Submitted this post a while ago but it was deemed too argumentative, which it was. Mostly just meant it in a goofin way. But to try and take out the /r/arguewithhistorians tone from the original post, I’m curious what academic and historical evidence there is that ancient “religious fertility symbols” like the various buxom Venus statues and ancient rome’s obsession with phallic statues that often happened to be the same size and shape as a dildo.

How much do historians actually know that sexy ancient artifacts were just props in vague “religious fertility ceremonies,” and how do they know that they weren’t just someone’s dildos or sex dolls?

And has there been much study into how much the culture of the historian at the time determines if the discovered artifact they just found is evidence of a “fertility symbol” or a “masturbation aid?” If contemporary historians were the first to discover Pompeii now, would they still be calling the hundreds (thousands?) of phallus figurines and statues and the lewd mural art “religious symbolism,” or they would be calling it “sex toys and porn?”