Mark Fennell

Ornamental penises were a thing in the Roman times.

Particularly the ones that are in Pompeii, because I'm like, that's not good luck there.

As a cloud descends over them.

Maybe it's not lucky after all.

And when this new analysis came out, it obviously hit the headlines.

Roman world plus wooden phallus, of course, naturally equals news.

And as you can tell from Kate and I,

lots of snickering ensued.

So that Roman phallus may be Kate's holy grail of sex history, but it's far from the last dildo of antiquity.

No, no, no.

As Kate has strung together these rare objects throughout time, a picture starts to form, a history that never makes it into the textbooks, but does reveal something very central about us human beings, which brings us to our next artefact penis.

Now, this one lives in London's Science Museum today, and it is in fact made of ivory.

No, I'm going to bequeath it to the National Library.

You're also banking on next generations becoming more progressive and less shameful, though, as well.

Now, it's tempting to think of sexual liberation and self-pleasure as quite a modern thing, but really, when you stop and think about it for a second, of course people have been doing this forever.

But as times change, so do societies and beliefs and values and morals.

Now, masturbation, believe it or not, for a long time was seen as a sin.

And in 18th century Britain, for example, self-pleasure became public enemy number one because of something so simple and so unassuming.

A piece of paper.

Yeah.