Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger

Reading the “Kamasutra”:
the strange & the familiar

The Kamasutra is the oldest extant

Hindu textbook of erotic love, y uno
of the oldest in the world. It is not, como
most people think, a book about the
positions in sexual intercourse. Es un
book about the art of living–½nding a
partner, maintaining power in a mar-
riaje, committing adultery, living as or
with a courtesan, using drugs–and al-
so about the positions in sexual inter-
curso. It was composed in Sanskrit, el
literary language of ancient India, prob-
ably sometime in the second half of the
third century of the Common Era, en
North India, perhaps in Pataliputra (cerca
the present city of Patna, in Bihar).

Wendy Doniger, a Fellow of the American Acad-
emy since 1989, is Mircea Eliade Professor of the
History of Religions at the University of Chicago
Divinity School and director of the Martin Mar-
ty Center. Among her numerous books are “Siva:
The Erotic Ascetic” (1973),“The Origins of Evil
in Hindu Mythology” (1976), “Splitting the Dif-
ference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and
India” (1999), and “The Woman Who Pretend-
ed to Be Who She Was” (2005). She has also
published a new translation of the “Kamasutra”
(with Sudhir Kakar, 2002).

© 2007 por la Academia Americana de las Artes
& Ciencias

Virtually nothing is known about the

author, Vatsyayana Mallanaga, otro
than his name and what little we learn
from the text. Nor do we know anything
about Yashodhara, who wrote the de½ni-
tive commentary in the thirteenth cen-
tury. But Vatsyayana tells us something
important about his text, a saber, that it
is a distillation of the works of a number
of authors who preceded him, autores
whose texts have not come down to us.
Vatsyayana cites them often–sometimes
in agreement, sometimes in disagree-
ment–though his own voice always
comes through, as ringmaster over the
many acts he incorporates in his sexual
circus.

The Kamasutra was therefore certain-

ly not the ½rst of its genre, nor was it
el ultimo. But the many textbooks of erot-
icism that follow it eliminate most of
the Kamasutra’s encyclopedic social
and psychological narratives and con-
centrate primarily on the sexual posi-
ciones, of which they describe many
more than are found in the Kamasutra.

Conspicuous by its absence, sin embargo,
is what Europeans call the ‘missionary’
posición, which the Kamasutra mentions
briefly but without enthusiasm: “In the
‘cup,’ both partners stretch out both of
their two legs straight. There are two
variants: the ‘cup lying on the side’ or

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‘the cup supine.’” (2.6.16–17) El COM-
mentator, también, scorns this position:
“How does he penetrate her in this po-
posición? It is so easy that there is nothing
to worry about!” So much for what Eu-
ropeans generally regarded as the default
posición.

Por el contrario, the default position for
ancient Indian men and women–over-
whelmingly favored in illustrations of
the Kamasutra–is something entirely
diferente, as Monty Python used to say.
The Kamasutra describes three variants:

Her head thrown down, her pelvis raised
arriba, she is “wide open.” Without lowering
her thighs, suspending them while spread-
ing them wide apart, she receives him in
the “yawning” position. Parting her thighs
around his sides, at the same time she
pulls her knees back around her own sides,
in the “Junoesque” position, which can
only be done with practice. (2.6.8, 10–11)

Some variants of these positions are
more complex. En algunos, her thighs are
bent back so far that, en efecto, he enters
her from the rear even though she is fac-
ing him: “When he raises her pelvis and
thrusts into her from below, violently, él
is called ‘grinding down.’” (2.8.24) Sig-
ni½cantly, this is the position that the
Kamasutra advises a man to use when the
woman’s genitals are much smaller than
su.

Size, and its importance, becomes ap-
parent from the very start of the part of
the text describing the sexual act:

The man is called a “hare,” “bull,” or
“stallion,” according to the size of his sex-
ual organ; a woman, sin embargo, is called a
“doe,” “mare,” or “elephant cow.” And so
there are three equal couplings, entre
sexual partners of similar size, and six un-
equal ones, between sexual partners of
dissimilar size. (2.1.1)

And when the text describes the possible
positions, it uses these sizes keyed to an-
imal types as its basic referents:

Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

At the moment of passion, in a coupling
where the man is larger than the woman,
a “doe” positions herself in such a way
as to stretch herself open inside. A “doe”
generally has three positions to choose
de: the “wide open,” the “yawning,"
or the “Junoesque.” (2.6.1, 7)

The man’s fear that his penis is not big
enough–the recurrent leitmotif of spam
on the Internet today–had apparently
already raised its ugly head in ancient
India. Como resultado, the doe became the fa-
vored woman, the ideal erotic partner.
The initial passage de½ning the three
sizes continues: “The equal couplings
are the best, the one when the man is
much larger or much smaller than the
woman are the worst, and the rest are
intermediate. Even in the medium ones,
it is better for the man to be larger than
the woman.” (2.1.1, 3–4) Thus two dif-
ferent, conflicting agendas are set forth
from the start: ideally, equal is best, pero
in fact the man has to be bigger, porque
women are by nature bigger. The biggest
woman (the elephant cow) is much larg-
er than the biggest man (the stallion).

