Male perception of women and female sexuality as the property of men is one reason for violence against women. The law is mute. 'Shame' keeps many women from speaking up for their rights.
Kali is the Goddess of Retributive Justice. If you interview women who go to Kali with their problems and ask them why they do not find redress in a court of law, they look bewildered. The goddess would understand their problems, but a court of law…
Adrienne Rich, the well-known feminist poet writes:
Throughout partriarchal mythology, dream symbolism, theology, language, two ideas flow side by side: one that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination, "the devil's way". On the other hand, as mother, the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing, and the physical potential for motherhood — that same body with its bleedings and mysteries — is her single destiny and justification in life. In order to maintain two such notions, each in its contradictory purity, the masculine imagination has had to divide women, to see us, and force us to see ourselves, as polarised into good and evil, fertile and barren, pure or impure.