In the stories of Yami and Yama, two common themes occur.
One is the association with women and sexual pleasure.
The other is about war.
Yami is the sister while Yama is the brother.
Yami approaches Yama but Yama refuses her.
Yama then dies with no offspring in the mortal world.
He gets trapped then in the world of the dead.
His rejection of sex turned him into the god of death.
Yami is very sad and turns into the goddess of the night.
She is now called Yamini. She also is the dark river Yamuma.
There is a similar story in Polynesian mythology where Maui tries to go inside Hine, the goddess of death. He does this to try to gain immortality.
Hine wakes up and realizes what Maui is trying to do so she bites him.
Because of these stories, men started associating women with immorality, misery, and vulnerability.
Rejection of women can be found in the Bible (reason is completely different than this argument though).
It is also found in Buddhism as Buddha rejects women to find freedom from suffering.
Women started to get looked at more like an object than a human.
They were bought and sold.
They were put into slavery.
They were abducted.
We even see this happen in the Mahabharata.
Because women became something one could own women also started selling themselves.
This is when prostitution started.
Men took over the economic world and women had nothing else to sell but their bodies if they did not have a husband.
The women became the property of the men in their life (father, brother, uncle, son).
The father would choose who his daughter married.
Learning about all of this is quite sad. I feel bad for all the things women endured through history and how poorly they were treated. The world is so sex saturated. Sex, meant for bringing two people together in intimacy, seems to have lost its value.
Bibliography
Seven Secrets of the Goddess by Pattanaik
Image Information: Yami and Yama: Wikimedia Commons
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