The Kama Sutra and the man from the building site

The Kama Sutra (attributed to Vatsyayana) is one of the most misunderstood classical works in global literary history. Before roughly 1960, its public perception—especially in the West—was shaped far more by colonial attitudes, Victorian morality, and selective translation than by the text’s actual content.

Prior to the 1960s, the general public perception of the Kama Sutra in the West was that of a scandalous, illicit underground text. Largely reduced by Western audiences to an exotic "sex manual" or forbidden erotica, the book was heavily censored and legally banned in both the United Kingdom and the United States until the 1960s.