The difference, then, between Playboy Channel trash and highbrow Saturday night date film is really just a matter of outfits and locations. Mira Nair’s “Kama Sutra” succeeds ever so handsomely in both departments. The story is cheesy, the history dubious, the connection to India’s tradition of tantric meditation tenuous and the championing of “female sexuality” spurious — but, what the hell, it’s still pretty sexy.

The story concerns the schoolgirl rivalry between Tara, a princess, and a serving wench named Maya in 16th century India. Tara may be the pretty one, but Maya’s sultry ways tend to capture male attention. Maya, angry at having to make do with Tara’s hand-me-downs all her life, seduces her friend’s bridegroom the night before the wedding. Cast out of the palace afterwards, Maya takes up with a studly, long-haired sculptor and learns Kama Sutra techniques from a retired courtesan. When the sculptor goes all angsty and distant on her because he thinks a relationship will hinder his art, Maya consents to become head courtesan for the king who married Tara. Despite his dissolution and burgeoning opium problem, the king has never forgotten his night with Maya, and soon poor Tara feels like the odd girl out.

“Kama Sutra” looks gorgeous, from the obligatory scarves (in dozens of saturated colors) to the posh, cushion-lined interiors, to the graceful, statuesque women and their dashing menfolk. The hairstyles alone are worth paying seven bucks to see. Yes, it’s full of dumb lines like “There she is, my lotus woman!” and “You don’t know this, but you inspire all of my work,” but at least Indira Varma, as Maya, really does seem possessed of a mysterious, vixenish allure that transcends her otherwise ordinary good looks. And the midriff-baring beaded number she wears in one scene practically deserves a screen credit all its own.

“Kama Sutra” has nothing to do with the complex, codified Indian society of the actual historical period, just as any claims Nair makes to addressing the spiritual aspects of the real Kama Sutra are pure malarkey. This movie is your basic harem fantasy, easy on the explicit sex and dominance/submission dynamics, but lavish on the gauze, ambient sapphism and romance. There’s even a bare-chested wrestling scene between the king and Maya’s Fabio-esque sculptor beau — a bonus for the ladies, I guess. It’s only the jarring ending that strikes a gloomy, real-world note.

To assume that India’s history of erotic art and literature emerged from a society entirely comfortable with sex is a bit like looking at all the naked people in Western painting and deciding that we must be completely at ease with nudity. In fact, contemporary Indian cinema prohibits the depiction of the most modest sexual contact, even kissing, although rape is a commonplace narrative device. “Kama Sutra” itself has been bogged down in the certification process imposed by the Indian government’s censors for months and Nair had to go to court to get the film released in her homeland.

None of this affects the goofy, Never-Neverland appeal of the film itself, but it does undermine the liberal American tendency to imagine every other culture — the more exotic, the better — as less sexually repressed than our own. That’s as flagrant a fantasy as Nair’s blithe vision of seductive houris and handsome princes.

One night in London, as a group of my male and female friends sat in
a fashionable bar near the West End drinking gin and tonics, I was suddenly
struck by the strangeness of my girlfriends. They seemed like a different
species: giant exotic birds, glossy, dressed in black, with graceful
fingers and fashionably clunky shoes. So much more overt than the men, less
conservative, and so much more sexual. Sallie with her bare shoulders, in
her bias-cut dress, Mary in her clinging Ozbek turtleneck, the way they
threw back their heads and laughed, the slight parting of their lips when
they listened. They asked me what I’d been writing about lately, and when I
replied “penis size,” they nodded knowingly as if I’d said “tax reform.”
The men, on the other hand, were a bit prickly.

“I would like to know,” Mark interrupted in his most perfect BBC accent,
“why people talk about penis size. The question shouldn’t be how big or how
small the man is. The question is, how small is the woman?”

“Shut up, Mark,” Sallie said languidly. “Anyone who talks about anchovies
and women is a misogynist. You’re just digging yourself deeper.”

“Actually, women have surgery all the time to make their vaginas tighter,”
Mary put in. “They just don’t talk about it. It’s one of those things that
women don’t talk about with each other.”

