In Islam the artificial penis has reached nearly as high a development as in Christendom.  Turkish women use it and it is said to be openly sold in Smyrna.  In the harems of Zanzibar, according to Baumann, it is of considerable size, carved out of ebony or ivory, and commonly bored through so that warm water may be injected.  It is here regarded as an Arab invention.[194]

Somewhat similar appliances may be traced in all centres of civilization.  But throughout they appear to be frequently confined to the world of prostitutes and to those women who live on the fashionable or semi-artistic verge of that world.  Ignorance and delicacy combine with a less versatile and perverted concentration on the sexual impulse to prevent any general recourse to such highly specialized methods of solitary gratification.

On the other hand, the use, or rather abuse, of the ordinary objects and implements of daily life in obtaining auto-erotic gratification, among the ordinary population in civilized modern lands, has reached an extraordinary degree of extent and variety we can only feebly estimate by the occasional resulting mischances which come under the surgeon’s hands, because only a certain proportion of such instruments are dangerous.  Thus the banana seems to be widely used for masturbation by women, and appears to be marked out for the purpose by its size and shape[195]; it is, however, innocuous, and never comes under the surgeon’s notice; the same may probably be said of the cucumbers and other vegetables more especially used by country and factory girls in masturbation; a lady living near Vichy told Pouillet that she had often heard (and had herself been able to verify the fact) that the young peasant women commonly used turnips, carrots, and beet-roots.  In the eighteenth century Mirabeau, in his Erotikca Biblion gave a list of the various objects used in convents (which he describes as “vast theatres” of such practices) to obtain solitary sexual excitement.  In more recent years the following are a few of the objects found in the vagina or bladder whence they could only be removed by surgical interference[196]:  Pencils, sticks of sealing-wax, cotton-reels, hair-pins (and in Italy very commonly the bone-pins used in the hair), bodkins, knitting-needles, crochet-needles, needle-cases, compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, tooth-picks, toothbrushes, pomade-pots (in a case recorded by Schroeder with a cockchafer inside, a makeshift substitute for the Japanese rin-no-tama), while in one recent English case a full-sized hen’s egg was removed from the vagina of a middle-aged married woman.  More than nine-tenths of the foreign bodies found in the female bladder or urethra are due to masturbation.  The age of the individuals in whom such objects have been found is usually from 17 to 30, but in a few cases they have been found in girls below 14, infrequently in women between 40 and 50; the large objects, naturally, are found chiefly in the vagina, and in married women.[197]