Quote Originally Posted by vasudeva datta View Post
i am not a sanskrit scholar, but I have a friend who is. So here goes...according to him, "varna sankara" literally does mean "the mixing of varnas" Why it leads society to ruin, as Arjuna seemed to think? Well, consider a marriage where the wife is a saintly brahmana, who wants to have intercourse only to produce children, and the husband has physical needs that are not so brahminical. You have the terrible situation of a woman being forced into sex by her husband, or at the very least being in a moral dilemma, compromised between her dharmic duty to please him and her varnic requirement to engage in sex only to produce children.... On the other hand, my reading of the Mahabharata has led me to believe that mixing was allowed if the woman was of a lesser varna- a ksatriya woman could have a brahmana husband, but not vice versa. The idea is that since varna is organized according to quality (guna) of the individual, not birth as some think, the higher the varna one was in, the greater the level of natural renunciation, manifest by the absence of lust. The best situation was that those in the same varna intermarry, but if there was to be mixing, a woman of a higher varna should never do so with a man of a lower varna. Men are stronger physically than women, and to subject a peaceful woman to one's lust is deplorable. Varna sankara cannot mean the mixing of different bloods in a genetic sense, as varna has nothing to do with the gentics of birth- only the psycho-physical qualities of the individual (guna-karma), regardless of birth.
Your post would seem to imply that woman have sex for more altruistic reasons then for pleasure. I dont buy it.