Kamasutra
Page 34
43 One man making love with many women who are fond of one another is like a bull in a herd of cows.
44 A man can take his pleasure with women in the water like an elephant with elephant cows. And just as one man can have sex with two women or many women, so a woman can have sex with two men or many men. For ‘sex in a cluster’ also intends to indicate sex between one woman and a cluster of men, such as two men embraced by one woman playing the man’s part. And in ‘sex with a herd of bulls’, one woman acts like a cow with a herd of men as bulls.
6 Whimpering is a nasal sound, rising above the throat and nose, sweetly echoing. Groaning is like the deep rumble of a cloud, coming out of the throat. Crying is well known, and should be heart-rending. Panting is another name for ‘sighing’. He will explain babbling, shrieking, and sobbing [15, 17, and 18]. These seven are indistinct sounds.
11 This is done when she is on her back. He strikes her between her breasts, because this is above the heart, one of a woman’s three seats of passion (the others being the head and the sexual organ). The passion even of a long-lasting woman whose sexual energy is fierce is quelled when she is slapped in those places.
14 She protests if she does not find pleasure in being slapped with the back of the hand but wants a different kind of slapping. His fingers are slightly bent, in the shape of a cobra’s hood.
15 When he strikes her with the ‘outstretched hand’, she babbles inside her mouth, with her throat closed, making an indistinct sound. Then she sobs, with the root of the tongue and with an open throat.
16 When the sex ends, the fluids are used up and there is exhaustion.
19 For, ‘Respond to an act with a counter-act’ [2.4.32].
20 Passion nears its end when he senses, from his penis, that his climax is near. He beats her on her sides beneath the armpits.
21 When he strikes her with the flat palm of his hand, she begins to babble.
23 Sometimes, but not always, there is an exchange when they make love, out of the pull of passion or according to the practice of the place. Then the woman abandons her own ways and changes to what the man has a natural talent for, doing the slapping, while the man abandons his own way, of slapping the woman, and takes up her ways, moaning and screaming. But after a short time, they change back. And in the absence of passion or this particular technique, they do it just as before, and there is no occasion to switch.
28 He embraced Chitrasena so tightly, at the start of their love-making, that she suffered greatly, because she was so delicate. And even when he realized her condition, and knew that she had to be handled delicately, he was so blind with passion that he did not take account of his own strength and destroyed her by using a ‘wedge’ on her chest.
29 Shatakarna’s son Shatavahana, born in the territory of Kuntala, saw his queen, Malayavati, one day when she had not long recovered from an illness and did not have her full strength, but was dressing for the festival of Kama. Passion arose in him and he made love to her, but his mind was carried away by passion and by using an excessively powerful ‘scissor’ on her chest, he killed her.
30 Naradeva was the general of the Pandya king. His hand had been deformed by a blow from a sword. When he saw Chitralekha, a dancing girl, dancing at the king’s residence, his passion was aroused, and when he made love with her, blind with passion, he used the ‘drill’ clumsily because of his lame hand; he missed her cheek and instead hit her eye, blinding her in that eye. The ‘tongs’ is not mentioned here, because by its very nature it is not too dangerous.
35 As for the part of the body: the place between the breasts can be slapped with the back of the hand, the head slapped with the outstretched hand, and so forth. As for the region: slapping is for a woman from Malava, oral sex for a woman from Abhira, and so forth. And as for the time: when he is inside her, he can slap her with the back of his hand; when she is seated on his lap, he can slap her with his fist, and so forth.
5 There is no third way. In the interval, he withdraws his penis, and then she begins from the very start in the man’s part.
6 Her breathing is hard because of the unaccustomed activity and her exhaustion. She joins her face to his, and bends her head down, in shame, not in order to kiss or bite him. She uses the ‘embrace of breasts’ [2.2.25]. All of this activity is said to be done with a woman’s natural talent [2.7.22]. The acts he demonstrated before are acts that he executed with roughness and ferocity, the man’s natural talent; she now does these acts against the current of her own natural talent. She hits him hard, with the back of her hand and so forth, demonstrating her ferocity. And so, in order to express the woman’s natural talent, even though she is not embarrassed, nor exhausted, and does not wish to stop, she indicates that she is embarrassed and exhausted and wishes to stop.
‘Playing the man’s part’ (purushayitva) takes two forms, external and internal. This passage explains the first kind, the behaviour of a woman acting like a man (purusha). But ‘playing the man’s part’ also refers to a man’s sexual strokes (purusha-upasarpanam), and a woman can do these, too. When the man is the active one it is called ‘a man’s sexual strokes’ and when a woman is the active one it is called ‘playing the man’s part’.
7 There are two kinds of sexual strokes of a man, external and internal. To describe the external strokes, he says the next passage.
9 He becomes hard because his passion is aroused. If her passion, too, is aroused, the action can succeed. But if not, then to arouse her passion, he touches the woman with his hand, on her armpits, thighs, breasts, and so forth.
