For Wendy Doniger, a University of Chicago professor who has written extensively on Hinduism, Redeeming the Kamasutra is a response to unwarranted attacks on the book—both from Western critics who find it demeaning to women and Hindu fundamentalists who want to expunge sexuality from their tradition. Doniger packs many ideas into her slender book, starting with the historical context of Kamasutra and arguing that—despite its patriarchal setting—“it was intended to be used by women, and has much to offer women even today.”
Notorious as a handbook for impossible sexual feats, the Kamasutra is a puzzle of paradoxes, seeming to license and criticize male profligacy while imagining women’s perspectives more thoroughly than “the psychologizing of novelists like Gustave Flaubert and John Updike.” And, it offers women tips on how to rid themselves of unwanted men that remain applicable today.