“This is news to me,” I said. Mary was a copy editor for a women’s health
magazine, and she said this with some authority. “What other things do
women not talk about with each other?”

“That’s true about the surgery,” Sallie interjected. “After childbirth, or just to
be smaller. It’s a very simple operation, it takes no time at all
apparently.” She and Mary nodded as the men drifted into rugby talk. “I
don’t know why women don’t talk about it. I haven’t had it done. Have you?”
she asked, turning to Mary.

“No. I know someone who did. It’s really not a big issue.”

“Whatever happened to Kegel exercises?” I asked.

“Spoken like a true Yank. Why do a load of exercises when you can just have
a simple procedure?” Mary asked.

“Women don’t talk about masturbation in the States,” I said. “There still
seems to be some sort of shame attached to it. But I asked an English
friend of mine about it recently, and she was quite upfront once the
question was put to her. She said when she’s anxious, she masturbates about
four times a day. She works at home, you see.”

“Why would there be shame attached to masturbation?” Sallie seemed
genuinely surprised. “John bought me a
vibrator. I use it all the time.”

“My friend also said,” I continued, warming up to the subject, “that she hadn’t
yet had a boyfriend who didn’t connect her frequent masturbation to her
feeling like she wasn’t getting enough sex in the relationship. In fact,
she said, the two had nothing to do with each other. It was just a tension
easer.”

“Women don’t talk about Bartholin gland cysts either,” observed Mary. “Although
something like 70 percent of all women get them at one time or another. My
gynecologist told me that.”

“We also don’t talk about multiple orgasms,” declared Sallie. “I’m not sure
why that is. I would like to know, actually, how my girlfriends count their
multiple orgasms. For instance, does anyone have one right after another?
Or is it within the space of five minutes? Or 10? And if so, does that
count as a multiple orgasm?”

“Another drink?” the waiter asked.

“Yes,” we all cried.

“But we all know you lot talk about our penises,” Mark interrupted. “That’s
something I think you should stop talking about. It’s very private.”

“Particularly if you’re as tiny as Mark,” Mary said, as Mark turned back to
sports talk. She finished the last of her drink and crunched some ice.
“Maybe we Brit girls need to get on the Internet. We need to find out from
the Americans what it is that we all don’t talk about. I will start by
saying that I have one orgasm per sexual session. That’s it.”

“Let’s have a round robin,” Sallie said eagerly. “Let’s all talk about one thing that we’ve never talked about
with girlfriends. I’ll start: I lust after a woman at my office. Now you,”
she said to me.

“I can’t top that,” I said. “You know my life is an open book. Let me get
back to you on this.”

Sallie and Mary groaned. “You can take the Yank out of the country,” they
said in unison.

My mother is no prude. We began talking about sex long ago, spurred in part, I think, by our mutual desire not to imitate the Irish Catholic, repressed relationship she had with her mother. She accommodated my pre-adolescent questions with a great show of openness, talking to me about menstruation, breast size and intercourse in a matter-of-fact tone as she put on her make-up or brushed her hair. She herself had been divorced for many years now, and growing up I’d seen a few boyfriends come and go, tiptoeing out of the house in the pre-dawn hours, looking pale and guilty in their black dress socks and rumpled, untucked shirts.

If anything, it was me that was the prude when it came to sex talk with my mother. Yes, we were honest, but we were not blunt. Skirting around the periphery was fine with me — yes, she knew I slept with men and a good number of them by the time I was 30, but she did not need to know more than that. Details were not asked for, nor were they provided. I wasn’t even certain if she knew exactly what Unzipped was about, although I had overheard her once at a cocktail party say something about her daughter, “who wrote some kind of urban life sex thing.”

“Well?” she asked, frowning when the titles of “The Mirror Has Two Faces” flashed on the credit card-sized movie screen.

“I’ve been writing about the importance of penis size, Mom,” I said. Honest but not blunt. But I felt myself squirm in my seat and go a little hot in the face. “Or, non-importance, as the case may be. So, do you think Lauren Bacall deserves an Oscar this year?”

“Penis size IS important,” my mother said. She was still fiddling around with her dials. “Don’t you think it is? Any woman that says that it isn’t is lying,” she continued, and not particularly quietly either.

