Imagine, if you will, the bustling salons and smoky parlors of 19th-century France. Amidst the clinking of champagne glasses and whispered scandals of the aristocracy, one figure stood out, not for her noble blood or razor wit, but for her extraordinary contribution to female sexuality.
This, dear reader, is the tale of Béatrice Dildoux.
Born into privilege, she might have spent her life drifting between garden parties and idle diversions, but even from an early childhood, Béatrice had a singular obsession. A nun once wrote: “Young Béatrice was caned across the backside again and ordered to recite the Lord’s Prayer a hundred times. Twice this month, she’s been caught urging boys to expose themselves.” Her mother lamented, “I found page after page of parchment in her room, covered in crude sketches of genitals. She is, it seems, single-mindedly obsessed with penis.”
Despite this precocity, Béatrice remained a shy, quiet girl. “She rarely speaks,” noted one teacher, “but when she does, trousers inevitably come down.”
French historian Emmanuel Dupont argues she exhibited the classic signs of Asperger’s syndrome, “She displayed little interest in conventional friendships, no sense of small talk, and an almost mechanical devotion to cataloguing male anatomy,” Dupont wrote. “Today she would be described as neurodivergent; in her time, she was merely considered odd, eccentric, and inconvenient to polite society.”
By all accounts, Béatrice's fascination with male genitalia did not extend to the men who had them. In Béatrice's diary, she wrote in her own words, “I wish only that the manhood might remain, but the man himself not. They speak too much, and they smell, often carrying ideas in their head that I do not care for.”
By her twenties, she found an outlet that would soon change the world. Harnessing the new science of natural rubber, she began crafting precise recreations of a male’s penis—ostensibly for “anatomical study.” These modèles anatomiques, however, found their way not to libraries or universities, but to the boudoirs of lonely wives of soldiers away during the Franco-Prussian War.
By 1875, demand was so great that Béatrice opened a boutique in Paris, shipping models across Europe. Contemporary wits could not resist taking a jab. Voltaire quipped: “If they arrested Dildoux, the women would mount another revolution, shouting ‘Off with their little heads!’”
Predictably, the ruling class was scandalized. Napoleon III himself, humiliated when his mistress the Countess of Castiglione was discovered “finishing the job” with a Dildoux, denounced the enterprise as “an affront to the moral fiber of France.”
Among women, however, her creations were revered. “Every Parisian woman has a little Béatrice Dildoux in her,” claimed one prostitute. “And some men, too. I don’t judge. A franc is a franc.”
Béatrice, restless, kept innovating. By 1879 she expanded her range: leatherworkers devised harnesses, German engineers drafted manual “thrusting machines” and even a steam-powered device, while sculptors produced fantastical phalluses inspired by Kraken tentacles, dragon curves, and werewolf knots. All, naturally, still marketed as “for anatomical study.”
Legends soon spun out of control. Some swore she voyaged abroad, seducing mythical beasts to take their molds.
In the novel 120 days of Dildoux by infamous author and prolific pervert Marquis De Sade, the Marquis wrote, "With a sword in one hand, point pricking the throat of the mighty Sphinx, the beast's forked cock in the other, she worked the monster into a frenzy then f-cked the living sh-t out of him with her wanton c-nt"
"Well-endowed Men from all over the world would arrive on her doorstep and expose themselves, expecting her to take on the challenge." said Emmanuelle, "She was, after all, the woman who bested the minotaur."
In truth, Béatrice rarely left her study. She busied herself with her business and increasingly experimental erotica. Her stories—what little remains of them—were, by all accounts, revolutionary. In much the same way the Ukiyo-e print "the fisherman's wife" gave way to Japanese tentacle erotica, Dildoux's homoerotic tales of anthropomorphic wolfmen and dogboys, penned in elegant prose, is often attributed as the origin of the furry erotica.
Her story, however, ended tragically in 1887 while attempting to cast the anatomy of a 2,150-pound Shire horse. Overstimulated and suspended by an overworked harness, the beast broke free and fell on top of her, madly thrusting to completion.
Her death would later be ruled as a drowning.
In the years that followed, most of her manuscripts were regrettably consigned to the flames by her own estate, and the authorities moved swiftly to shutter her boutique. Time itself proved no kinder, for the natural rubber of her models has long since degraded and crumbled away, leaving scarcely a trace of her once-thriving enterprise. Yet her name endures, softened and anglicised into the familiar term “dildo.”
One notorious specimen is known to have escaped destruction, however: The Dragon’s Embrace. Said to have once belonged to Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln, it now resides—discreetly catalogued though seldom exhibited—within the Smithsonian Institute.
I really don’t know what’s better. The audio for this or the comment section.
Love this piece! But I have to ask—did Beatrice Dildeaux have any dealings with Philippe de Brassiere before the whole Otto Tizling patent fiasco? The historical implications are huge.