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.
Wendy Doginer is a history of religions professor at the University of Chicago. “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 wingman pretend to be a fortune teller and tell the target lady’s mom how blessed with auspicious signs the suitor is.
Some of the sex-positive aspects of the book were missed or toned down by Burton. The Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton brought the text to the West’s attention with his 1883 translation, though due to obscenity laws, the book was not legally published in either the UK or the US until 1962. The Kamasutra, written by the Hindu philosopher Vatsayana sometime in the 3rd century, was so far ahead of its time that even hundreds of years later, its words carried far too many sexually revolutionary ideas - frank, gender-fluid, unabashedly celebratory of the sensuous - for it to appear uncensored before the public eye. “Redeeming the Kamasutra” by Wendy Doniger For more than a century, we’ve thought of the third-century Sanskrit text, the Kamasutra, mainly as an illustrated guide to improbably gymnastic sex - frisky moves of the kind 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.
0 kommentar(er)
