The term marital aid is most often used to describe what are now called sex toys, products including vibrators, dildos, strap ons, and more. It has also been used more broadly to include non-prescription "sexual enhancers" that come in pill or herb form. Whether specific or general, a marital aid is meant to be something specifically to enhance sexual contact between two people.
It isn't clear when the term marital aid became common and when it went out of fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a first usage in 1969, and it can be found in common usage in newspapers throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s. When progressive and political sex shops, which had used the term as well, began appearing they had at least some role in shifting away from marital aids and toward sex toys. There are a few explanations for this shift. Firstly, they didn't want their products to be thought of as only for married heterosexual couples. Indeed many of them adopted the term sexual aids from the start. However in the 1980s as HIV/AIDS became part of the sexual lexicon sex shops dropped the aids term altogether. Some also suggested it was because an "aid" suggests that something is a crutch, and sex toys aren't meant to be replacements for anything.