The problem of satisfaction posed by
the greater size of women is not easily
solved, in part because it is not physi-
cal but mental. No proto-Kinsey went
around in ancient India measuring wom-
en’s vulvas. It is a matter of fantasy, ap-
parently a cross-cultural human fantasy,
and it is not about physiology (para cual
the Kamasutra offers physical correc-
tives) but about desire. And desire is af-
fected not merely by size but also by in-
tensity and duration:

A man has dull sexual energy if, en el
time of making love, his enthusiasm is in-
diferente, his virility small, and he cannot

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Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

bear to be wounded, and a man has aver-
age or ½erce sexual energy in the oppo-
site circumstances. The same goes for the
woman. And so, just as with size, so with
temperament, también, there are nine sorts of
couplings. And similarly, con respecto a
endurance, men are quick, promedio, y
long-lasting. (2.1.5–8, 30–31)

The passage then concludes that the
woman should reach her climax ½rst.
Por qué? The commentator explains:

The best case is when the man and woman
achieve their sexual pleasure at the same
tiempo, because that is an equal coupling.
But if it does not happen at the same time,
and the man reaches his climax ½rst, su
banner is no longer at full mast, y el
woman does not reach her climax. Allá-
delantero, if the coupling is unequal rather than
igual, the woman should be treated with
kisses, embraces, Etcétera, in such a
way that she achieves her sexual pleasure
½rst. When the woman reaches her climax
½rst, the man, remaining inside her, puts
on speed and reaches his own climax.

So the problem of ½t is merely one as-
pect of the greater problem of satisfac-
ción. Just as mares are bigger than hares,
la lógica va, entonces, the commentator
points out in the context of an argument
about female orgasm, women have far
more desire than men: “Women want a
climax that takes a long time to produce,
because their desire is eight times that of
a man. Given these conditions, it is per-
fectly right to say that ‘a fair-eyed wom-
an cannot be sated by men,’ because
men’s desire is just one-eighth of wom-
en’s.” (2.1.19) Here he is quoting a well-
known Sanskrit saying: “A ½re is never
sated by any amount of logs, nor the
ocean by the rivers that flow into it;
death cannot be sated by all the crea-
tures in the world, nor a fair-eyed wom-
an by any amount of men.” In another

texto, a female-to-male bisexual says that
when she was a woman, she had eight
times as much pleasure (kama) as a man,
which could also be translated as eight
times as much desire.1

But the Kamasutra had its ways of cop-
ing with satisfaction, a kind of end-run
around the obstacle of size. Just as there
are ways for a doe to expand, entonces, también,
the Kamasutra assures us, “In a coupling
where the man is smaller, an ‘elephant
cow’ contracts herself inside . . . . Sex
tools may also be used.” (2.1.3, 6) (El
commentator helpfully remarks, “If he
is larger than she is, there is no need for
sex tools.”) The “grinding down” posi-
ción, in which the woman bends her
thighs so close to her chest that the man
enters her from below, is particularly ef-
fective for this: “He thrusts from below
into the lower part of her vagina, vio-
lently, because the itch is most extensive
in the lower part of the vagina.” (2.8.24)
The Kamasutra also provides an extensive
collection of recipes that are the ancient
Indian equivalent of Viagra, a combina-
tion of drugs and surgical procedures to
increase the size of the penis; Y solo
as the doe may use drugs to expand, el
elephant cow may use drugs to contract:
“An ointment made of the white flowers
of the ‘cuckoos’-eye’ caper bush makes
an ‘elephant-cow’ contract tightly for
one night.” (7.2.36)

En este punto, it might seem that an-
cient India had come to terms with what
Freud called penis envy (referring to
women, though Woody Allen wisely re-
marked that it is more of a problem for

1 Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: generación-
der and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chica-
go: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 287–
292 (the tale of Chudala, in the Yogavasistha).
Some Greek texts maintain that Teiresias, también,
said that women have not just more pleasure,
but nine times as much pleasure as men–there-
by one-upping the Indian ante. Ibídem., 293.

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hombres). Perhaps size does not matter after
todo?

Well, No. A counterweight to the prob-

lem of desire is the problem of vulnera-
habilidad. It turns out that a man may be
caught between the Scylla of a woman
who is too big, producing a kind of sex-
ual agoraphobia, and the Charybdis of
a woman who is too small, inspiring a
kind of sexual claustrophobia. Let us re-
turn to our ideal woman, the doe, y
look again at the ½rst position recom-
mended for her, the “wide open” posi-
ción. It turns out to be rather dangerous.
The commentator warns:

When she is making love with the man’s
penis inside her, she should slide back
with her hips; or when the man is making
love with her he should slide back little by
little, so that they do not press together
too tightly. For if he moves inside her too
apenas, she can be injured, and the man’s
foreskin can be torn off, which physicians
call “ruptured foreskin.”

