Are Secular People Denying the Failure of the Sexual Revolution?

How the Philosophy of Language Destroyed Human Sexuality

Man as Hacker: The Centrality of "Consent" Replicates the Centrality of the Idea of Breaking and Physical Promiscuity in the Linguistic Domain  (Source)

Girls understand: We were victims. Boys understand: We were victimizers. And the narrative is changing before our eyes in real-time. The secular narrative of liberation, discovery, and pleasure is turning (sometimes in retrospect! and sometimes for the same person, in a new self-discovery as a victim or criminal) into a narrative of harm and injustice, with sexuality as a whole increasingly seeming like a disaster-stricken area of rape. And the worst is yet to come. When #MeToo reaches the homosexual world, where its manifestations are no less severe, the heterosexual world will discover to its surprise that men are also potential victims. And this is still the easy part to digest, because the historical logic of the process will reach its total exhaustion only when it deals with the lesbian world, then the heterosexual world will be shocked to discover that physical and emotional violence, exploitation and manipulation are not just male phenomena but also female phenomena, meaning: sexual phenomena.

Women are also assholes, not just "tormented saints" - which is after all the secular (and somewhat Christian) equivalent of religious sexual holiness, with the same moments of inherent biological disgust that dress up as ideology, or vice versa. Yes, the sense of impurity has a genetic and cross-cultural source in humans, and often this is indeed the cry (disguised under secular ideology that cannot recognize it): They defiled me.

But secularism stands before a broken trough precisely because it cannot offer a positive opposite pole of sexual holiness (except for the suffering Christian one - rape with a Madonna). Therefore, it falls into an internal contradiction (which also has an expanding practical and phantasmatic BDSM control component): If the cause of everything is pleasure - why is there so much suffering? The ideal of secularism was freedom, as opposed to religious sexual "repression", and therefore it is trapped: After all, we don't want to go back to non-free sexuality, right? If the alternative is external regulation - we still choose the free jungle, including the predatory animals trying to hunt us (and the return to "bestial", biological or evolutionary metaphors - such as seed dispersal - is related to the resistance to the agricultural-patriarchal world with its regulated sexuality, and therefore to the loss of meaning of sex. The drooling men simply want to eat us because we are "sweet". After all, good sex is animalistic sex, right?).

Worse still - the crisis of secular sexuality threatens secularism itself, because its self-identity definition relies on sex as a positive ideal, as the peak of self-realization, as the center of the world of the soul and experience and as the source of meaning and motivation, that is: as the secular deity. If so, the problem of evil inherent in sex becomes a kind of theodicy problem. What is the source of sexual evil? Is it in the inclination of man's heart? If so, why did sexuality create man as evil, if it is so good? Where was the original sin of sex? Free sexuality is the best of all possible sexual worlds (that is: the spontaneous sexual arrangement is the best arrangement of sexual monads), and that's why we suffer, right?

Secular sexuality has become a kind of language game, where everyone plays and tries to succeed or compete (to get girls, or catch a hot guy, and so on). It operates according to certain rules shaped by the community of sex players, which are constantly undergoing gradual norm changes within the community - just like developments in language. There is no external obligatory meaning to sex - beyond the game itself. The use of the body is its meaning, and as long as you play by the rules - you're okay. Therefore, if there's a problem, they immediately turn to change the rules for the bastards, because the new game rules are what will save us and solve the trouble. And then sanctions are imposed on those who behave "incorrectly", that is "not okay", and everything is fine. Right? Therefore, there can be no soul-searching about the very idea of game rules, as if the right way to deal with meaning is through grammar rules. And if there are men engaged in accumulating experiences, of course within the rules and "everything was consensual" - what's the problem actually? What are we complaining about? How can we change the rules to ensure us what we really want? We can't. Maybe dealing with norms is futile - and secondary to the main issue? And maybe the source of suffering is the very turning of sexuality into such a game area, where the only thing imposed on you is to comply with the sacred and moral (of course) rules? (Once, by the way, it was immoral to cheat on your partner. Or to sleep with someone without marrying her afterwards).

So what is the alternative? For the sake of an apt metaphor, we might turn to a slightly less charged area than our sex lives, but no less fascinating: the philosophy of mathematics. In the past, in the Kantian philosophical paradigm (which is not identical to Kant's own conception of mathematics, of course), the philosophy of mathematics understood mathematical concepts as forms of perception of the physical world or the mathematical universe (with emphasis on the different possible mathematical forms of perception of the same physical or mathematical phenomenon - this is the structural tendency in modern mathematics that prefers abstract structure over concrete content). We could also understand sex this way: not through some objective perception of its elusive essence, but certainly through human concepts that are built into us - that constructed it. We could give place to our biology - as part of our perception, without feeling guilty that our categories and perceptions stem from dark biology. And now that we have become enlightened, we think that all the rules of the sexual game depend only on us and our decision, just like in language. In the linguistic philosophical paradigm, the conception of mathematics as an arbitrary language game is common (is it really arbitrary?), and the justification of mathematics is simply as a language with well-defined rules - and no more. This is despite the fact that automatic application of the rules creates completely uninteresting "theorems" and "proofs", and is far from describing real mathematics as it is done by mathematicians. So what really determines mathematical interest? What drives the development of mathematics from within? This is similar to defining literature through grammar rules, or defining the Oral Torah through the thirteen hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded. It is not the language of mathematical logic that defines and creates mathematics - but the method of mathematical learning. Indeed, mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics are expected to put learning as the central key concept in them in the 21st century - which will replace the concept of language of the 20th century and enable a wave of new and more subtle mathematical results, which eluded the crude (though efficient for their time) linguistic tools.

