Puritanism is not an element of a class based society or a patriarchal one. It is useful for all domineering systems. But it is also not correct to consider sexual freedom to be the standard for measuring the freedom of a society.
There is something which is linked to all this – male supremacy. Man works. The woman looks after the home. The man is the hero. There is no heroine. Rather the heroine is only a bit actress. It is said that in animals the female has less sexual urge than the male. So the male has to physically attack and subjugate the female to copulate. In human beings that is not the case.
Perhaps a reason why male dominance still persists is that men wish and are able to own the woman and keep her as private property. In our societies as long as male supremacy persists, even if sexual freedom comes, the exploiter male will bend that too and convert it to something which is useful to him.
May 1972, extracted from a Letter to Govindan
