IT’S ‘SEX AND THE CITY’ 1.0
Revealed: Surprising truth behind ancient Kamasutra
FOR more than a century, we’ve thought of the Sanskrit text the Kamasutra mainly as an illustrated guide to improbably gymnastic sex — frisky moves of the kind that Cosmopolitan magazine gave such nicknames as “the backstairs boogie,” “the octopus” and “the spider web.” But the naughty imagery is a small part of the book: It turns out that the world’s most famous sex manual is more about bending your mind than your limbs.
The Kamasutra, written in the third century by the Hindu philosopher Vatsayana, was so far ahead of its time that even hundreds of years later, its words carried far too many sexually revolutionary ideas — frank, genderfluid, unabashedly celebratory of the sensuous — for it to appear uncensored before the public eye. The Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton brought the text to the West’s attention with his 1883 translation, although due to obscenity laws, the book was not legally published in either the UK or the US until 1962. Some of the sex-positive aspects of the book were missed or toned down by Burton.
“The world of the Kamasutra is a fantasized world of sex that is in many ways the prototype for Hugh Hefner’s glossy Playboy empire,” writes University of Chicago history-of-religions Professor Wendy Doniger in her new book, “Redeeming the Kamasutra.” Nor, in its single-girl-about-town sections, would it be unfamiliar to Carrie Bradshaw of “Sex and the City.” Its seduction advice even anticipated the player’s handbook “The Game” — a guy is advised to have a wing man pretend to be a fortune teller and tell the target lady’s mom how blessed with auspicious signs the suitor is.
In the Kamasutra — which might be translated as “The Rules of Desire” — homosexuality and even transgenderism are all part of the fun, female sexual pleasure and oral sex meet with approval, sex toys for women (including vegetables and small statues) are lauded, and the author seems to be aware of the G-spot, which in some cultures remains mysterious even today.
THE young buck who emerges as the book’s masculine ideal is almost a parody of the wellheeled urban swell whose only job is having fun: He spends the day watching cockfights, playing games, posing in salons, napping and singing, all as buildup to the evening when “he and his friends await the women who are slipping out for a rendezvous with them.” When it’s business time, “he puts her at ease and offers her another drink. He sits down on her right side and touches her hair, the fringe of her sari and the knot of her waistband. He embraces her gently with his left arm to prepare to make love. They talk about things they have done together before, joking and titillating, touching upon all sorts of things hidden and obscene.”
As in Playboy magazine, though, there is unease beneath the surface of this metrosexual who daintily colors his lips. Wherever there are men, there is alarm about penis size. A sur- gical method the book cheerfully recommends is piercing a young man’s member and enlarging it “by putting larger and larger spears of reeds and ivory-tree wood in it.” Excuse me, I have to faint now.
The rake’s feminine counterpart, though, is a self-actualized girl on the make. The Kamasutra celebrates flirtation: Women “might feel a guilty pang of familiarity when reading the passage suggesting that a woman interested in getting a man’s attention in a crowded room might find some pretext to take something from him, making sure to brush him with her breast as she reaches across him,” writes Doniger.
And the book backs the idea that sex is not merely for procreation, pointing out that humans are the rare species that have sex even when the female is not in a fertile period. “The Kamasutra is for women,” Doniger declares flatly. “It was intended to be used by women, and has much to offer women even today.” One section advises maidens on how to catch a husband, while another tells wives how to keep their men happy. Female orgasms are described in awed detail, and the text notes that in sex, the woman’s climax should happen first.
The woman-on-top sex position, referred to in predecessor texts as “perverse” or “topsy turvy,” is described in the Kamasutra without sneering as an instance when a woman decides “to play the man’s role,” a method that “unveils her own feelings completely