As long as the meaning of sex is simply compliance with the logic rules of sex - we will get countless "legal" injustices, "lawful" tastelessness, and ugliness that is moral (because the aesthetic is different from the moral, of course). Therefore, after sex was emptied of fixed meaning like "act of love" or part of a "marriage covenant" or other such perceptions, and moved to a free meaning dependent on us, we should not construct it as a free playground, but in a way that is both more serious and more interesting: as a learning domain. A person who reaches sexual maturity does not join a game or competition, but begins a long process of learning that will last all his life - and this is the meaning of sexuality. Men and women don't "need to play the game", because the game itself is meaningless and lacks real interest (for example: the game of how many people you slept with. Or the game of varied experiences. Or the conquest game. And so on). A culture where sexuality is perceived as learning, and sexual achievements are perceived as learning achievements, not game achievements, is a culture where sexuality is much more satisfying - for both sexes. And when male motivation becomes learning-oriented, it is much less dangerous and childish than game motivation.

Can we really reach a state where we "solve" the problem of sexual suffering? Learning turns evil into good by raising it to a higher order: to method. It was bad but we learned from it and therefore it's good: "It's okay, you learn from everything". But this is not just an empty, theological solution that happens automatically (theodicy), but a solution that requires practical transformation work to work, that is, there is a need for real learning (and even: the depth of learning needs to be as deep as the evil). Therefore, if something bad happened, learning offers an ethical solution to cope: you can learn from it, and thus raise it to a second order, above the evil shell itself, and this is the raising of the sparks.

And where is evil necessarily present? Where learning fails to be as deep as the evil itself, where it is unable to match it, because of the destruction of the future and learning itself that is built into it. For example in the death of a child, in the birth of a retarded child, in infertility, and of course in the Holocaust. That is: in impossible learning failures, where any learning from them is mockery to the phenomenon itself. And how can we deal with them, still, partially? Through endless learning work, which never alleviates the problem, which cannot be closed, that is - which we refuse to close. Namely: not through method, but through interest - learning interest. This interest is annoying and relentless. This is not raising them to the meta level above the thing itself, but turning them into something below the thing itself - something below ourselves. When you can't plug the hole or skip over it in learning - the pit is internalized into you, as a black hole, that is, as a kind of thing that sucks the world into you: interest.

Sexuality is not only a hole in us that cannot be closed - but also one that we do not want to. That's why it interests us so much. It's not some problem that has a solution (and certainly not a "moral solution") that can be learned, but a learning domain. Because learning by nature occurs in domains. Thus, for example, there is not really some concept of "the moral" or "the good" (this is a harmful fiction), but there is the domain of morality as a learning domain. Therefore, there is also no point in refuting an entire domain, such as the domain of religion, claiming that religion is not valid, because the question is whether religious learning is valid, that is, interesting. At most, one can mark areas where learning is not of quality, for example in ideology (where learning is finite, automatic, inhuman, and produces robots), or in astrology (where learning is meaningless, in countless details without generalization, and arbitrary). There are indeed such religions, where learning is at a low level, and there are religions that surpass them, because learning in them is higher. Therefore, there can certainly be a hierarchy between more or less interesting domains. Why then is the domain of sexuality so interesting to us (much more than food or oxygen, for example, and usually more than the philosophy of mathematics)? And what does sexual "learning" mean at all? Is "learning" like a magic password that can be attached to anything and has little meaning and therefore little value? Well, it can certainly turn into that, but that's the point - because then it will be something non-learning.

The reason sexuality is so interesting and learning-oriented is exactly the reason why it is so vulnerable to those who lack learning - and to the suffering they cause. Because the one who does not learn is the serial: a person can have several sexual relationships, but the one who does not learn is the one for whom all systems are the same thing, and essentially the same system. The objectifier is the one for whom all women are the same woman. The person who does not learn is the person we would not want with us in a relationship, because it is not a relationship with us, but an internal system of his. He is an automaton. He is the impure person - and the one who defiles our bodies and our souls, exploits our feelings and openness. Lack of life is the father of all impurity, hence the aversion to those who repeat themselves (for example: the ideologue. Or the bad and recycling writer). From those who implement and do not discover. Because sexuality is a kind of peak of the learning challenge of man - because it touches the evaluation function itself. It not only interests us, but constantly deals with what interests us. What has meaning for us.

