5. KAma SUtra — Sex, Potions, Magic, and Toys

A woman’s vagina was very powerful in the Kāma Sūtra. Stimulated properly, it offered many health benefits. There were six great nerves in the vagina. If her lover stimulated a certain one, putrī, the woman would stay young. If her lover stimulated another, duhitrinī, she would have sons. If the two nerves were stimulated at the same time, she would have sons into same-sex sex.

The penis was very important too, and if a guy had one that was “rabbit gauge” the Kāma Sūtra offered a magic recipe to make it bigger:

Take shūka hairs — the shūka is an insect that lives in the trees. ... Kill the shūka before using its hairs. Take hold of the insect with small pincers and rub it on the sides of the penis. The hairs become detached, torn out by the rubbing. They must then be spread out by massaging with oil. This causes swelling. When the swelling is sufficient, let the penis hang through a hole in the bed board so that it gets longer. ... Then cool with soothing mixtures eliminating the pain. ... The swelling caused by the shūka will last for life.

There were also potions and magic for becoming attractive and for good luck in love. All you had to do was to harvest the eye of a peacock or tiger during their mating season, cover it in gold foil, and hold it in your left hand or tie it to your right arm. But the eye had to be freshly harvested.

In order to marry, both partners must have been from the same caste. They must also have had auspicious astrological charts, compatibly sized sex organs — rabbit, deer, bull, horse, or elephant (dildos could be used to satisfy a woman if the man was very small) and similar sexual temperaments — slow, fast, average. And it was best if the couple enjoyed the same amusements, pleasures, and tastes.

The Kāma Sūtra offers many different positions for coitus. Here a few examples:

Bhgnaka — Bent

The girl raises her thighs, which she clasps with her arms. The boy, too lifting his knees, grips her and fucks her.

Jrimbhitaka — Gaping

She raises both her legs and places them on the boy’s shoulders. It is the knee-joint that rests on the shoulder.

Utpῑditaka — High Pressure

The girl folds both her legs, which the boy presses against his chest. The boy puts his arms around the girl’s neck and presses his chest against her retracted legs. Both their chests are compressed, which is why it is called “high pressure”.

Kārkataka — The Crab

Like a crab folding its claws, the woman, lying down, folds her bended legs over her vulnerable part, the boy pressing his navel against her legs. Intercourse in this position is called the crab.

Within or outside of marriage, the Kāma Sūtra was all about pleasure. All kinds of it — and for both partners. Vatsayana said “it is not possible to name all the parts of the body where men put their lips.” But “whatever the man practices on the woman should also be practiced on him by her.”

The Kāma Sūtra acknowledged that women were more sexually vigorous than men. It also had a solution to equalize them: When the man was exhausted and the woman wanted him to keep going, she had to behave like a man. She should mount him and use a dildo to penetrate him through the anus so that he got “the taste of one pleasure after another”, until he was roused again.

There was no shame associated with this kind of “inverted intercourse”. Kṛishna himself enjoyed his divine consort, Rādhā, penetrating him anally. The Kāma Sūtra encouraged women to use dildos with one another, anally as well as vaginally. It reminded them, and men, to stimulate the clitoris with one hand while moving the dildo with the other. In fact, there should always be lots of foreplay before any kind of intercourse so that both partners were very ready for it. Both partners must be pleased and there must be no shyness in their sex play. Men should be careful not to act on just their own desires but in reaction to the desires of the women they are with.

The Kāma Sūtra advised that sex with another man’s wife could be dangerous, but it could be rewarding, though naughty, and it could cure lovesickness. So it offered a magic recipe to make a guy invisible so he could get into a harem without being seen:

This is the procedure: without letting the steam escape, cook a mongoose’s heart, long gourd fruits, snakes’ eyes. Crush them all together to make eye salve. If applied to the eyes, one can move about without one’s body or shadow being visible.

That and other recipes seems like marlarkey, today! But, all in all, the Hindu yearning for the practice of love — kāma shāstra, embodied in the Kāma Sūtra, has brought insights, pleasure, and the sense of sexual freedom to millions around the world.

Jon Knowles, author: How Sex Got Screwed Up

URL: HowSexGotScrewedUp.com

Twitter: @HowSxGotScrewed

Vernon Press Book One https://vernonpress.com/book/417

Vernon Press Book Two https://vernonpress.com/book/418

Quoted text from Alain Daniélou, Trans. (1994). The Complete Kāma Sūtra. Rochester, Vermont: Park Street Press.

4. SamE-Sex Marriage—not a new thing

This is from a seventh-century icon of Serge and Bacchus. Christ is the “best man”.

