Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Kamasutra: The Ancient Playboy Manual

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Most people would assume that the Kamasutra is a book of hundreds of fantastical sex positions.They would partly be right, but mostly wrong!Sex is a small part of this ancient text, which includes fascinating insights into 3rd century Indian culture. It also includes some extremely modern-sounding advice on how to dump a boring husband.What happened in the Victorian era that made us think it was a catalogue of sex positions? What are some of the more feminist-leanings it features? And how has it survived all these years?Taking us through the Kamasutra today is the legendary Wendy Doniger, author of Redeeming the Kamasutra.This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here. You are here. We are all here and now I have to give you a fair do's warning. Here it is.

This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things, covering a range of adult subjects in an adulty way. And you should be an adult too. I don't know about you, but I certainly feel safer, continuing with this podcast, on with the show. It's the third century, AD, and you have got yourself a very boring boyfriend that, frankly, you would rather be shot of.

But it is not that easy to elbow your affianced or your partner or your husband at this particular time period. So what are you going to do? Who are you going to ask for advice? Well, one source, if your Sanskrit is up to screen, of course, and if you were privileged enough to know how to read, it was the Karma Sutra. We often think of this as a text to tell you how to have sex with people, but that is such a

tiny, tiny part of it. One of the things it gives you some advice on is how to dump a partner. I hope you're all taking notes out there. Here we go. If your boyfriend is boring and you want him to, well, basically dump you first, it advises that a woman talks about things her partner doesn't know about. To show no amazement and only contempt for the things that he does know about. I mean, that's gold, isn't it? That would still work today. It advises her to talk in public about the bad habits he can't give up.

And to criticise men with the same faults when they're alone together. And in the end, the text assures us, the release will happen all by itself. I'm not surprised. Truly a sacred text. And as we will find out, there's so much more to it than sex and even relationship advice. There is so much in this book to get into.

Let's do it. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy. does make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful dance. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. For many people, the Karma Sutra was and is an acceptable sexual text, full of illustrations of such acrobatic sex positions that you're not even sure if you're holding that book the right way up. But the truth is, the sex part of the Karma Sutra is actually heinie.

and in many ways the least interesting part of it. Joining me today to delve into its pages is Wendy Donaga, all-round legend and author of Redeeming the Karma Sutra. Why do we see this ancient book through such a limited sexualized lens? What impact did the Victorians have on its legacy and what are some of the more pro-feminist passages in there? I am ready to get into this if you are. And welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Wendy Doneger. How are you doing? I'm well and I'm very glad to be on this program. I miss England very much and it's nice to be in touch with people in England again. I am so thrilled to have you here because you probably won't remember this because you get so many emails about your work on the Kama Sutra. But when I was writing my book, A Curious History of Sex. I desperately needed to know if there was a Sanskrit word for the clitoris in the karmus suture.

And I emailed you and you were so lovely and responded and gave me all this information about clitorises and karmus sutras. And it was just amazing. And I've put a big shout out. Thank you to you in my book for doing that. Thank you. I'm glad I was able to help. Do you get lots of random emails like that from people who want to know about the kama sutra? I did a lot when the book was first published.

And after that, I get questions, once a month or two, something like that. They still come through, what is this? And do the Hindus know about that and things like that? Wow. So you have worked on Sanskrit and the Kama Sutra for years and years and years. But the book that we're talking about today, another one, is your book redeeming the Kama Sutra.

So I suppose my first question is, what brought you to the Kama Sutra? as an area of study, what was your origin story with this? Well, before I did redeeming the Kama Sutra, I published a translation of the Kamasutra with my colleague Sudhir Kakar. And that we thought was going to replace the Burton, the flawed Burton translation, which is the way most English-speaking people know it.

To my sad disappointment, the Burton translations out of copyrighting is free, and anyone people are just used to it, And so people are still reading the Burm, and not reading ours as much as I wish they would. But some people are reading it, and it's much more accurate. But, you know, all the books I've written about starting with my first book in 19, what was it, 72, long time ago, before you were born, I've been interested called Shiva the Erotic Assetic. So I was always interested in the erotic side of Hinduism and the ascetic side. The way it's not just some people are crazy about sex and other people go and meditate and don't eat fish and things like that.