Hence also the connection of learning to religion. For what is faith? Faith is that there is meaning to the story, especially to history (this is the biblical idea), but also to the private story, our story, and that it is not a collection of incidents (hence the hard blow of the random Corona to faith and religious groups). In fact, faith is a category of our brain, almost like in Kant, that organizes the world into a narrative - and must organize reality as a narrative for it to make sense. God is just who leads the learning story - he is the teacher. Faith is not that God is a calculator and an automaton of justice, privately supervising the details of our actions, but that there is some lesson here - that he is teaching us. Lack of faith is not that there is no judgment and no judge - but that there is no learning. Therefore, if we learn from relationships, or better learn within relationships, we create the story of our personal lives as a meaningful story. And if we encounter the deniers of learning, the stuck, the obsessive to one thing only, they desecrate the meaning of our lives, and therefore we despise them and are despised by them. Those who just jump from bed to bed - their lives have no interesting learning meaning. It's not interesting and could not hold any story.

Normal people will want their lives to be similar to a novel, and for people of merit it even rises to lives that have fantastic elements, but such that are well woven in a non-arbitrary way into the plot, as in well-designed religious literature, that is, in myth. And indeed there are exceptional individuals whose lives are myth, just as myth is the peak of shaping the most beautiful historical story (and therefore usually historically inaccurate, but in a learning sense - historically deeper than any true historical story). A love story can also receive mythical elements, and even become a myth. But is this the learning ideal? Not necessarily, because a myth story is a very closed thing, that is, it lacks learning openness, and therefore there is an advantage to stories that have ended (the tragic and even Hollywood failure).

The good learning story is just a plot line, and life is a wide plane. Kabbalah, for example, turned myth from a story into a learning plane, that is, into a mythical domain. The highest elevation a person can do to another person, in love, is to turn them into a domain. To a learning world. Exactly as a good parent does to their beloved child. And exactly as our lives are not a story but a learning domain, and within it we learn. Within each such domain, one should strive for many good stories, that is, for literature, and not for a story. The tragic person is the one whose life is a story, while the learning person is the one whose life is literature. Or even better: whose life is a genre. There are people who are a bad genre, repetitive boring and stuck in tedious conventions, like the guy who looks for a girl for the night and tries to recreate the same story, and there are people who are a creative, open, and developing genre, which has significant and long works, and sometimes also a magnum opus that is the story of their lives, to which they developed after a few short stories, and less developed, just like in literary development. Maybe there are recurring themes in their lives, but they are developing, and that's what distinguishes them from mannerisms. Love is to build a shared story - and maintain a shared learning domain.

Therefore, sexuality is a learning domain - for personal development or in partnership (in fact, the need itself for partnership for the sake of learning stems from the fourth postulate of learning - and is similar to the need for a teacher. It ultimately stems from the most basic mathematical truth of our world on the gap between the ease of evaluation from outside to the difficulty of solution from inside: P!=NP. Hence the need for two sexes). The skirt chaser is like someone who learns to play a different instrument every week, for sexuality is the only performing art domain in which we all engage, and as such it combines aspects of technical mastery with emotional and even conceptual dimensions. And the more these dimensions are intertwined with each other, as in art – the more successful the art of love is. Education for sexuality should be similar to education for learning an artistic domain, hence the need to innovate in a way that is organic to creation, but not arbitrary, artificial and pointless. Innovation is not a way to "maintain a relationship", but a need arising from the very learning nature of sexuality: the need for it to be interesting. Sexuality teaches us to create within a world of secret (and as such it is an opposite resistance to the Facebook world). Therefore, it can actually pose a positive ideal, which is much more effective than the negative demand of keeping the game rules: to create something beautiful, enjoyable, mysterious, challenging, creative, pleasurable and interesting - everything that characterizes a truly valuable creation (as opposed to playful creation in language, which characterizes the uninteresting art of our days).

Hence, secular sexuality makes a fatal mistake in going the halakhic way of constructing prohibitions and restrictions on sexuality as a central ethos - instead of going the Kabbalistic way of constructing sexuality as a creative secret ideal. The best way to deal with crime is not only to deal with the criminal - but to pose an attractive positive alternative to crime, which is not just the boring walk according to the rules on the straight path of mediocrity, but righteousness. Today the great secular sexual righteous person is one who did not rape - and not the sexual artist or the sexual scholar (that is, it is a moral ideal and not an aesthetic or learning one). Therefore, men and women have no real attractive shared positive sexual ideal, and a gender war and power struggle is created between them (over the boundaries of the game). That is: conflicts of interest are created, because the basic interest of both sexes is perceived as contradictory, since it is not a learning interest but a game interest (for example: who will defeat whom). Therefore, this is not a game that can be won and both sides lose. We want a man who learns us - and learns to please us, and that this is the interesting challenge he has set for himself, and not the boring challenge of sleeping with us and getting us. The "consent" is the beginning of creation - and not its end or the center of its meaning (the centrality of consent replicates the male perception of the centrality of the moment of penetration into the system, and not learning within the system). Because it is not the terrible rape that is the secular sexual challenge and the source of antagonism between the sexes, but the simple and prosaic fact that there is so much bad sex. And so much sexual ignorance and lack of talent stem from only one reason: lack of learning.