The initial passage defining 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. In addition, a ‘doe’ may use drugs to expand herself: ‘An ointment made of powdered white lotus, blue lotus, “morningstar” tree blossoms, rose dammar blossoms, and marjoram makes a “doe” open wide.’īut the ‘doe’ is the favoured woman, the ideal erotic partner it is in other couplings, when the man is smaller than the woman, that male anxiety about phallic size raises its head, and the problems are not so easily resolved. A ‘doe’ generally has three positions to choose from: the ‘wide open’, the ‘yawning’, or the ‘Junoesque’. When the man is larger than the woman, the problem is relatively easily solved:Īt 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. When the Kamasutra describes the possible positions, it uses these animal types as its basic referents for size. (The elephant cow, the biggest, is the only animal to survive as a classificatory type in the much later Kokashastra, which speaks of four types of women: Lotus Woman, Art Woman, Conch Woman, and Elephant Woman ). And so there are three equal couplings, between sexual partners of similar size, and six unequal ones, between sexual partners of dissimilar size.Ĭlearly the six paradigmatic animals are chosen for their size, and they do not match: a hare is smaller than a doe, a bull smaller than a mare, and a stallion smaller than elephant cow.
The man is called a ‘hare’, ‘bull’, or ‘stallion’, according to the size of his sexual organ a woman, however, is called a ‘doe’, ‘mare’, or ‘elephant cow’. The passage describing genital size, and its significance, is placed at a critical moment at the very start of the part of the Kamasutra describing the sexual act:
And here again, as in so many of the other apparent parallels, we veer back and forth between conceptions of what is perceived as part of nature or part of culture. One link between ancient India and the contemporary world is male anxiety about penis size, which remains a prevalent obsession on the Internet. We have noted the ways in which the Kamasutra veers between attitudes that strike the contemporary reader as reasonable and others that seem to find no parallels in the modern world. This excerpt from The Mare’s Trap tells us how much size mattered in ancient India. From alternatives to Viagra to the question of why there’s such an overwhelmingly zoological aura to sex in Kamasutra, sex is a complicated but pleasurable affair in Vatsyayana’s masterpiece. In The Mare’s Trap, Doniger writes about Kamasutra, analysing different facets of the ancient text and showing how it is much more than a list of improbable sexual positions. Editor's note: Wendy Doniger, author of The Hindus and the pin-up favourite of Hindutva trolls, is back.