10 Her thighs are tightly pressed together out of embarrassment; he caresses them to make her open them.
11 Her breasts are tightly pressed together by the corset made of her arms.
13 A loose woman is one whose boldness is full-blown and who does whatever she wants, indulging in sex without shame. The meaning here is that she is the one who makes the advances.
15 Now he describes the internal sexual strokes of a man. When he is inside her making love, he observes how she moves in reaction to the external sexual strokes in order to determine how to stroke her with the internal ones.
16 When she feels his penis moving in a certain spot inside her vagina, the pleasure of that touch makes her eyes whirl around in a circle; he strokes her with his penis very hard on that very spot, and from that pressure she quickly achieves her sexual ecstasy. This remains secret because women do not make it known. There is some argument about this. Some people say that, when the man is stroking inside her, whatever place the woman looks at, either specifically or vaguely, that is the place where he should press her. Others say that, if she looks at many places, he should press her in one place after another. Or, whatever place she looks at very hard is the place where he should press her very hard.
17 She takes him very deeply inside her by attaching her sexual organ to his extremely closely, and that is a sign that she has reached her climax or is very close.
18 The sign of a climax that has been ignited (but not quenched) is that, when the man has reached his climax, she is still active with her own vagina.
19 He notices how she is moving before he enters her, and realizes that if he himself reaches his climax first, then the emotional flow of her climax will be interrupted. Women’s vaginas are said to be of four kinds:
The best part of a woman
is like a lotus petal to touch inside,
or like a small globe, or wrinkled,
or rough as a cow’s tongue.
All but the first kind need to be agitated because the itch is so extensive. For when her vagina has become soft and wet, she reaches her climax quickly once he moves around inside her. Thus it is said:
The ring finger and the index finger,
joined with the middle finger closely at the tip,
form an artifice so like the tip of an elephant’s trunk
that people have given it that name.
22 He rotates his penis deep inside her va
gina, as if he were churning.
23 He lowers her hips and thrusts from above into the top part of the inside of her vagina, with his penis like a dagger.
24 He thrusts from below into the lower part of her vagina, violently, because the itch is most extensive in the lower part of the vagina.
25 He penetrates with his penis right to the very root, continuing for as long as the penis is able to rise up and sink down.
30 This is the time of the actual state of ejaculation.
33 She uses the lips of the vagina as a tongs.
34 With his penis inside her vagina, she bends her knees to put her feet on the man’s chest and whirls around like a potter’s wheel, supporting her body with her hands.
35 To make it easier for her to do the ‘spinning top’, and to keep his penis from slipping out, the man raises his own pelvis upward.
36 She swings forward and back, and from side to side. But if she twists around in a full circle, it is a variation of ‘churning’.
37 She does this so that his penis does not slip out of her, when passion is not yet extinguished.
41 If she has her period, she may not conceive; or, on the other hand, if the man gets on top again and she does conceive, a little boy and little girl may be born with reversed natures.* If she has recently given birth, uterine blood may flow out. If she is a ‘doe’, a ‘bull’ or ‘stallion’ may split her apart. If she is pregnant, she may have a miscarriage. And if she is very fat, it is not possible for her to make active sexual strokes.
9 She teases him, saying, ‘You are so easy to excite, you get an erection just from being touched on your thighs!’
10 If he does not say, ‘Excite me with your mouth’, despite the clear sign of an erection caused by being touched where the thighs join the torso and on the penis, and when it is known that he can be excited by oral sex, she makes advances without being urged on.
16 She holds it with her hand to keep it from bending down, forms her lips into a ring, and pierces her mouth with the tip of it.
17 She makes her hand into a fist.
18 When he urges her to bite the sides, or to do something else, she closes her lips around the glans. Then she sucks it out and releases it again, using her lips like a tongs outside the foreskin.
19 When she is performing the ‘outer tongs’, he presses further inside her mouth. This is the ‘inner tongs’ because her mouth acts like a tongs on the glans without its sheath.
20 Once it is no longer covered by the foreskin, she grasps it as she would grasp his lower lip with her two lips.
21 She pierces the glans, on the opening hole, with the tip of her tongue.
22 In this state, the glans is no longer covered by the foreskin.
26 It is forbidden by dharma texts: ‘Do not ejaculate in a mouth.’ For if he performs in the mouth of one of these women (the promiscuous woman and the others) the act that should be done in the vagina, then, at the time when the act is done in the vagina, if he again touches her mouth, in the throes of passion, he himself will be disturbed, saying, ‘I have been debauched’, but the woman will not be disturbed by this.
27 Promiscuous women and so forth are varieties of courtesans. Oral sex is not a mistake on the grounds of being opposed by the moral code. It is, however, a mistake to have oral sex with one’s wife. As Vasishtha says:
‘But a man who copulates
in the mouth of his wife
causes his ancestors to starve
for fifteen years.’*
But it should be avoided for other reasons: because it is not done in proper society, because of the dangers involved in contact with the mouth, because it is done secretly, and because one also eats food with the mouth. But it might not be a mistake for someone according to the customs of a particular region, and therefore might not have to be avoided.
