Kama sutra

In 1883, Kama Sutra was translated into a European language for the first time... Since then, it has gained fame as first-class pornography, and that fame still beats it today. Kama sutra became an object of morbid curiosity, misunderstanding and the experience of a monk by trade; and in the midst of all the noise and shouting, pirated editions sprung up, were stolen, added to and rearranged, spoken in whispers and offered to customers under the counter as a product of a special Eastern perversion.

However, Kama Sutra is not any kind of pornography. There is no pornography in the Orient, it exists only in the West, in a climate where sex is taboo and where, until Introduction to Psychoanalysis, any talk or writing about sexual problems was considered tasteless pornography.

Despite our rational culture today, eroticism is still more or less taboo for us. This is exactly why we have pornography - because we have made erotica into an unclean specter, because we are unlived and burdened with feelings of guilt and sin. When we say sex, we also say scandalous, we say vulgarity and forbidden fruit. And when an ancient or modern Indian says kama, he also means holiness, beauty, pleasure.