Published on 8th September,
2014, in The Speaking Tree
In nature, all female forms are valuable as each one creates new life. Only the strongest or smartest male gets the chance to impregnate females. The female may either pair with one male all her life, or she may just present herself to him during mating season. But the male, mostly has to compete with other males for her attention by exposing himself to risk and injury when he fights rival males or when he displays his colours or plumage, in full view of predators.
-N.B Written by Devdutt Pattanaik is everything in italics, Courier
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For the least I found out from watching Thalassa and National Geographic as well as being a biology student for 3 years, this whole concept under the biological point of view does make sense. In nature it is the males who fight for females. A good example is the 'dancing' done by male birds of paradise normally part of some elaborate courtship displays performed. An obvious one is to impress the female with the male's vigour and biological fitness, and to persuade her to pick him above all other males – a form of sexual selection. The display may also have the added benefit of deterring rival males One might argue that females also undertake courtship display but it would be noteworthy that where males tend to work to attract a single "geese", females show courtship display behaviours directed at attracting a lot of males!
However, among humans, the effort has been to overturn this law of nature...
Humans have whole-heatedly tried to rebel against nature and today do quite the contrary of what "animals" do. And there, just by doing that, humans call themselves "civilised, sophisticated and domesticated" with the power of imagination and God-Knows what other kind of greatness..
Yes, they replaced the "female alpha" concept by "patriarchy", hail be the human brain.
They replaced words like "the old gives wisdom, the youth enacts" with "the old rules, the youth watches", hail be the human intelligence!
They replaced "living for and with nature" with "destroy and rebuild the 'best' one", hail be the human power of thought!~
But suddenly after some centuries 'elaborate civilisation' we find humans tending to the law of the jungle. Feminism-Sufraggette Movement, Save Our Whales-Trees, The Girl Child.. New movements rising up, with somehow more space being given to the youth to express themselves with the particular acceptance that 40 years old is not 'young'!
I remember my Primary School teacher once telling me that it might be interesting to consider the evolution of primates to homo sapiens in reverse mode. She was the first one to have introduced me to this picture: We are homo sapiens, slowly reverting back to becoming apes.
By completing this article you might probably come to ponder whether we are not tending to revert back to the animalistic savage ways that humans are suddenly perhaps not seeing as being barbaric anymore!
....and this is discernible in the different forms of marriage found in the puranas. There's been different types of marriages strewn in Indian history believed to be mythology.
Starting with:
1. Prajapati-vivah, where the boy approaches the girl’s father for her hand in marriage.2. Brahma-vivah, where the girl’s father approaches the boy for his hand in marriage and even offers dowry.3. Deva-vivah, where the daughter is given to the man as fee for services rendered to the father.4. Rishi-vivah, where the daughter is given to a sage along with a bullock (beast of burden) and a cow (source of food) in order to enable the sage perform yagna.5. Gandharva-vivah, or marriage based on love of man for woman, that does not care for social sanction.6. Asura-vivah, where the girl is purchased.7. Rakshasa-vivah where the girl is abducted.
And shockingly this one even:8. Pisacha-vivah, where the girl is raped while she is asleep.
(I've used different font colours for you to understand the loss of the alpha female and the gain of the alpha male.)
What I had wish to notice is that whilst the female reigned as alpha, violence was not the order of the day. Violence became a rampant tool of fear as men rose to power as physicality was their sole tool. Women led with care. Men decided to rule with fear.
Now, avid readers of Indian Mythology would probably understand the below retelling:
In the Mahabharata, Shantanu cannot get wives he loves until he gives them what they want. His first wife Ganga demands complete freedom, which includes killing their newborns. The second wife Satyavati demands that her children, not Ganga’s, are declared heirs. Satyavati gets daughters-in-law very differently: she orders her stepson, Devavrata, to simply kidnap them. Kunti selects her husband while Madri is purchased. Gandhari’s father is approached for her hand in marriage, but she is not told her husband is blind. Kunti’s daughter-in-law, Draupadi is a trophy of an archery contest and ends up being shared by the five Pandava brothers. Thus we see a clear shift in the status of women from one generation to another.
Mahabharata informs us that there was a time when women and men were free to go to whoever they pleased.
Apsaras make love to rishis and simply walk away, often leaving them to take care of their young. Urvashi curses Arjuna that his genitals will fall off because he does not satisfy her. The Bhagavata tells the story of Usha, a princess, who kidnaps Krishna’s grandson, Aniruddha, because he is so handsome.Also in the Mahabharata is the story of the origin of marriage. Shvetaketu discovers his mother in the arms of another man but the father, Uddalaka, is not upset.
Shvetaketu wonders how he can be sure that he is his father’s son. So he institutes the law of marriage that requires the wife to be faithful to her husband.But he can ask her to go to another man if he is unable to make her pregnant himself.
Sure,
Marriage is a creation of man, not of nature. Monogamy is not necessarily another law of nature but it was rendered universal by society, more specifically by men. Remember? Females are presumably polygamous for they attract a crowd not a single ''goose''!
Thus marriage is not God-Given. It can in no way be considered as the most upright form of coupling only because society decided to go along with the patriarch.
In a society that wanted all men to have wives, women’s freedom had to be curtailed. Laws had to be created so that she did not leave her husband for a better or more desirable man. Chastity of women served to allay male anxiety over their incompetence and inadequacy. With a wife at home obliged to be faithful to him, the man had nothing to fear.
Read otherwise in biological terms whilst still holding the same essence,
If the male human wanted to secure his mating prospects without having to invest energy, time and hope in one female during courtship display, he just had to use that famous 'power of thinking of his' to contort the established rules of nature.
It's not me saying all of this mind you.
Male are heavily insecure. They time and again need the proof and evidence from tour female partner that they truthfully 'belong' to them or not or more biologically placed, if the progenitures begotten carry their very own genes or not. Let's face it, the second law of biology after survival is procreation and that is what male and female alike strive for. But while the female retained the power to allow her elected to have a lineage, makes would suffer from rejection, insecurity of svtually being the father or not.
It brings me to again think of the hymen law. Women are called upon to prove their faithfulness on the basis of some previous sexual act.
Although attached with purity and chatisty reason, one could always argue that it's a rule, a patriarchal rule meant to assure the new husband that his Bruce is not already pregnant with some other man's baby.
So, could my personal thought of patriarchy being mere ashes of the inferiority complex of men and their inability to ensure their perpetuation?
Thus, men turned his fidelity as not a matter of law but a matter of choice solely to engage females in that stride. Biologically, females are mostly polygamous by nature. So they had to be tamed. Perhaps today under the excuse of morality, religion and ethics, practicality even. But these are merely the latest validations of getting the male alpha's ideologies and patriarchy that masquerades insecurities into power.. The newest validations.
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A new thinking line, yet another:
When he was faithful, he became worthy of adoration, like Rama, the only divinity in Hindu mythology to have the title of ekam-patni-vrata, faithful to one wife.
In the Adbhut Ramayana Sita is described as slaying a demon with hundred heads, suggesting she is capable of easily slaying Ravana who has only ten, but chooses to downplay her power to establish Rama as God.But modern storytellers – even on television – prefer versions that portray her as demure, weakly breaking down when Rama abandons her. They refuse to highlight the Sita who comfortably raises her children alone in the forest, just like Shakuntala, Hidimbi and Kunti. Guess, men still want women to be victims, needing rescue, dependent creatures unlike the female in nature, who is very much capable of taking care of herself and her family.