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Karezza: Sexual Equality in Tantra

© Alyssa Skye

Karezza (Italian for "caress") was coined during the 19th century by Alice Bunker Stockham, an American OB/GYN and the fifth woman doctor in the United States. It refers to the sexual practices which she had devised after a visit to India to study tantra secrets, but it deviated from tantric sexuality in two key points.

First of all, karezza was developed by Stockham as a form of sacred sex which was not based on religious or social dogma. She did not feel that adding religion to the practice was essential to achieve spirituality in sex.

Stockham's main priority in establishing karezza, however, was to promote women's rights and equality in sexuality. At the time of her research into sacred sex, women were held in very low esteem in India and much of the world. Therefore, the emphasis behind Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu tantra practice was to teach men orgasm control as a means of reaching a higher spiritual plane. Women, on the other hand, were considered "shaktis", incarnations of goddesshood whose role was to validate men's spiritual experiences.

Stockham's underlying premise in karezza was to teach both men and women to learn to control their orgasms thereby creating equality among the genders and in relationships. By using her basin metaphor, we can examine this idea more closely. Stockham viewed sexuality as a basin filling up slowly, drop by drop. As sexual desire (the basin) builds day by day, it will eventually overflow naturally (orgasm). If, however, the basin is drained often through orgasmic sex acts without allowing the desire to build up, the drained person will be in a "state of magnetic depletion."

In the case of tantra sex where the man is taught self-restraint in order to keep his basin full and his sexual magnetism complete while the woman is drained continually of her sexual desire, an inequality eventually creates an aversion in the couple. Stockham believed that the man would come to view the woman as an empty (drained) vessel whom he would lose all respect and desire for. At the same time, the woman would resent the man for his domination of the relationship through his self-restraint. The result of these deductions is karezza.

Stockham's solution allowed for a couple to have sex as often as they wanted as long as three conditions were fulfilled. First, some sort of spiritual dedication must be performed. In American culture, this takes the form of courting through love letters, dates, etc. Second, a couple who doesn't want children shouldn't have orgasms when the woman is fertile. The third, and final, condition stated that orgasm should only occur as a result of the natural "overflow of the basin."