It was that it was the same world, that there were the same people who had these ideas about the importance of eroticism and the importance of asceticism, that they weren't too warring camps. Yeah. Or part of the same god Shiva, the great god Shiva. And so it was there from the start in its Indian context. and I read the Kama Sutura when I was beginning Sanskrit, and I knew it, and it's quoted in various places. So I kept bumping into it. And then finally, I got so fed up with the Burton translation

that I thought it's got to be a better translation to that. So I did it with the help of my colleague and good friend, Sidiya Kaka, and it was great. And then when I realized what resistance there was to the Kama Sutra in India, that it was treated as a dirty book in India, which was such a shame. Part of my general war on Modi's India and the contemporary politics, the anti-Muslim politics, the anti-woman politics of India. So part of that reaction against the way that modern Indians,

under the influence of the BJP, didn't appreciate their own culture and didn't appreciate the Khamasuf and regarded it as a shame, a shameful thing. I said, I'd do something like this. So I wrote the beginning the Kama Sutra book. I'm so glad that you did. And your translation of the Karmat Shed, that was what prompted me to write you that email

was because I read Burton's translation of the Kama Sutra thinking this is an accurate translation, why wouldn't you? And then I read yours and I realized that Burton had used the word clitoris and you had not. And I was, ah, oh shit, right, okay. And I mean, I'm going to assume there are much bigger differences between the two than just the use of the word clitoris. But for you, when you were translating it,

what was really jumping out at you as, wow, this is very different from the Burton translation that people are so familiar with? Well, first of all, Burton did not write the Burton translation. Burton wrote the Arabianites. He knew Arabic. He didn't know Sanskrit. So he was at the mercy of two intermediaries along the way.

So it's like a game of telephone. You're going to lose it as you go along. the way. But the thing that made me most cross about it was the way that he treated women and that the book had a reputation as being sexist for the use of men who want to dominate women and so forth. Whereas in the Sandsford text, the women are really important and have very loud voices which were cut out or dimmed or mistranslated. So it wasn't so much the clitoris and the physical part of it, which Britain got by and large correct, although not all. but the social context of it.

It's about men and women getting along in all sorts of ways besides in bed. And the women are really quite, they have a voice in the Kama Sutra. And the Kama Sutra's reputation as a sexist book, kind of like a playboy handbook, was so unfair that I wanted to redeem it in that sense. And I wanted to give it back to Indians to say, you can really like this book. You can be proud of this book. It's part of your great contribution to the literature of the world. So I wanted to redeem it for women and for contemporary Indians.

Do you think that the image of the Kama Sutra in popular culture, it's kind of morphed into something that isn't even related to the original text in many ways? When you think of it, people think of acrobatic sex and they think of sex manuals and they think of really elaborate images and elaborate drawings. but does that come from Burton's translation primarily, or is that sort of more of a more modern Western interpretation of like this kind of very sexualized image of India and Indian culture? More the latter.

First of all, the section on the positions in the Kama Sutra is perhaps one-twentyth, one-fifth of the book. It's just part of chapter two. It's only a very small part of it. And even chapter two is not where you put your left hand in your left foot. It's a lot about a lot of other things as well. The whole rest of the book is about how men and women interact in society, how you meet people, how you approach a girl to marry her, how courtisans live, how they decide what men to sleep with and what men not to sleep. The last book is how you use drugs.

I mean, it's all about the life of pleasure so that it's just a little tiny percentage of that. But we're talking about Victorian Indy, England at the time. And there's a wonderful book called The Other Victorians. I've forgotten the name of the author, but I can look it up. But it's about Victorian pornography. About the other side of the coin, the Victorians, who wouldn't say the word leg of a leg of a table, all that don't show your legs, all that Victorian stuff,

that it also had the nastiest whorehouses and the nastiest pornography and all that kind of stuff. They did, yes. that's Burton's India too and Burton loved the dirty stuff he loved the dirty stuff in Arabic too he collected erotic stuff so what he liked about it

was that brief pornographic section and that's what got into the culture as a whole also it was one of the few dirty books you could read I remember when I was young when anyone went to Paris you asked them to bring back a copy of the Kama Sutra because it was not yet available legally in the United States.