So the small woman may be too small.
But it gets worse: the too-large woman
may also become too small, by overcom-
pensating, as it were, for her size. El
elephant cow is encouraged to employ a
sexual position that catapults her unsus-
pecting partner from the frying pan of
insatiable enormity to the ½re of stran-
gulating tightness. It begins, disarming-
ly, with the harmless missionary posi-
ción:

Both partners stretch out both of their two
legs straight. Si, as soon as he has penetrat-
ed her, he squeezes her two thighs togeth-
er tightly, it becomes the “squeeze.” If she
then crosses her thighs, it becomes the
“circle.” In the “mare’s trap,” which can
only be done with practice, she grasps
him, like a mare, so tightly that he cannot
move. (2.6.13–20)

There is also a variation with the wom-
an on top: “When she grasps him in
the ‘mare’s trap’ position and draws
him more deeply into her or contracts
around him and holds him there for a
long time, that is the ‘tongs.’” (2.8.33)
The commentator adds helpfully: “She
uses the lips of the vagina as a tongs.”
This is the only sexual position that
the Kamasutra associates with a mare,
y, confusingly, it is reserved for the
“elephant cow” rather than the “mare”
woman. The confusion arises because
the horse, hypersexualized, is the only
animal that appears on both the male
and the female sides of the initial triads
of men and women. Though the male
and female equines are not paired–the
stallion is the largest male, mientras que la
mare is merely the middle-sized woman
–Hindu mythology regards the mare
as sexually dangerous, bursting with re-
pressed violence: the doomsday ½re is
lodged in the mouth of a mare who
wanders on the floor of the ocean, wait-
ing for the moment when she will be
released to burn everything to ashes.2
The mare is the sexual animal par excel-
lence; the commentator on the Kamasu-
Entre, glossing the phrase “two people of
the same species” (in the argument that
women have the same sort of climax as
hombres), offers this example, surely not at
aleatorio: “Two people of different spe-
cíes, such as a man and a mare, would
have different kinds of sensual pleasure;
and so he speci½es the same species, el
human species.” (2.1.24)

The conflation, in an animal image,
of the woman who is too big with the
woman who traps you (and is, in that
sense, too small) begins in ancient In-
dia in a text from about 900 bce:

2 Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic
Ascetic (London and Oxford: Oxford Universi-
ty Press, 1973), 289–292.

Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

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Dædalus Spring 2007

69

Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

Long-Tongue was a demoness who had
vaginas on every limb of her body. To sub-
due her, the god Indra equipped his grand-
son with penises on every limb and sent
him to her. As soon as he had his way with
her, he remained ½rmly stuck in her; Indra
then ran at her and struck her down with
his thunderbolt.3

Long-Tongue is a dog, and she and the
grandson of Indra (the ancient Indian
counterpart of Zeus/Wotan/Odin, a
notorious womanizer) get stuck togeth-
er as dogs sometimes do; en este caso, él
spells her death, and not his, but clearly
it is an image of excess that corresponds
to her excessively numerous vaginas,
each one presumably demanding to be
satis½ed. So this is the catch-22: if the
woman is too big, you cannot satisfy her,
but if she is too small (or too big), tú
may be injured and/or trapped inside
her.

This example points as well to the ten-

dency to identify women, más que
hombres, as animals, as is also assumed in a
passage from the Kamasutra that makes
women, in contrast with men, creatures
both explicitly likened to animals and
said to speak a meaningless animal lan-
guage:

There are eight kinds of screaming:
whimpering, groaning, babbling, cry-
En g, panting, shrieking, or sobbing. Y
there are various sounds that have mean-
En g, such as “Mother!” “Stop!” “Let go!"
“Enough!” As a major part of moaning
she may use, according to her imagina-
ción, the cries of the dove, cuckoo, verde
pigeon, parrot, bee, nightingale, goose,
duck, and partridge. He strikes her on her

3 Jaiminiya Brahmana, 1.161–163. Wendy Don-
iger O’Flaherty, Tales of Sex and Violence: Gente-
lore, Sacri½ce, and Danger in the Jaiminiya Brah-
mana (chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 101.

back with his ½st when she is seated on
his lap. Then she pretends to be unable
to bear it and beats him in return, mientras
groaning, crying, or babbling. If she pro-
pruebas, he strikes her on the head until
she sobs, using a hand whose ½ngers are
slightly bent, which is called the “out-
stretched hand.” At this she babbles with
sounds inside her mouth, and she sobs.
When the sex ends, there is panting and
crying. Shrieking is a sound like a bam-
boo splitting, and sobbing sounds like a
berry falling into water. Always, if a man
tries to force his kisses and so forth on
her, she moans and does the very same
thing back to him. When a man in the
throes of passion slaps a woman repeat-
edly, she uses words like “Stop!” or “Let
me go!” or “Enough!” or “Mother!" y
utters screams mixed with labored breath-
En g, panting, crying, and groaning. As pas-
sion nears its end, he beats her extremely
quickly, until the climax. At this, she be-
gins to babble, fast, like a partridge or a
goose. Those are the ways of groaning and
slapping. (2.7.1-21)

It is worth noting that these women
make the noises of birds, never of mam-
mals, let alone the mammals that char-
acterize the three paradigmatic sizes
of women. Además, one of the birds
whose babbling the sexual woman imi-
tates–the parrot–appears elsewhere
in the Kamasutra as one of the two birds
who can be taught to speak like humans.
(1.3.15, 1.4.8, 6.1.15) The passage about
slapping and groaning inculcates what
we now recognize as the rape mentality
–‘her mouth says no, but her eyes say
yes’–a dangerous line of thought that
leads ultimately to places where we now
no longer want to be: disregarding a
woman’s protests against rape. And this
treatment of women is justi½ed by a
combination of the of½cial naming of
women after oversized animals and the

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Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

expectation that in the throes of passion
women will speak like animals, significar-
inglessly.