“Mom, could you keep your voice down?”

“Why? Does it embarrass you?”

“Ssshh. For God’s sake, at least take off your headphones,” I hissed. “No, of course it doesn’t. You and I can talk about anything. How is tax time going to be for you this year, by the way?”

“In fact, I think penis size is VERY important. I think it directly affects the way a man treats a woman, how big or small he is. You and I have never talked about this, have we?”

“No,” I said, shifting around. A man burping a baby glared at me. “Maybe there’s a good reason for that.”

“Men my age are completely hung up on their penises,” she said, taking a careful sip of her Diet Coke. “Then again, so are the women!” She giggled suddenly, and said, “Have I ever told you about going to that nude beach with your father …”

“OK, Mom, that’s it.” I sat up. “This discussion is over. I refuse to hear that ‘p’ word and my father in the same sentence.” I plugged my headphones in, determined to catch up on “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” From what I could tell, Lauren Bacall and Barbra Streisand seemed to be having the same type of conversation we were.

“Well!” my mother said. She pretended to be a little huffy but I could see she was highly amused. “When did you become such a nervous Nellie? I was only going to say in the ’70s, we used to always go to the nude beaches and look at all the different sizes. There really is an amazing range.” She opened a magazine and began flipping through it.

A week later, we were sitting with a group of 10 of my friends at the Avenue, a bustling, modern restaurant in central London. After the first five bottles of wine, my English friends were delighted with my mother; by the 10th she was officially declared “one of the mates.” She was open, she was honest, she was witty. They all wished they had mothers like Peggy.

In the middle of my Caesar’s salad I leaned across the table to my friend Mark, who was sitting to her left. “Here, Mark,” I said holding out an anchovy fillet. “Do you like anchovies?”

“Good Lord no!” he exclaimed. “Get that away from me. I had a bad oral sex experience once, you see,” he explained to my mother. “The woman was positively like a salt trough. I haven’t been able to eat anchovies since. Disgusting.” He began talking loudly across the table about the upcoming elections.

I looked at Mom. She was crimson from neck to hairline. I patted her hand and said, “Don’t worry. It’ll never come up again.”

“It hasn’t really been keeping me up nights,” I told him. Then I realized that in his mind he was paying me a real compliment.

Freud was all wrong about penis envy. In Psychology 101 you will hear female titters around the room when it is stated categorically that all women yearn for a dick, and (in the male mind) a really big one at that. Did it give me a warm glow to know I had a big clit? Did it fill me with silent power to walk in a room full of women and say to myself, “Yeah, baby, the Johnny Depp look-alike may be hanging on your arm, but I got something bigger and better between my legs than you’ll ever have?” What do you think?

But it got me thinking about this whole issue of penis size, this locus of male anxiety. We all know how much penis size matters to men, but how much does it really matter to women?

Speaking for all women, let me say: Yes, women do talk about their partner’s size — the more open of us, anyway — and yes, bigger is better. You will never hear a woman say, for example, that she prefers a really, really tiny penis, as shapely or as aesthetically pleasing as it may be.

Before all of you less-endowed folks jump off the nearest bridge, however, let me make it clear that size is simply not that important to most women. Oh, sure, we girls always remember the better-hung of our past boyfriends, and certainly they’ve provided more than a few masturbatory fantasies for me personally. Big cocks just simply feel better to us. In certain positions, namely the good ol’ missionary, a big dick will pull on the inner lips of the pussy and indirectly rub the clit. It’s not rocket science.

But like all sexual issues, this one is not without its complexities and corollaries. How big is too big, for example? The same boyfriend who’d made the complimentary (he thought) comment about my clitoris was himself extremely well-endowed. And sex wasn’t all that fun with him. He’d learned early on that he didn’t need to concentrate on the more subtle aspects of sex; he wasn’t very sensual in his foreplay or very imaginative in the speed or position of his thrusts.

Moreover, for me it was one urinary tract infection after another. He had a proclivity toward doggie-style, which I normally enjoy, but with him it felt like a thudding assault on my cervix, a ramming attack against the bolted fort. (Looking back, his preference for that position makes sense: He was a self-absorbed egotist who I think really got off watching his own dick.) I like to think Mr. Big was an anomaly, that huge dick and cavalier jerk don’t have any correlation to each other, but I’m starting to wonder after hearing many of these sorts of stories from women.