It was like James Joyce, you know, it was naughty, Ulysses, and so forth. So it was a naughty book. And no one ever really noticed what was in it. They just did cartoons of women with one leg over their head and yellow leg in behind them and all of that. So partly because of Victorian culture, partly because of the culture of censorship. For a long time, when the commissoutesuits was translated into German, for instance,

is a good translation. The parts that deal with the sexual act are left in Latin. Ha ha ha, right. So it was part of a culture of both pornography and the suppression of normal, decent writing about sexuality. And it got a reputation, which it still has. So people miss all the good stuff in it. So take me back to, because its origins are quite mysterious as well, aren't they? Like, do we know who wrote it?

Do we know when they wrote it? Where they wrote it? This book kind of materialized from somewhere. Well, we know something. It was probably written in the third century in North India. The author quotes coming from Pataliputra, which is the modern city of Patna, a northern Indian city. It's a book written in a city. He has a lot of scorn for country bumpkins.

The author refers to previous books that he drew upon. This is the first one we have. And then other texts quote him. So we know pretty much what century he lived in, probably the third century in, India. Paintings from the Kama Sutra occur throughout North India all through the years. Someone had a Kama Sutura because there were paintings of it, painting illustrations of it. And then finally, it really surfaced in the 19th century largely through Burton's efforts. So we've got to give him a juice for that, I suppose. In India, with the moist climate, the heat, the red ants,

manuscripts don't last more than a couple hundred years. Wow. I have a Sanskrit text that was written in the third century, it had to have been copied continuously. So it was kept alive. Someone cared about it. So for people that are listening, and like I said, the Karma Sutra's got a reputation as being a sex manual, but what is the book actually about? Is it a story?

Does it have a narrator? Is it just written as a third person guide to life? What is the Karma Sutra? It's not a storybook, although it progresses. There's a first chapter on how a man should set up his bedroom. The second chapter is how he finds a girl to marry. The third chapter is how he behaves, but the third chapter is how you treat a bride on the wedding night. You don't jump her the first night. You talk to her at several nights. You sleep with her, but you don't have sex with her. No, no, no,

about how to treat a bride. Then the fourth chapter is how to run a household if you're a wife. what vegetables you should plant in the garden, how you should treat your servants, what you do if there are several different wives, how you maintain your political power in the household, you bring presents for the children of the other wives. Smart. Absolutely smart stuff.

What you do if your husband is sleeping with the other wives and not sleeping with you, what you do to get him back, you cook things that he likes that the other women can't cook? Always been the same. It's about what? life. It's about life like that. Then the fifth chapter is about how to commit adultery. And it basically tells you how to tell when a married woman is likely to adultery with you. Oh my goodness. Hard to do because the punishment for an adulterous woman was to be torn apart by dogs in the

public square. I mean, you really were not supposed to commit a dog. Men were. So it tells you how you can tell what sort of married woman might actually take that chance. And it's things like A woman who has no children, a woman whose children have died young, a woman who's married to a man who's stupider than she is and embarrasses her in public all the time. A woman is married to a man who smells bad. A woman is married to a man who travels and is out of town a lot. A woman who really was promised and married to another man, but then it fell through so she had to marry this one. It's a whole psychology of unhappy marriage from the standpoint of the woman. sympathizing with this woman, how unhappy she must be to take the considerable risk of committing

adultery and ancient Indian when she can be killed for it. And it's like a feminist passage. It's just like a handbook of what women put up with when they have inadequate husbands. And it's very, very, very sympathetic to women. See, it's so funny because it sounds so modern as well. Like those all actually seem, I'm not advocating adultery, but those would all seem to be reasons why somebody might be unhappy in a marriage and quite, quite fair ones. I mean, the risk that these women were taken to do it was, that was considerable. A portrait of an unhappy marriage. And then book six is about cousins. And you would think, well, very few of us who read this book actually perform sexual acts for money. It's not only about us. But it's really about women who

are independent, a business woman maybe, a woman who had her own business and didn't have to marry for money. It didn't have to marry for someone their parents wanted them to marry, but could choose the guy they wanted, which wasn't true of other women. So the cortisans chapter tells you what you look for in a guy, how you choose between a guy who has a lot of money, but you really don't like him and a guy who doesn't have what's money at all, but he's really great and you love him. Oh, what does it say? What's the advice for that? That's a fairly pertinent question to today's audience, I'm sure. And then there's a wonderful section, how you get rid of a man you're tired of without actually kicking him out. Right, I'm taking notes, Wendy. Go for it. Tell me.