The practice of naming the sexual
movements after animals–the “boar’s
thrust,” the “bull’s thrust,” “frolicking
like a sparrow” (2.8.27–29)–also im-
plies that there is a very basic sense in
which sex, even when done according
to the book, as it were, is bestial. But de-
spite its recurrent zoological terminolo-
gy, the Kamasutra argues that people are
not animals, and that the sexuality of an-
imals is different from that of humans.
The very passages in which people are
advised, for the sake of variety, to imi-
tate the sexual behavior of animals, o
in which women are told to mimic the
cries of animals, imply that such behav-
ior is, by de½nition, different from ours.
Vatsyayana distinguishes human sexu-

ality from animal sexuality in the argu-
ment that he puts forward at the very be-
ginning to justify his text:

Scholars say: “Since even animals manage
sex by themselves, and since it goes on all
el tiempo, it should not have to be handled
with the help of a text.” Vatsyayana says:
Because a man and a woman depend upon
one another in sex, it requires a method,
and this method is learnt from the Kama-
sutra. The mating of animals, por el contrario,
is not based upon any method, porque
they are not fenced in, they mate only
when the females are in their fertile sea-
son and until they achieve their goal, y
they act without thinking about it ½rst.
(1.2.16–20)

Humanos, whose sexuality is more com-
plex than that of animals, are more re-
pressed–“fenced in,” as the text puts
él. Por lo tanto, they have a different sexu-
ality from animals, and need a text for
él, where animals do not. The Kamasu-
tra’s claim to fame is precisely that it has
found ways–positions, herramientas, drugs–to

deal with the mind as well as the body,
to satisfy women not only of any size
but of any degree of desire. Vatsyayana’s
words in such passages do not seem to
reflect male anxiety at all; the women
are depicted not as enormous monsters
but as pliant and manipulatable sources
of great pleasure. Vive la différence: ser-
cause we are not animals, we can use cul-
ture–more precisely, the technique of
the Kamasutra–to overcome our baser
instincts, which must surely include
male phallic anxiety.

But culture, in the Kamasutra’s sense,
belonged to those who had leisure and
medio, time and money, none of which
was in short supply for the text’s pri-
mary intended audience, an urban (y
urbane) elite consisting of princes, alto
state of½cials, and wealthy merchants.
The production of manuscripts, especialmente-
cially illuminated manuscripts, was nec-
essarily an elite matter; men of wealth
and power, kings and merchants, would
commission texts of the Kamasutra to be
copied out for their private use.

The protagonist of the Kamasutra is
such a man. Literally a “man-about-
town” (nagaraka, from the Sanskrit
nagara, ‘city’), he lives “in a city, a capi-
tal city, a market town, or some large
gathering where there are good people,
or wherever he has to stay to make a liv-
ing.” (1.4.2) He has, as we say of a certain
type of man today, no visible source of
income. Vatsyayana tells us, at the start
of the section describing “The Lifestyle
of the Man-about-Town,” that the play-
boy ½nances his lifestyle by “using the
money that he has obtained from gifts,
conquest, comercio, or wages, or from inher-
itance, or from both.” (1.4.1) His com-
panions may have quite realistic money
problemas (1.4.31–33); his wife is entrust-
ed with all the household management,
including the ½nances; and his mistress-
es work hard to make and keep their

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Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

dinero. But we never see the man-about-
town at work:

This is how he spends a typical day. Primero
is his morning toilet: He gets up in the
mañana, relieves himself, cleans his
teeth, applies fragrant oils in small quanti-
corbatas, as well as incense, garlands, bees’ wax
and red lac, looks at his face in a mirror,
takes some mouthwash, and attends to the
things that need to be done. He bathes
every day, has his limbs rubbed with oil
every second day, a foam bath every third
día, his face shaved every fourth day, y
his body hair removed every ½fth or tenth
día. All of this is done without fail. Y
he continually cleans the sweat from his
armpits. In the morning and afternoon he
eats. (1.4.5–7)

Ahora, ready to face the day, he goes to
trabajar:

After eating, he passes the time teaching
his parrots and mynah birds to speak;
goes to quail-½ghts, cock-½ghts, and ram-
½ghts; engages in various arts and games;
and passes the time with his libertine,
pander, and clown. And he takes a nap. En
the late afternoon, he gets dressed up and
goes to salons to amuse himself. And in
the evening, there is music and singing.
Después, on the bed in a bedroom care-
fully decorated and perfumed by sweet-
smelling incense, he and his friends await
the women who are slipping out for a ren-
dezvous with them. He sends female mes-
sengers for them or goes to get them him-
self. And when the women arrive, he and
his friends greet them with gentle conver-
sation and courtesies that charm the mind
and heart. If rain has soaked the clothing
of women who have slipped out for a ren-
dezvous in bad weather, he changes their
clothes himself, or gets some of his friends
to serve them. That is what he does by day
and night. (1.4.8–13)

Busy teaching his birds to talk, he never
drops in to check things at the shop, dejar
alone visit his mother. Throughout the
texto, his one concern is the pursuit of
pleasure.

