December 30, 2012
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A better Kama Sutra
JDN 2456292 EDT 16:33.
The Kama Sutra is a great book, and I really mean “great” in the sense of Hamlet or Iliad or On the Origin of Species. But it is also deeply flawed, and like the Bible its flaws have been preserved over the centuries in the name of religious reverence. Unlike the Bible, the Kama Sutra also has a very open attitude about sexuality (which is how most of us in the West know it), which has also made our puritanical culture wary of discussing it at all, let alone to critique it seriously on its own terms.
At its core, the Kama Sutra is a truly wonderful notion: Sexuality as a means to spiritual transcendence. It’s about elevating sexuality, expanding its potential. The Kama Sutra is a sex manual, but it is a sex manual for mystics and philosophers.
But some of the things it gets wrong… they’re awful. Basic facts about the functionality of orgasm, particularly female orgasm. It contains a long section debating whether female ejaculation exists (hint: it does, period), completely confusing it with orgasm (it’s not even the same thing in males, for goodness’ sake). It reasons a priori, much like Plato and Aristotle, which means it just plain gets a lot of things wrong about physiology.
Also, while it rates levels of desire as “small, middling, intense” (pretty straightforward), it has a really bizarre categorization for size, “stallion/elephant, bull/mare, hare/doe”. Now that just makes no fucking sense, pardon the pun. Stallions evolved to have sex with mares; their genitals correspond, you idiots. Also, elephants and hares come in both sexes. If you want to use animal comparisons (which are obviously exaggerated), here’s a much more logical system: “stallion/mare, bull/cow, dog/vixen”. Or, you know, you could just go with, “small, medium, large”. In fact, there are at least two independent dimensions of size involved here (three geometrically, but the transverse dimensions tend to be strongly correlated), where girth is often much more important than length. And then there are shape considerations as well.
I’ll tell you what I do like about the Kama Sutra’s size system however: It focuses on compatibility. In our own society we seem to think that a huge penis and a tight vagina are objectively the best; but see, those don’t actually fit well together–in fact, sometimes they literally do not fit at all. Men with small penises shouldn’t be made to feel bad; they should instead find women with small vaginas. Likewise, women with large vaginas shouldn’t be put down, they should find men with large penises. The Kama Sutra gets this right, and while it describes the combination of large penis with small vagina as “high union”, it explains that “high union” is not nearly as good as “equal union” in which the two fit comfortably. Likewise, it doesn’t tell men to “last longer” or women to “come faster” (as so many pills falsely advertise today); it says that different people take different lengths of time to reach orgasm, and you should look for someone whose timing is compatible with yours. To be perfectly honest, I sometimes wish I didn’t take as long as I do; I literally have to schedule around it, and can’t just do the five-minute quickie some people can. Soon we will probably have medications that can actually modulate orgasm timing, but it’s not obvious to me what the best time would be, other than aligning with your partner’s.
The Kama Sutra also doesn’t talk about any of the risks of sex, either psychological (e.g. heartbreak) or biological (e.g. infection). It presents an idealized vision of sex as always perfect and beautiful, and thus doesn’t prepare the reader for the very real risks and disappointments that sex can involve. Admittedly, I prefer this to the way most sex education classes are presented, in which sex is depicted entirely in terms of risks, harms, and dangers. But still, sex does carry real risks, and we should be honest about them.
The Kama Sutra is most famous for its sexual positions, and some of what it recommends are really bizarre, difficult, and I must imagine not terribly comfortable or pleasurable. Then again, it’s written by the same class of mystics who brought us yoga, so maybe they’re writing for an audience well trained in bodily flexibility. For those of us who don’t bend in those directions, it would be nice to have a spiritual sex manual that focuses on more traditional positions, like missionary, cowgirl, and doggystyle.
Also useful would be an integration of queer sexuality: gay sex, lesbian sex, polyamory, pegging, kink, and so on. Teach people that queer sexuality is really not so queer, that most people are “deviant” in some ways and most of this “deviance” is utterly harmless. Largely gone are the days when straight people literally don’t know how to have sex (Kinsey wrote about a few such couples he interviewed), but gay and especially lesbian couples still have this problem sometimes. It doesn’t help when sex education classes barely even mention homosexuality and provide detailed information about the vas deferens and fallopian tubes without even the briefest mention of how to have anal or oral sex. Instead of an education about sexuality, we get one about reproductive physiology. This would be rather like having a culinary arts class and spending the whole time talking about the function of the intestinal tract.
I think the reason we don’t talk about these things is that we fear teenagers will have sex more if we tell them how to do it properly. There’s actually no evidence to support this (rates of teenage sex do not increase when comprehensive sex education is introduced [citation]), but even if it were true… so what? Suppose it really were the case that when we teach teenagers how to make sex safer and more fun, they have more sex, because it’s safer and more fun. What would be bad about that?
To me, that feels like saying, “If you give kids helmets, they’ll ride bicycles more.” Yes, that may be true; and the problem is? I think the unstated assumption, the implicature we’re all supposed to read between the lines, is sex is bad; so obviously more sex would be a bad thing. But I simply don’t see it that way! More infection is certainly bad, and more pregnancy could be bad (especially unwanted pregnancy), and even more heartbreak could be bad… but more sex? If you have reduced the risks, you’ve reduced the risks, and I thought that was the whole point.
This is actually how I feel about risk compensation in general; it’s often argued that safety features don’t really do anything, because people provided with safety features often take more risks [citation]. But they take more risks and get more benefits, which is why they do it. Install airbags, and we drive faster; but that means we get where we are going sooner. (And if you don’t see why arriving sooner is worth risking injury or death… why don’t you walk everywhere you go? Or just stay home for that matter?) Moral hazard is a real danger–when my actions incur risk to you, we have a problem–but risk compensation just means that people are willing to take risks to get benefits, and as well they should be. I don’t mean to imply that all risks people actually take are rational; far from this, plenty obviously aren’t, like smoking, football, binge drinking, and indeed reckless driving. But some risks are rational, and risk compensation is not inherently a bad thing.
There are some modern books that do a fairly good job of explaining sexuality honestly and usefully, like The Joy of Sex, The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality, The Guide to Getting it On, and Sex: A Book for Teens. But none are comprehensive, and I can’t think of any text that does a good job of taking seriously the transcendent component of sexual psychology without falling into ludicrous mysticism. (And indeed, the Kama Sutra falls headlong into ludicrous mysticism.)
In fact, it’s rare to find a book that talks about spiritual transcendence at all without this sort of lapse into ridiculousness, but there are a few: Spinoza, Einstein, Bertrand Russell, David Bohm, Carl Sagan, and lately Sam Harris. Yet I’ve seen hardly any yet that talk about sexuality explicitly in those terms, probably because they are afraid of puritanical backlash. This is how religion controls us: It takes away our real joy and then offers us imaginary substitutes. It’s a brilliant scam, really.
Perhaps I should write this new sex manual, a Kama Sutra for the twenty-first century. Of course, I still have two novels in progress, a finished nonfiction book seeking publication, and another nonfiction book in draft stage, not to mention short stories…