29 Even though they have never seen or heard of oral sex, they still imagine it among these women. When they do somehow make love with these women, in the throes of passion, they avoid the act of the mouth with them, that is, kissing them.
30 In making love or doing the act of the mouth with courtesans, they do not think about what is pure and not pure.
31 The city is Pataliputra.
32 They do everything: love-making, oral sex, and the act of the mouth.
36 Certain men-about-town, the ones who are practically women, take one another, in friendship, and give one another the sensual pleasure of ejaculation. They say, ‘You do it for me now, and I will do it for you later.’ Or both of them do it at the same time, by turning their bodies head to foot, losing all sense of time because of their passion. Thus there are two ways of doing it. Women, too, can do this. As it is said:
‘Certain women in the harem,
unable to get any tools,
trusting in one another, excite one another
with their mouth on the vagina.’
38 At the same moment, each has a mouth on the sexual organ of the other. The man and the woman are like crows because they are taking something unclean in the mouth.
43 These practices, of oral sex, can be done just like kissing a mouth.
45 Oral sex is secret, and people are especially fickle when passion is involved.
4 The remaining arts are sketching and so forth.
12 It is said of the ‘plough-handle’ (Hallishaka):
The ‘plough-handle’ is a dance
with the women in a circle
and one man the leader,
like Krishna with the cow-herd women.*
18 The man stimulates both his own passion and the woman’s.
19 Their particular goal might be to gain something, or to reverse a loss, but they are not acting out of passion. The woman may be attached to another man, and the man to another woman.
21 A woman can do this too.
22 A coarse servant is a ‘non-male’ who has the characteristics of both sexes.
24 This is similar to the kind of sex just described because it, too, involves sex with someone quite unlike the man.
27 He plays her false by going to the house of a co-wife, or sending betel and so forth to that woman, or making love with her; the woman who is fond of him cannot bear it if the man is unfaithful.
28 Sleeping on the floor means that she is not sleeping with him.
29 He does not reveal any emotional disturbance.
35 Their learning and conversations are about the three aims of human life.
36 These conversations are about the Kamasutra.
37 Wise men, who know the three aims of human life, rejoice in this triad because it is a means of protecting women. The dregs of society delight in it because it explains the way things actually are for them; the courtesans de luxe, because that is how they make their living. People call the Kamasutra by this name because it gives them delight.*
38 Women love it because it brings joy to them, especially. It brings fortune, because all householders use it; success, because, like magic, it gives power over people; and luck in love, because it makes both a woman and a man lucky in love.
39 Second-hand women are subsumed under other men’s wives.* He might have said ‘courtesan’ instead of ‘courtesan de luxe’, but he wanted to indicate that she is a woman skilled in the sixty-four arts of love.
4 The two sides are those of the mother and the father.
7 The other friends, also dressed as fortune-tellers, say, ‘They want to give him the rich, beautiful, and highly esteemed daughter of this general. And so we have been asked to consider the fit between the two horoscopes, tomorrow.’
8 Fate consists in the good and bad karma amassed in previous lives, especially as revealed by the planets and constellations.
11 A pimply girl is one marked with whiteheads, a condition which destroys wealth and kills her husband. A bull-like girl looks like a man and has a bad nature. When a girl starts menstruating, the blood breaks her maidenhead. She should not be less than three years younger. For it is said:
a recommended virgin who is
four to eight years younger,
or else she is too old.
12 He should avoid such names as Kamalu, Vimalu, Caru, and Taru.
14 The people of the girl’s faction also do all this at the time of courtship.
17 They say, ‘It is in the lap of the Lord of Creatures.’ And, ‘Let us carry out the tests with the help of our friends and relations.’
19 As it is said:
In a wedding in the manner of the god Brahma,
a man summons his well-adorned daughter and gives her away.
In a wedding in the manner of the Lord of Creatures,
a man says, ‘May the two of you together fulfil your dharma?
In the manner of the Sages,
he gives wealth and a cow and bull.
But in the manner of the Gods,
he gives her to a priest performing the ritual at the altar.
22 His in-laws are his father-in-law, brother-in-law, and so forth.
2 There are two kinds of maidens, those ready for sex and those not ready. The trust of the first sort is won by paying attention to the act of love-making, and of the second sort, by taking care to dispel her fear and embarrassment.
3 If he does not speak or move, she thinks, ‘I have married a dumb peasant!’
8 Once he has embraced her in this way, he can stop immediately, before it begins to upset her.
28 Within the three nights, he does these things but does not break his vows. He penetrates her from the fourth day on, and gives her sexual pleasure without upsetting her.
29 He teaches her the sixty-four techniques.
31 If he rubs her the right way too much, this establishes the path for the future, too, and from this obstacle to his own wishes he fails to achieve his object. If, however, he rubs her the wrong way too much, from that moment all her passion cools, and how can he achieve his object?