Kama Sutra to prevent STD’s?

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According to a short audio clip on NPR’s Weekend Edition, the Indian government has authorized Kama Sutra playing cards to be distributed in order to promote monogamy and prevent sexually transmitted diseases. To understand the logic of this you can listen to NPR’s clip (with “exotic” music in the background). However, I think NPR may have made a reporting error. First of all this idea isn’t new. The BBC reported on the use of Kama Sutra to prevent STDs (although by different reasoning) two years ago, pointing to a program in Calcutta.

The government in India’s West Bengal State is supporting a programme that offers prostitutes an ancient solution to modern concerns about safe sex.

“Kama Sutra has many postures that can give men the highest pleasure without consummation and that is what the prostitutes are being taught.

“They are learning something very useful,” says Rajyashree Choudhuri, chief of the Institute of International Social Development (IISD), who designed the project.

Furthermore a 1993 journal abstract in Global AIDS News mentions the following:

…the Indian Health Organization, a nongovernmental organization founded 11 years ago in Bombay, is promoting the teachings of the Kama Sutra as an alternative to condom use in preventing HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The basic message that sex with one partner in many positions is safer than sex in one position with many partners is proclaimed on T-shirts and in a series of explicit postcards. This approach is promoting openness, communication, and equality between the sexes.

I’d pay BIG money for one of those T-shirts. Getting back to my point however, I think NPR mistakenly believed that the Indian Health Organization, which it mentions in the audio clip, is a branch of the Indian government and that this is a state sponsored national program. I don’t think the Indian government would be passing out Kama Sutra cards nationally. Am I wrong? If so, someone in India please correct me (and send me a deck of those cards…for reporting purposes).

One thought on “Kama Sutra to prevent STD’s?”

  1. what is the best condom so it will not break. you see i’m still a virgin and i don’t know or what the signes of STD’s, aid’s,or anything. and when i lose it i don’t me to be the one explaining that i’m pregnet because the condom broke.