That is not to say, sin embargo, that the
pursuit of pleasure didn’t require its own
trabajar. Vatsyayana details the sixty-four
arts that need to be learned by anyone
who is truly serious about pleasure:

singing; playing musical instruments;
dancing; painting; cutting leaves into
shapes; making lines on the floor with
rice-powder and flowers; arranging flow-
ers; coloring the teeth, clothes, and limbs;
making jeweled floors; preparing beds;
making music on the rims of glasses of
agua; playing water sports; unusual tech-
niques; making garlands and stringing
necklaces; making diadems and head-
bands; making costumes; making vari-
ous earrings; mixing perfumes; putting
on jewelry; doing conjuring tricks; prac-
ticing sorcery; sleight of hand; preparing
various forms of vegetables, soups, y
other things to eat; preparing wines, fruit
juices, and other things to drink; needle-
trabajar; weaving; playing the lute and the
drum; telling jokes and riddles; complet-
ing words; reciting dif½cult words; read-
ing aloud; staging plays and dialogues;
completing verses; making things out of
cloth, madera, and cane; wood-working;
carpentry; arquitectura; the ability to test
gold and silver; metallurgy; conocimiento de
the color and form of jewels; skill at nur-
turing trees; knowledge of ram ½ghts,
cock½ghts, and quail ½ghts; teaching par-
rots and mynah birds to talk; skill at rub-
bing, massaging, and hairdressing; el
ability to speak in sign language; bajo-
standing languages made to seem foreign;
knowledge of local dialects; skill at mak-
ing flower carts; knowledge of omens;
alphabets for use in making magical dia-
gramos; alphabets for memorizing; grupo

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recitation; improvising poetry; dictionar-
ies and thesauruses; knowledge of metre;
literary work; the art of impersonation;
the art of using clothes for disguise; spe-
cial forms of gambling; the game of dice;
children’s games; etiquette; the science
of strategy; and the cultivation of athletic
habilidades. (1.3.15)

And while we are still reeling from this
lista, Vatsyayana immediately reminds
us that there is, in addition, an entirely
different cluster of sixty-four arts of
love (1.3.16), which include eight forms
of each of the main erotic activities:
embracing, kissing, scratching, biting,
sexual positions, moaning, the woman
playing the man’s part, and oral sex.
(2.8.4–5) A rapid calculation brings the
tab to 128 letras, a curriculum that one
could hardly master even after the equiv-
alent of two Ph.D.s and a long appren-
ticeship–and one that not many could
afford.

So the lovers must be rich, Sí, pero no

necessarily upper class. When the text
says that the man may get his money
from “gifts, conquest, comercio, or wages,
or from inheritance, or from both,” the
commentator explains, “If he is a Brah-
mín., he gets his money from gifts; a king
or warrior, from conquest; a commoner,
from trade; and a servant, from wages
earned by working as an artisan, a travel-
ing bard, or something of that sort.”
(1.4.1) Brahmin, warrior, commoner, y
servant are the four basic classes, or var-
nas, of India. En efecto, the Kamasutra is
almost unique in classical Sanskrit lit-
erature in its almost total disregard of
caste, though of course power relations
of many kinds–gender, wealth, político
posición, as well as caste–are implicit
throughout the text. But varna is men-
tioned just twice, ½rst in a single sen-
tence admitting that it is of concern on-
ly when you marry a wife who will bear

you legal sons, and can be disregarded
in all other erotic situations (1.5.1); y
later in a passage about what we would
call rough trade:

Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

“Sex with a coarse servant” takes place
with a lower-class female water-carrier
or house-servant, until the climax; en esto
kind of sex, he does not bother with the
acts of civility. Similarmente, “sex with a peas-
ant” takes place between a courtesan and
a country bumpkin, until the climax, o
between a man-about-town and women
from the countryside, cow-herding vil-
lages, or countries beyond the borders.
(2.10.22–25)

Vatsyayana disapproves of sexual rela-
tions with rural and tribal women be-
cause they could have adverse effects
on the erotic re½nement and sensibility
of the cultivated man-about-town; él
would have been baffled by any Lady
Chatterji’s sexual transports with a
gamekeeper. But for all the rest of the
world of pleasure, class is irrelevant.
Where classical texts of Hindu social law
might have said that you make love dif-
ferently to women of high and low class-
es, Vatsyayana just says that you make
love differently to women of delicate or
rough temperaments. Size matters, y
money matters, but status does not.