Then I think about my friend Michael, who was the most erotic and passionate man I’d ever slept with, who was attuned in a way Mr. Big never was. Michael is certainly average size, and has more than a few anxieties about this, but his size simply never really mattered that much to me. For one thing, we were incredibly in love. For another, he made up for any deficiencies (in his own mind) by being extremely proficient in other areas, like cunnilingus. And yes, women talk about this stuff probably more than dick size. A man who becomes known for his skill in this department will never suffer from a lack of willing partners.

Around the time of Julian, Michael and I had been wandering around the grocery store when he asked, oh-so-casually, “So, what about his … you know?”

“His DICK?” I said loudly, picking up a cucumber. “Wonderful! Couldn’t be better. Should we have a salad tonight?” Seeing Michael’s knit brow, I became serious. “It’s OK. Not that big of a deal.”

“Girth?”

“Good. He has good girth. That’s one thing he’s got going for him, because certainly nothing else is.” The irony, of course, is that if Julian were simply a filler, an offal relationship, his size would matter a great deal to me. And if I was in love, it would mean jack shit. As it was, he was in that limbo area, and here I was focusing on girth and how we weren’t very compatible.

So, can you make generalizations about this stuff? Sure, but in the end, like everything else, it’s only one (big? small?) part of a package deal.

Later, we looked at our parents’ books: “The Joy of Sex,” “How to Make Love to a Woman” and even the Japanese coffee-table tome, “Erotic Art.” Seventies couples were pictured in the prototypical line drawings, men busily attending to that little rosy button between the legs of their women folk, who were seemingly paralyzed, backs arched, in the throes of what looked like pain. By the time our mid-teenage years had kicked in, we girls knew the clitoris was the gateway to our pleasure. We naively assumed the boys would make it their business to find out too.

My friend Isobel has been going out with Jack now for about a year. She is by all accounts in love. They mesh in all the right ways, she says, from their mutual love of “Law & Order” to their decision not to have children to their enjoyment of Alice Waters’ cuisine. And yet, and yet. Isobel has never had an orgasm with Jack, which astounds me, but seems to only mildly bother her (which astounds me further). “Sometimes it feels like I might,” she said to me. “When he’s on top of me, and he’s lasting longer than usual, and he’s moving in the just the right way, when our rhythm is in sync. But then … I don’t.”

“Have you tried …” I cleared my throat, “well, talking about this?”

Isobel looked distracted. “I would,” she said, “but at this point it’s kind of too late. You know? I should have said something a long time ago. I don’t think he knows anything about the clitoris, I don’t think he knows that I can’t get off unless he pays attention to it. I’m not sure he would know what I was talking about.”

“What if you showed him?”

“It’s not as if he hasn’t ever touched me there. It’s just that when he does, it’s not the right way. He doesn’t have any delicacy about it, he kind of fumbles around, and it ends up hurting more than feeling good. Then afterwards, when we’re done and he gets up to go to the bathroom, I touch myself. I can come really fast on my own.” Seeing my startled expression, Isobel said hurriedly, “It’s not as if I don’t enjoy having sex with Jack, because I do. We share other great things that make up for it.”

I would like to think that Isobel is an anomaly, that most men are more knowledgeable about the female anatomy than Jack. I mean, could it really be that as we approach the millennium that men are clueless when it comes to the function of the clitoris? Or that they don’t know about this little issue called the clitoral foreskin, which when rubbed the wrong way can result in a jangled, stabbing little pain, as nerve ends are exposed? Of course it’s possible: Who’s going to tell them about all this if it not us girls?

Once upon a time, in our sex education class so many moons ago, a new teacher, bless her heart, told us to go home, get a mirror and sit down to look at our vulvas. Figure out where everything is, she told us: the vagina, the labia, the urinary tract, the anus, the clitoris. We were all horribly embarrassed and giggled madly. But now, I like to think I know the reason she gave us that advice. She knew that someday we, too, would have to be sex educators — only not in the classroom.