History’s favourite sex toys
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Jack McLennan was 27, fit and visibly strong. He was trained well. He knew how to hit and I was gobsmacked. He seemed ready for anything, but then he suddenly vanished. I was just talking to him last night, like, how the hell does that happen? I'm Rob Bergen. Join me as I investigate what became of Jack in the new season of Unravel.
There has to be something more nefarious going on.
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It's 1992, and two archaeologists are digging in a second-century fort ditch in Northumberland.
It's a Roman fort called Vindolanda, and it's in the north of England, and it's where the Romans hung out near Hadrian's Wall, and they had big defences, and it's a big... It's like our Pompeii, basically, except, you know, we didn't have the volcano.
And they're finding all kinds of stuff. Shoes, clothing, tools. And then they unearth an artefact that looked, well, different but also familiar.
There was an item that was excavated that got categorised as a darning tool. So something as an aid to sewing, somehow. Yeah, so if you were to look at this thing, you would immediately realise that it was no sewing tool. That doesn't look like something that any woman is using to mend socks with anything.
No, but she might have been using it for something else. My name is Mark Fennell, and be warned, this is a very fun and very adults-only story of how a series of mysterious artefacts have changed our perception of our ancestors' sex lives, starting with the Roman object, which was no tool for darning. In fact, to those male archaeologists, that tool was very familiar.
They are very serious academics. They couldn't just publish a paper that went, look, it looks like a dick. So it's clearly a dildo.
Which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, no one saw it coming.
There's so much work being done at the moment about the emotional labour that women do, the unseen labour that women do at home and in the workplace. And I'm here to remind us that we are doing it in the bedroom as well and that we really, really need to stop doing it. So I wanted to understand where that comes from. Why has that happened?
So I get really irritated by this. So this is the incredibly talented and, yes, somewhat irritated Dr Kate Lister.
I am a historian of sex and sexuality and I spend most of my time rooting around in the pants of history and then telling people what I find in there.
Which brings us to the case of that Roman artefact, shaped like a member on one end and culminating with a sort of round handle on the other end. Now, initially, when it was dug up, yes, they did assume that it was the sort of shape you could, like, wrap a sock over and therefore maybe was used for darning socks. But a few decades later... Two experts, weirdly, two guys named Rob, were less convinced of that likelihood.
And when, oh, hang on, you're the officer. Did you do that one more time for me? They kind of gave each other the side eye and just went, oh, no. If you look at it, you can understand the confusion. It kind of depends what way you hold it, right?
True.
What ancient artifact sparked the discussion about sex toys?
Because from the thin end of it, yes, it very clearly looks like the tip of a penis. But if you flip it the other way, it kind of looks like a... Club. The cliche of it. Yeah, like a caveman club.
That bottom bit that you're talking about that looks like a club, they argue that... that you can't stand it up because that bottom bit is rounded. So you can't balance. So it's not an ornamental penis. You can't do anything with it. Which is a thing, right? That's a thing.
Ornamental penises were a thing in the Roman times.
They loved an ornamental penis, Mark. They absolutely loved it. If you've ever been to Pompeii, it's just wall-to-wall cock. It's absolutely everywhere. They can't help themselves. They're on the floor. They're on the walls. They're in bakeries. They're on houses. They just love them. Most historians don't think that they were seeing something erotic.
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