She does for him what he does not want in bed, and she does repeatedly what he has criticized. She talks about things he doesn't know about. She shows no amazement, but only contempt for the things he does know about. When he's talking, she looks at her friends with glances. When she's interrupted his story, she tells other stories, she talks in public about the bad habits that he can't give up, she ignores him, she criticizes men who have the same

faults and she stalls when they're alone together. And at the end, the release happens all by itself. That's amazing. And very useful. How do you get rid of someone without actually kicking him? That's advice about how to just make a man stop fancying you and to make

him not want to be with you anymore. That's right. Wow. Very useful. You don't want to say, actually, I don't want to go away. There are reasons why women might not want to do that. So it seems for what you're saying, that women were the audience of the Kama Sutra. They weren't just pornographic characters within it. Whoever wrote it must have been assuming women are going to read this. They're writing for women. It was definitely for women. It even says so. Someone might say, well, women can't read Sanskrit, so they can't know what's in the Kama Sutra. and the author says absolutely not. It's very important for women to know what's in this book.

Even if they can't read Sanskrit, they might have a friend who knows Sanskrit, and besides, people talk about it. You can learn what's in a text from people who have read it, and a woman needs to know all of this stuff, and I've written it because I think women should know what's in this text. So it's definitely written for women, even though most women in ancient India did not know Sanskrit. But they said it's word of mouth.

Someone's read it. She'll tell you about it. An auntie or princesses learned. There were women who did learn Sanssuit and said, you get to one of them. And then it gets into the culture. People talk about it. So even people who haven't read,

they can tell you what they've heard is in it, and you should listen to them. So he wanted women to read it. I'll be back with Wendy after this short break. So if it's written by a man from male perspective, does he talk to male readers about their relationship with women and how they should treat women? He does indeed. There's a wonderful section in the section on marriage on the wedding night where he says she's frightened.

Don't jump her right away. Talk to her about other things. The first night you might not even touch her at all. The second night you might just caress her and give her a glass of wine and so forth. And eventually you try very simple things. And then if she likes that, you might try something a little more elaborate. So he's definitely talking to men. Indeed, in the same. section which I read, which I like, a much section on how you tell a married woman might commit adultery with you. It's trying to judge what a woman likes and how you can get to know her and so forth. There's also a section on how you meet a bride when you meet her family before you're getting married and the prospective bride, what you should do when you meet the family

and how you should behave to make them like you. You know, the word comma does not mean sex. It means pleasure. So there are basically. three goals of life in ancient India. Dharma, Arta, and Kama. It's like everybody knows this. Dharma is the world of social justice, doing the right thing, learning the rules,

going to church or temple as the case may be, behaving yourself like that. As a family person, marrying the right kind of person, raising your kids, that's all Dharma. Arta is money and political success. It's how to outsmart people.

If you're a king, how to manipulate other kings. It's very Machiavellian than Machiavelli. It's a very, the science of art is the science of how to make money, how to make power, and so forth. Everyone should have some of that, just as everyone should have some of the social justice world of Dharma. And the third thing that every life should have is karma, which means pleasure. It means wearing a silk dress instead of a cotton dress. It means cool places to swim on a hot night, good food, good music, how to appreciate good dancing, good music, having a nice house instead of a not nice house.

And that's considered a legitimate goal of human life, along with making money and doing the right thing. So the commiss wreath is about that. The whole first book is about how to set up your room, what kind of food you serve at a party, how you invite people to parties at your house. forth. It's the good life for a well-to-do person, not necessarily upper caste, but you need money to lead the life of the Kamas Sutra. And this is a guy who never visits his mother, apparently, who just lives for pleasure, never goes to the shop, you never see him in the office. He wakes up in the morning, and he has a bath, and somebody shaves him, and da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. They tell you how to set the bedroom up afterwards. He says there should be two bathrooms,

because you both want to look each other because you're a wreck. So she'll go to her bathroom to clean up and you'll go to your bathroom to clean up. That's good advice. So it's about the life of pleasure of a privileged person, not necessarily high caste. I was just about to ask you about class and how that plays out in the Karma Sutra. Because from what I've read of it, like you're saying that to live this life, you must have a lot of money. This isn't a guy who's going without. if you can afford two bathrooms for you to clean up afterwards,

he's making some bank. But it does seem quite accessible, even if you're reading it, you're thinking, well, I don't have two bathrooms. But you could still apply a lot of it. So what is its relationship to class and cast? Cast is never mentioned at all in this book, which is extraordinary for an ancient Indian text.