Two worlds intersect for us in the Ka-

masutra: sex and ancient India. We as-
sume that the understanding of sex will
be familiar to us, since sex is universal,
and that the representations of ancient
India will be strange to us, since that
world existed long ago and in a galaxy
far away. This is largely the case, pero
there are interesting reversals of expec-
taciones: some sexual matters are strange
(para, as you will recall, Vatsyayana argues
that sex for human beings is a matter of
culture not nature), or even sometimes
repugnant to us, while some cultural

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Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

matters are strangely familiar or, if un-
familiar, still charming and comprehen-
sible, reassuring us that the people of
ancient India took their trousers off one
leg at a time, just like us. Consider the
description of the man’s day: his morn-
ing toilet is much like ours, but we do
no, alas, schedule in things like teaching
mynah birds to speak. It is the constant
intersection of these perceptions–“How
very odd!” “Oh, I know just how she
feels.” “How can anyone do that?” “Ah,
I remember doing that once, years ago.”
–that constitutes the strange appeal of
the Kamasutra.

Take the matter of male anxiety about

penis size and its prevalence on the In-
ternet–a link between us and them. El
Kamasutra tackles the problem aggres-
sively:

The people of the South pierce a boy’s
penis just like his ears. A young man has
it cut with a knife and then stands in wa-
ter as long as the blood flows. To keep the
opening clear, he has sexual intercourse
that very night, continuously. Entonces, después
an interval of one day, he cleans the open-
ing with astringent decoctions. He en-
larges it by putting larger and larger spears
of reeds and ivory-tree wood in it, y el
cleans it with a piece of sugar-cane coated
with honey. Después, he enlarges it by
inserting a tube of lead with a protruding
knot on the end, and he lubricates it with
the oil of the marking-nut. He inserts in-
to the enlarged opening sex tools made
in various shapes. They must be able to
bear a lot of use, and may be soft or rough
according to individual preferences.
(7.2.14–24)

And if that doesn’t work, try this:

Rub your penis with the bristles of insects
born in trees, then massage it with oil for
ten nights, then rub it again and massage
it again. When it swells up as the result

of this treatment, lie down on a cot with
your face down and let your penis hang
down from a hole in the cot. Then you
may assuage the pain with cool astrin-
gents and, by stages, ½nish the treatment.
This swelling, which lasts for a lifetime, es
the one that voluptuaries call “prickled.”
(7.2.25–27)

Granted, I have chosen extreme sur-
gical examples, but the pharmaceuti-
cal recommendations, though less gro-
tesque, are hardly more practical:

If you coat your penis with an ointment
made with powdered white thorn-apple,
black pepper, and long pepper, mezclado
with honey, you put your sexual partner
in your power. If you pulverize a female
“circle-maker” buzzard that died a natu-
ral death, and mix the powder with hon-
ey and gooseberry; or if you cut the knot-
ty roots of the milkwort and milk-hedge
plants into pieces, coat them with a pow-
der of red arsenic and sulfur, dry and pul-
verize the mixture seven times, mix it
with honey, and spread it on your penis,
you put your sexual partner in your power.
(7.1.25, 27, 28)

The commentator’s comment on this–
“Do this in such a way that the woman
you want does not realize, ‘A man with
something spread on his penis is making
love to me’”–has inspired at least one
reader to remark, “Any woman who
would let you make love to her with all
that stuff smeared on you would have to
be madly in love with you already.” Pas-
sages like this make us think, as a Victo-
rian gentleman cited by Hilaire Belloc
remarked after seeing Shakespeare’s An-
tony and Cleopatra, “How different, cómo
very different, from the home life of our
own dear Queen.”

But we may also recognize, and ad-

mire, the precision with which Vat-
syayana tells us how to detect when a

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Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

woman has reached a climax (o, por-
haps, if we assume, as I think we should,
that the text is intended for women, también,
he is telling the woman how to fake it):

The signs that a woman is reaching her
climax are that her limbs become limp,
her eyes close, she loses all sense of shame,
and she takes him deeper and deeper
inside her. She flails her hands about,
sweats, bites, will not let him get up, kicks
him, and continues to move over the man
even after he has ½nished making love.
(2.8.17–18)

He also knew about what we call the
G-spot (after the German gynecologist
Ernst Graefenberg): “When her eyes roll
when she feels him in certain spots, él
presses her in just those spots.” (1.8.16)
Vatsyayana quotes a predecessor who
dicho, “This is the secret of young wom-
en”–and, en efecto, it remained a secret
in Europe until well into the 1980s.

Contrariamente a lo esperado, there are mo-
ments of recognition in the realm of cul-
tura, también. There is the passage in which
the boy teases the girl when they are
swimming together, diving down and
coming up near her, touching her, y
then diving down again. (3.4.6) This was
already an old trick when I was a young
girl at summer camp in the Adirondacks.
European readers must surely also recog-
nize the man who tells the woman on
whom he’s set his sights “about an erot-
ic dream, pretending that it was about
another woman” (3.4.9), and the woman
who does the same thing. (5.4.54) I felt a
guilty pang of familiarity when I read the
passage suggesting that a woman inter-
ested in getting a man’s attention in a
crowded room might ½nd some pretext
to take something from him, haciendo
sure to brush him with her breast as she
reaches across him. (2.2.8–9) This is an
amazingly intimate thing to know about
a culture, far more intimate than know-

ing that you can stand on one leg or
another when you make love.