Two fourth-century soldiers, martyrs, and saints, Serge and Bacchus, were married. Catholic liturgies invoked them for same-sex marriages until the 16th century. Their feast day is October 7. But they were not the first.

Among the Hittites, one same-sex partner paid a bride price for the other. Men who married men in ancient Crete earned more social privileges than those who took women. Romans, including some emperors, married men, too. Same-sex marriage — parigraha — was also common in India and in the Muslim world of the first millennium.

Until the 13th century, marriage was a private oath. The church took it over to stop the marriage of priests. It outlawed private, “common-law” marriages. It imposed three-month banns, church services, and witnesses. Even as 17th-century cities such as Venice burned men alive for same-sex marriage, Michel de Montaigne attended a same-sex marriage in Rome. In Dalmatia, they called women who married women prosestrime. Men were probatimi. Same-sex marriage was so common in Fujian that the Chinese called it nanfeng — “southern custom”.

Caribbean pirates of the 18th century had same-sex marriages — matelots. They pledged their property and lives to one another. Some of these buccaneers took oaths to die together and some did. At the same time, scores of men in London’s molly houses married — many by the Reverend John Church. Celebrities such as Charles Darwin and Queen Charlotte thronged to Wales to visit the “Ladies of Liangollen”, two married women. (London’s “mollies” — married or not — went to the stocks, the gallows, or were driven to suicide.)

Most Americans had common-law marriages without public ritual. This led some communities to accept same-sex marriage. Lincoln knew about them. He wrote this little ditty in the 1830s:

Rueben and Charles have married two girls

But Billy has married a boy.

The girls he had tried on every side

But none could he get to agree.

All was in vain he went home again

And since he is married to Natty.

This was the time, for example, when Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake’s neighbors knew them as “husband” and “wife” in Weybridge, Vermont. They belonged to the Trinitarian Congregational Church.

But after the first national law about marriage, the anti-polygamy Morrill Act of 1890, common-law marriage began to become illegal across the country — in all but eight states and the District of Columbia.

Most of us have lived through the rest of this history: In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act to allow states to specifically outlaw same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court overthrew the Act in 2013. And in 2015, the Court decided to protect same-sex marriage. So, the whole history is much longer than any of us have lived through.

Citations

Book One: 74, 91, 114, 176–7, 204, 265, 276, 290, 296, 340–2, 396, 430, 526, 657, 724, 726–8, 742, 800–1, Wiki

Book Two: 208–10, 609 Wiki

3. Stroking the Clit to Dampen Hysteria

Thanks to Jackie Rotman (NYT, June 26), vibrators are in the news again. Here’s a little history about them: Plato taught that a wandering uterus caused hysteria. Doctors began to stroke the clitoris to relieve it. By the 17th century, most believed the uterus wandered if a woman didn’t get enough sex or wasn’t pregnant often enough. But very few of them would admit they gave women orgasms when curing hysteria.

Most doctors of the 19th century believed that women could not have orgasms. But they still believed that the uterus was a “furious and insatiable animal”. So, professional stroking was necessary — for a fee. And they invented vibrators to make their work easier. In 1889, the Butler Electro-massage Machine appeared. By 1899, the vibrator was the second most used electrical appliance in the home (The sewing machine was the first.) But women knew better than to talk about the joys it gave them.

For the first 20 years of the 20th century, ads for these “Delightful Companions” ran in women’s magazines such as Home Needlework Journal, Women’s Home Companion, and the Sears and Roebuck catalog. In 1910, The American College of Mechano-Therapy ran this ad in Women and Men: “Your Hands Properly Used are all you Need to Earn $3,000 to $5,000 a Year.”

Film porn at the end of the ‘20s, such as Widows Delight, let the cat out of the bag. Ads for vibrators disappeared entirely from mainstream media. In the ‘70s, Eve’s Garden and Good Vibrations opened to sell women sex toys — for pleasure, and a lot of women still used them, but on the Q.T.

They remained a forbidden subject. In 1991, Professor Donald Silva lost his job at University of New Hampshire. He had quoted Little Egypt to describe metaphor: “Belly dancing is like Jello on a plate with a vibrator under the plate.” And in 1998, Clarkson University refused to continue its contract with Rachel Maines. She had published her landmark book, The Technology of Orgasm — “Hysteria,” the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Clarkson feared its success would interfere with alumni funding!

Today, Walmart, Amazon, and other retailers sell vibrators as part of the growing “femtech” market — worth $50 billion by 2020. But mainstream advertisers —not at all shy about erectile dysfunction — refuse to acknowledge them.

For citations see:

Book One — 40, 150, 666, 825, 828

Book Two — 14, 111, 129, 157, 314, 441–2, 513, 684, 695