Editing Yoni (section)

===Orientalist literature===
The colonial era Orientalists and Christian missionaries, raised in the Victorian mold where sex and sexual imagery were a taboo subject, were shocked by and were hostile to the yoni iconography and reverence they witnessed.<ref name=dasgupta107/><ref>{{Cite book |last=McGetchin |first=Douglas T. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PHVRDSM-tyMC |title=Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India's Rebirth in Modern Germany |publisher=Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-8386-4208-5 |page=34}}</ref> The 19th and early 20th-century colonial and missionary literature described yoni, lingam-yoni, and related theology as obscene, corrupt, licentious, hyper-sexualized, puerile, impure, demonic and a culture that had become too feminine and dissolute.<ref name=dasgupta107/><ref name="Ramos2017p56">{{Cite book |last=Ramos |first=Imma |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FRhdDgAAQBAJ |title=Pilgrimage and Politics in Colonial Bengal: The Myth of the Goddess Sati |publisher=Taylor & Francis |year=2017 |isbn=978-1-351-84000-2 |pages=56–58}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Urban |first=Hugh B. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VKv3AgAAQBAJ |title=The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies |publisher=I.B.Tauris |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-85773-158-6 |pages=8–10}}</ref> To the Hindus, particularly the Shaivites, these icons and ideas were the abstract, a symbol of the entirety of creation and spirituality.<ref name=dasgupta107/> The colonial disparagement in part triggered the opposite reaction from Bengali nationalists, who more explicitly valorised the feminine. [[Swami Vivekananda]] called for the revival of the Mother Goddess as a feminine force, inviting his countrymen to "proclaim her to all the world with the voice of peace and benediction".<ref name="Ramos2017p56" />

According to Wendy Doniger, the terms lingam and yoni became explicitly associated with human sexual organs in the western imagination after the widely popular first ''[[Kama Sutra]]'' translation by [[Richard Francis Burton|Sir Richard Burton]] in 1883.<ref name=doniger2011p500/> In his translation, even though the original Sanskrit text does not use the words lingam or yoni for sexual organs, Burton adroitly sidestepped being viewed as obscene to the Victorian mindset by using them throughout in place of words such as penis, vulva, and vagina to discuss sex, sexual relationships and human sexual positions.<ref name=doniger2011p500/> This conscious and incorrect word substitution, states Doniger, thus served as an Orientalist means to "anthropologize sex, distance it, make it safe for English readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the text was not about real sexual organs, their sexual organs, but merely about the appendages of weird, dark people far away."<ref name="doniger2011p500">{{Cite journal |last=Doniger |first=Wendy |year=2011 |title=God's Body, or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva |journal=Social Research |publisher=The Johns Hopkins University Press |volume=78 |pages=500–502 |number=2|doi=10.1353/sor.2011.0067 }}</ref> Similar Orientalist literature of the Christian missionaries and the British era, states Doniger, stripped all spiritual meanings and insisted on the Victorian vulgar interpretation only, which had "a negative effect on the self-perception that Hindus had of their own bodies" and they became "ashamed of the more sensual aspects of their own religious literature".<ref name="doniger2011p505">{{Cite journal |last=Doniger |first=Wendy |year=2011 |title=God's Body, or, The Lingam Made Flesh: Conflicts over the Representation of the Sexual Body of the Hindu God Shiva |journal=Social Research |publisher=The Johns Hopkins University Press |volume=78 |pages=499–505 |number=2|doi=10.1353/sor.2011.0067 }}</ref> Some contemporary Hindus, states Doniger, in their passion to spiritualize Hinduism and for their Hindutva campaign have sought to sanitize the historic earthly sexual meanings, and insist on the abstract spiritual meaning only.<ref name=doniger2011p505/>