Sometimes the unfamiliar and the fa-

miliar are cheek by jowl: the culture-
speci½c list of women the wife must not
associate with, which include a Budd-
hist nun and a magician who uses love-
sorcery worked with roots (4.1.9), is fol-
lowed in the very next passage by the
woman who is cooking for her man and
½nds out “this is what he likes, this is
what he hates, this is good for him, este
is bad for him,” a consideration that
must resonate with many contemporary
readers.

One part of the text that surely speaks

to the modern reader is the advice on
ways to seduce a married woman. En el
would-be adulterer’s meditations on rea-
sons to do this, there are self-deceptive
arguments that still make sense in our
world:

“There is no danger involved in my hav-
ing this woman, and there is a chance
of wealth. And since I am useless, I have
exhausted all means of making a living.
Such as I am, I will get a lot of money
from her in this way, with very little trou-
ble.” Or, “This woman is madly in love
with me and knows all my weaknesses.
If I reject her, she will ruin me by publicly
exposing my faults; or she will accuse me
of some fault which I do not in fact have,
but which will be easy to believe of me
and hard to clear myself of, and this will
be the ruin of me.” (1.5.12–14)

Mientras tanto, another passage brilliantly
imagines the resistance of a woman who
is tempted to commit adultery, in ways
that rival the psychologizing of John Up-
dike and Gustave Flaubert:

She gets angry and thinks, “He is propo-
sitioning me in an insulting way”; or she
fears, “He will soon go away. There is no
future in it; his thoughts are attached to

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Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

someone else”; or she is nervous, think-
En g, “He does not conceal his signals”; o
she fears, “His advances are just a tease”;
or she is dif½dent, pensamiento, “How glam-
orous he is”; or she becomes shy when she
thinks, “He is a man-about-town, accom-
plished in all the arts”; or she feels, “He
has always treated me just as a friend”; o
she cannot bear him, pensamiento, “He does
not know the right time and place,” or she
does not respect him, pensamiento, “He is an
object of contempt”; or she despises him
when she thinks, “Even though I have giv-
en him signals, he does not understand”;
or she feels sympathy for him and thinks,
“I would not want anything unpleasant to
happen to him because of me”; or she be-
comes depressed when she sees her own
shortcomings, or afraid when she thinks,
“If I am discovered, my own people will
throw me out”; or scornful, pensamiento, “He
has gray hair”; or she worries, “My hus-
band has employed him to test me”; o
she has regard for morality. (5.1.23, 25, 26,
28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 37–41)

The woman’s thoughts on such sub-
jects as how to get a lover and how to tell
when he is cooling toward her also ring
remarkably true in the twenty-½rst cen-
tury. My favorite is the passage on the
devious devices that a woman can use
to make her lover leave her, en vez de
simply kicking him out:

She does for him what he does not want,
and she does repeatedly what he has criti-
cized. She talks about things he does not
know about. She shows no amazement,
but only contempt, for the things he does
know about. She intentionally distorts the
meaning of what he says. She laughs when
he has not made a joke, and when he has
made a joke, she laughs about something
else. When he is talking, she looks at her
entourage with sidelong glances and slaps
a ellos. And when she has interrupted his
story, she tells other stories. She talks in

public about the bad habits and vices that
he cannot give up. She asks for things that
should not be asked for. She punctures his
pride. She ignores him. She criticizes men
who have the same faults. And she stalls
when they are alone together. And at the
end, the release happens of itself. (6.3.39
–44)

A little inside joke that does not survive
the cross-cultural translation is the word
used for ‘release,’ moksha, que genero-
ally refers to a person’s spiritual release
from the world of transmigration; allá
may be an intended irony in its use here
to designate the release of a man from a
woman’s thrall. The rest comes through
loud and clear, sin embargo: the woman
employs what some would call passive-
aggressive behavior to indicate that it
is time to hit the road, Jacobo. There is no
male equivalent for this passage, pre-
sumably because a man would not have
to resort to such subterfuges: Él haría
just throw the woman out. Este, también, tiene
not changed very much.

Our reaction to the central subject,
the act of love, should surely be one of
recognition, of familiarity, but no. Aquí,
rather than in the cultural setting, es
where we are, unexpectedly, brought up
short by the unfamiliar. The Kamasutra
describes a number of contortions that
“require practice,” as the text puts it
mildly, and these are the positions that
generally make people laugh out loud at
the mention of the Kamasutra. Reseñas
of books dealing with the Kamasutra in
recent years have had titles like “Assume
the Position” and Position Impossible. A
recent cartoon depicts “The Kamasutra
Relaxasizer Lounger, 165 positions.”4

4 Señor. Boffo cartoon by Joe Martin, Cª, dis-
tributed by Universal Press Syndicate; pub-
lished in the Chicago Tribune, Septiembre 29,
2000. A salesman is saying to a customer,
“Most people just buy it to get the catalogue.”

