Popular mythology has it that Crusaders who were leaving to fight the Pope’s wars in the 1100s would lock chastity belts on their female partners to assure the women would remain true. No such devices ever existed. Male Renaissance poets in the 16th Century talked about their female lovers wearing chastity belts as a way of saying “let us be true to each other,” not that any of the poets offered up a male version of the chastity belt. The first real chastity belts were created during the 1800s as crude devices to keep boys and girls from masturbating. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when women were beginning to enter the work force and sexual harassment was an even more serious problem than in the 1900s, some women may have devised chastity belts to help keep them from being raped or molested while in the workplace. The most popular use of chastity belts throughout history is today in the BDSM community.