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Kama Sutra | Jul 13 2001

Recently I’ve been fixated on the fact that most dead people had sex at some point. I mean, while alive.

It goes along with the thought that they (the dead people) were once people with lives more or less like mine.

Except that they never, unless having very recently died, used the Internet.

Nor spoke on a cell phone.

Nor [fill in any number of things that I do all the time and never once think about and basically can’t imagine not doing, although I only relatively recently started doing them].

The question is: Is my life fundamentally different from the life of my great-great-grandfather?

And the answer is: It depends on what one means by “fundamentally.”

This being true, there are certain things we undoubtedly share.

Such as the fact that we each had, or are still having, sex.

This brings me to my other current fixation, which is actually a sub-fixation of the first fixation, and that’s the question, inspired in part by lego porn, of what kind of sex people had a hundred years ago. Or a thousand.

Short and brutish?

Well, to say that, I am forgetting the Kama Sutra.

Not that my great-great-grandfather, your run-of-the-mill late 19th century Ukranian peasant, ever read the Kama Sutra.

This seems an obvious difference between us: I’ve read the Kama Sutra.

Or I’ve skimmed it.

I’ve looked at the drawings.

Just back from reading the Kama Sutra. It’s great. Every position has a clever – and often erotic! – name: Clinging Creeper, Mare’s Trick, Sucking a Mango. Plus there are funny parts:

Your wife grips your neck
and locks her legs around your waist:
this is Kirti (Fame) …
Never try it with heavy girls.