “sensations," some doctors even went as far as to try to remove the offensive little button of pleasure. Ovaries were removed to prevent nymphomania. The kindest of the doctors used techniques on their patients to treat them for “hysteria,” which was seen as a psychological illness that taunted bored, rich, and sexually deprived women. In order to “cure” them of their hysteria, Victorian doctors would often masturbate their female patients using vaginal massage to bring them to a state of “hysterical paroxysm.” Sometimes this “la titillation du clitoris” is attributed to, of course, a kinky French physician named Pierre Briquet. Today that term is commonly known as “orgasm.” 

Homo sapiens have crafted tools for all sorts of things, including the wheel. It’s been said that there’s no sex in violence, but ancient Upper Paleolithic man’s sex batons, or dildos, were probably something created after someone used a similarly shaped weapon for sexual pleasure. While archaeologists have tried to ignore the obvious usage of most dildos, the oldest dildo ever found was from that era 30,000 years ago and unearthed in Germany.  The kinky ancient Greeks were renowned for their sex parties, orgies, and gender-neutral debauchery, so artifacts from their culture include handcrafted cocks galore, including the olisbokollikes which were used in the 5th century B.C. These creations can be seen in Greek vase art, generally in solitary or female-oriented scenes. Dildos were talked about profusely in plays and literary works like Lysistrata, Thoomas Nashe’s The Choice of Valentines, John Wilmot’s 1673 Signor Dildo. Chinese women even used lacquered wood dildos in the 15th century.