Sex Toys: Luxury or Necessity

Safe alternatives for single lads and lasses.

- Purnima Atul Goyal

The history of sex toys is as old and exciting as the human civilization itself. The world’s oldest sex-toy dildo made of silt stone, and found in Germany belongs to 2600 BC.

According to some historians, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt (69-30 BC) had a habit of using gourd-shaped toy filled with bees for her sexual arousal. The luxury bronze dildo and the bronze -jade butt-plug found from the tombs of aristocrats in Yizheng and Shanghai of China are around 2000 years old.

In the middle of the 20th century, hundreds of motorized sex toys such as the electric vibrator, HollywoodVibra-Tone, Oster Stimu-lax, polar-cub etc began to be produced on commercial scale. In 1940, a beauty products-making company in the USA started selling sex toys in the name of weight-loss-accessory.

The sex toy business grew wildly in the world after the year 2000. While in India, the business of sex toys saw rapid growth only after 2010. Ten years ago, the annual trade of sex toys in India stood at just one crore rupees, with the sex toys used by women accounting for only one percent, that is, only one lakh rupees.

During the last ten years, however, the sale of sex toys in India has grown at 20 percent per annum rate to about 1500 crore rupees, in which sale of toys used by women has been more than half.

In other words, it means more and more women than men are opting for sex toys for their sexual pleasures.

However, the increasing business of sex toys in a developing country like India reveals very shocking information.

Easy accessibility to e-commerce sites and apps has led to an increase in the purchase of sex toys. Anybody can now easily buy sex toys online by hiding his or her identity. Also, during the Covid lockdown period, online buying of sex toys saw an increase.