Wow. It's not about cast at all. You choose your partners and your friends on the basis of, their talents, their beauty, their availability, their sympathico personalities. You do need a certain amount of money. That's fair. You do. It's, first of all, assumes leisure. It assumes you've got a lot of time that you stay out all night and sleep until the

early afternoon and you have servants being in your stuff. So it's a moneyed class, but it's not necessarily a noble class or a Brahman cast or anything like that you just have to have enough money to give you the leisure and the freedom to live a life which is entirely dedicated to pleasure as opposed to an ordinary person's life in which he must spend some time on Dharma going to church and being nice to his mother and you've been nice to your mother and you've made a good marriage that the family approves of and you've got enough money to do this then then you have fun and this is about how you have fun Is there any mention in the Kama Sutra about working class that his servants and that the people below him?

I just have this image of his servants wandering around, like becoming aware of this book about how great it is to lie around all day. And all of them just thinking, chance to be a fine thing, mate. Does he show an awareness of the people who can't live that life? Absolutely not. Nah, stuff. So, no, it's a book. It's more like the Playboy Handbook than anything. I know.

Yes. It assumes that a guy has nothing to do but have fun. Do you have any sense? And I think you answered this a little bit earlier when you were saying about how the book managed to stay in print. But do we know how popular this book was when it first came out, what its readership was? It's quoted in all sorts of places. Oh, wow. Okay.

It's quoted in poetry. It's quoted in books about how the king lives. There's a whole section on the Harareem and so forth. it's in particular known from paintings. There are lots and lots of paintings, sometimes preserved on walls and on frescoes, and sometimes in pictures which were copied over and over because paintings, too, don't last in India,

unless they're on walls. So it's cited, and the poetry, which we do have, bones from all through the ages since the 3rd century, will describe episodes in the Kama Sutra, passages. about what you do, long passage, what you do after you've made love. Then you go off on the roof of the house and you look at the stars and you drink wine together and so forth.

Oh, that's lovely. Mine's just phone an Uber. That's right. You don't just phone an Uber. And those passages are quoted and used in erotic poetry, sometimes in religious erotic poetry. There are poems about the God Krishna making love to his girlfriend, Rada. which use passages from the comma suture. Oh, wow, so it must have been very influential and popular then.

There are later texts which use it and rewrite it. There are texts in Arabic which use it. There are texts in Hindi, in South Indian languages that was translated. So it really pervaded the culture. It was very well known in the culture of art, really. In music, there are songs, there are musical Raghas, There are musical themes that take up episodes in the comics, where the paintings, poems.

In that world, it was known. Again, the world of pleasure. Pleasure. So it sounds like from what you said, this is an incredibly influential book. And then eventually in the 19th century, the Victorians in the West went, oh, it's a bit racy, a bit spicy.

But how did it happen? Because you said at the beginning of the interview that you wrote, redeeming the Kama Sutra because you wanted to allow people in modern India to, like you said that it was viewed as a dirty book. So how does it go from a book in India that is discussed with kings and gods and it's everywhere to being regarded as a dirty book? Was that Burton again?

Did he do that? How did that happen? Burton in, it's your fault. It's totally our fault. I knew you were going to say that as well. All the country is to take over India, the Victorian, British, I mean, give us a British. And covering up the statues in the temples

that had women with breasts and kicking the dancing girls out of the temple. The British, the Indians ashamed of their own culture. Yeah. That was the end of that. And that was the end of that. So that process of colonialism, basically, and about the British Raj turning up

and teaching Indian people shame and with the Deb Dasi dancing girls. These women always went around bare breasted, all of a sudden they're wearing Mother Hubbard's. Oh, we really did fuck things up, didn't we? Besides taking away all this money, which made it a very poor country, when it had originally been a very rich country, that also counts.