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Reading
the “Kama-
sutra”

Cosmopolitan magazine published two
editions of its “Cosmo Kamasutra,” offer-
ing “12 brand-new mattress-quaking sex
styles,” each with its numerical “degree
of dif½culty,” including positions called
“the backstairs boogie,” “the octopus,"
“the mermaid,” “the spider web," y
“the rock’n’ roll.”5 There is a Kamasutra
wristwatch that displays a different posi-
tion every hour. A recent Roz Chast car-
toon entitled “The Kama Sutra of Grilled
Cheese” included the following menu:

#14: The Righteous Lion. With a ½rm but
loving hand, guide your cheese to a slice
of bread. Top with another slice of bread,
and place on hot, well-lubricated griddle.
Fry until bread and cheese become one.
#39: Buddha in Paradise: When the time
is right, position your cheese atop a slice
of bread. Run under the broiler until the
cheese yields up its life force and is trans-
formado. #58: The Lotus: While your
cheese is melting in the microwave, your
bread should be toasting in the toaster. Si
all goes well, both will arrive at the crucial
stage simultaneously, and can be united.
Next Week: The Kama Sutra of Peanut
Butter and Jelly.6

The satirical journal The Onion ran a par-
ody about a couple whose “inability to
execute The Totally Auspicious Position,
along with countless other ancient Indi-
an erotic positions, took them to new
heights of sexual dissatisfaction.”7 The
authors of these jokes had in mind posi-
tions like ones that Vatsyayana attributes
to his rival Suvarnanabha:

5 “The Cosmo Kamasutra,” Cosmopolitan, Sep-
tember 1998; “The Cosmo Kamasutra, #2,” Cos-
mopolitan, Septiembre 1999, 256–259.

6 The New Yorker, Septiembre 10, 2001, 78.

7 “Tantric Sex Class Opens Up Whole New
World of Unful½llment for Local Couple," El
Onion, March 30–April 5, 2000, 8.

Now for those of Suvarnanabha: Cuando
both thighs of the woman are raised, es
called the “curve.” When the man holds
her legs up, it is the “yawn.” When he
does that but also flexes her legs at the
knees, it is the “high-squeeze.” When he
does that but stretches out one of her feet,
it is the “half-squeeze.” When one of her
feet is placed on the man’s shoulder and
the other is stretched out, and they alter-
nate again and again, this is called “split-
ting the bamboo.” When one of her legs
is raised above her head and the other leg
is stretched out, it is called “impaling on
a stake,” and can only be done with prac-
tice. When both of her legs are flexed at
the knees and placed on her own abdo-
hombres, it is the “crab.” When her thighs are
raised and crossed, it is the “squeeze.”
When she opens her knees and crosses
her calves, it is the “lotus seat.” When he
turns around with his back to her, and she
embraces his back, that is called “rotat-
En g,” and can only be done with practice.
(2.6.23–33)

Claramente, even Vatsyayana regards these
as over the top, which is why he blames
them on someone else. What are we to
make of these gymnastics? Did people
in ancient India really make love like
eso? I think not. True, they did have
yoga, and great practitioners of yoga can
make their bodies do things that most
of us would not think possible (or even,
tal vez, desirable). But just because one
can do it is no reason that one should do
él. (O, as Vatsyayana remarks at the end
of his Viagra passage, “The statement
that ‘There is a text for this’ does not jus-
tify a practice.” [7.2.55]). I think the an-
swer lies elsewhere: “Vatsyayana says:
Even passion demands variety. And it
is through variety that partners inspire
passion in one another. It is their in½nite
variety that makes courtesans and their
lovers remain desirable to one another.

Dædalus Spring 2007

77

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Wendy
Doniger
en
sexo

Even in archery and in other martial
letras, the textbooks insist on variety. Cómo
much more is this true of sex!" (2.4.25)
The user’s-manual approach does not
account for positions that do not invite
imitation. These may simply be the art-
ist’s free-ranging fantasies on a theme of
sexual possibilities: they are not instruc-
tive but inspiring, and inspired. Ellos
represent a literally no-holds-barred ex-
ploration of the theoretical possibilities
of human heterosexual coupling, mucho
as the profusion of compound animals–
heads of ducks on bodies of lions, or tor-
sos of women on the bodies of ½sh, y
so forth–pushed back the walls of our
imagination of the variety of known and
unknown animal species. It is a fantasy
literature, an artistic and imaginative,
rather than physical or sexual, explora-
tion of coupling. Since there is nothing
like this in the Western tradition, él
strikes us as weird in the same way that
the passage about enlarging the penis
boggles our imagination.

But when compared to European por-

nography, this is, después de todo, mild stuff.
There is no discussion of everyday topics
of many European publications, como
bondage or golden showers. The text is,
bastante, a virtual sexual pas de deux as Bal-
anchine might have choreographed it,
an extended meditation on some of the
ways that a naked man and a naked
woman (o, rarely, several men and/or
women) might move their limbs while
making love. It depicts an idealized
world of sex that is the antecedent of
Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck” or the capi-
talist fantasies of Hugh Hefner’s glossy
Playboy empire. And though sexual real-
ity may in fact be universal–there are,
después de todo, just so many places that you can
put your genitals–sexual fantasy seems
to be highly cultural. Este, entonces, is what
is new to us in the brave new world of
these ancient images.

78

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