But I don't care about that as much as I care that it's made them ashamed of their own religion. Made them ashamed. So that only one thin strain of Hinduism, which is very much like Protestantism, was considered good. And that's the strain of Narendra Modi's Hinduism. That's what he's using. It's anti-woman.

and of course it's anti-Islam. That came from the British. It came from Bengal, where the British first moved from Bengal, then they moved their capital to Bombay later. But the impact of the Raj was in Bengal. And it was Bengal, which had the intellectuals, so that the intellectual world of India was heavily influenced

by English-speaking, upper caste Hindus, who worked for the British, and worked with the British, who appreciated the British, were influenced by their values and became very much ashamed of their own culture. The British, the West, we have a very, very complex relationship, still do it, but definitely in the 19th century, to Indian culture and society, because they were, obviously, experiencing something like the Kama Sutra,

Victorian sensibilities couldn't cope with that. They couldn't square that circle at all. But it's not true that they were so shocked by it that they tried to hide it. They were obsessed with it. in their own outraged way. And the more they were outraged, the more they were interested in it. So it's created this strange relationship.

It's taught India to be ashamed. But at the same time, the West were obsessed with it. They just loved it. And it justified their rule. These are primitive people, over-sex, passionate, emotional, but not rational, not able to think straight. They need us to rule their country because they're like children, really. and they're sort of over-sexed and so forth.

That was the image, the noble savage and so forth, women in Tahiti with their breasts, that whole world. For a while, British soldiers married Indian women all the time in the 18th century. There were a lot of it, and then the British got tired of it. A lot changed at the time of the so-called mutiny, now known as the War of Independence, but it was a mutiny. It happened in the army, and the soldiers revolted against their officers, which is what a mutiny is.

In any case, it totally ended the period in which the British interacted with Indian people, either to marry them or to sleep with them or whatever it was, and they completely blockaded and largely stopped the marriage, English men and Indian women, which had happened a whole lot in the 18th century, where the 19th century, that was the end of that. So when we're talking about the Kama Sutra

and the legacy that it's had, It's kind of starting to bring us together nicely. We're talking about the legacy. We're not just talking about the stories, the text. It is an emblem, and it was instrumental in British colonialism in the oppression of India in many ways. Yes, it was part of the British attitude toward Indians, which justified their rule.

Yes. Something that matter with these people. They can't run their own country. We'll run it for them and will teach them to be better people. And the Kamasutha was part of the image of Indians as over-sexed, ignorant, out of control, emotional rather than rational. Which was the justification for the imposition of British systems, British education, Protestant missionaries, the whole change that took place. And this is what your book, Redeeming the Kama Sutra, is about, is about not so much trying to say that it isn't a shameful text, but trying to, to reintegrate it and get people to look at it again through non-colonial eyes.

Would that be a fair thing to say? To look at it without these prejudices and to see the many passages that are not about the physical act and to appreciate how much wisdom there is in it about a kind of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. It's just favorable to women, which appreciates women, which helps women. Those things that we don't know, this idea about going up on the roof after you make love, It's a really cool idea. That's lovely, isn't it? All right.

My final, final question to you, just because I think that everybody should know this, when I wrote to you to ask about the clitoris and the klamas suture, you wrote back to say that it's not mentioned explicitly, but you did tell me what the Sanskrit word for clitoris is translated as. And it's quite frankly amazing, and you said that it translates to Umbrella of the Love Gods. That's right.

That's just incredible. Exactly. because it's shaped like that. Exactly. That's the idea. Was it because it was the shape of it? Shape of it and the idea. That's where the love god enters in. That's a group of people who know how to please women. It's the umbrella of the love gods, right? There's a lot about how to please women. It's a great deal about how women achieve their climax and how to make them do it. Wendy, you have been unbelievable to talk to today. Thank you so much.

And if people want to know more about you and all of your work, where can they find you? Well, they can find me on Wikipedia and tells my books and what I've done. Thank you so much. You have been an absolute umbrella of the love god's treat. Thank you for asking such good questions and just for wanting to do it at all. I love talking about this subject and it was a great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Wendy for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Robert Burns' sex life to sex in ancient Rome, all marching your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith.

The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music for, from Epidemic Sound.