odyossefchai wrote on 26 Sep 2024 19:02:

me too! that just makes them more sexy............

odyossefchai wrote on 26 Sep 2024 19:02:

Perfect spot for a Cordnoy post:


If you look around and imagine how everyone has got it better than you, that's likely the false reality you'll see.

Muttel wrote on 26 Sep 2024 17:04:

I like the original post, Benny’s riposte, and Muttels clarification. But I want to add a point. To address Benny’s response here




I disagree with this point. And I want to explain. I know that humanising women that you see doesn’t work for a lot of people, but it does work for me.

Part of why it works for me is because of the line I bolded in the post above. To me, the point isn’t that women I meet have bad breath and flaws. That doesn’t do anything for me. However, because Im not 17 anymore, once I see a person as a person,  the pull that I would feel to her, as a person, would be the pull of attraction, (flavored  and spiced, of course, by sexual desire and lust).  Attraction has to do with a a relationship with the whole person. Now for an healthy human male, it’s obvious that there will be a greater potential pull of attraction if the woman is pretty and sexy. 

But, as I said, I’m not 17 any more. And I have a great wife, who I’m attracted to. So once my brain is feeling the pull of attraction , it’s easier to for the other part of my brain to kick in, help me back off and say: I don’t know her, and don’t really want to, and she’s probably not that nice at all (and I’d never want to wake up next to her!). 

The lizard brain you’ve talking about, for me, kicks in, in its raw untrammelled form,  if I have the misfortune to see a mostly naked body. My brain blares a trumpeting of pure lust and wants to react with pure physical sexuality. Hard to fight that. BH, with Siyata Dishmaya and carefulness I do my damned best to avoid that kind of thing these days. 

What Muttel is saying, and/or what works for me, is this. If I erroneously look at a woman I meet as a naked body that happens to be surrounded by inconvenient clothes, the lizard brain kicks in.

When I train myself to see instead, a person- e.g. a mother feeding a child, a daughter hurrying to catch a bus, or a wife shopping for her husband, I can know that they aren’t mine, and more easily react accordingly, even if they are highly attractive women. 

This is not incorrect biologically either, because Hashem wired us to want to get married and connect and love a woman, not just bed them. Tapping in to where the former instinct lands is a way to avoid the latter lizard.

cande wrote on 26 Sep 2024 19:35:

Brother,

I assume you are struggling and can’t make 90 days clean. 

In that case, you gotta remember that anything can be a trigger. 
A doorknob or even
Hopefully you’ll get out of this rut soon 

this whole thing, that girls, בעצם are disgusting HUMANS, cause they smell and poop,
just גראדה פונקט there sexy על אף all there חסרונות,
is FAKE NEWS!

im not saying im not wrong,
just putting it out there................

love,
cande

R' Muttel, thank for sharing this thought with us! Truth be told, I've heard this a few times since joining GYE. First, I saw R' Chaimoigen mention it in passing, and I'm pretty sure I rolled my eyes all the way to the back of my head (goodness knows what's in there!). It just seemed lofty at best, at worst, plain unrealistic. Then a few days ago, I sat with HHM, he also mentioned it, as well as the point about porn stars just doing it for the money etc.. I didn't press him on it, I think I was in a bit of a daze from the whole meeting. But something about what you wrote triggered me, in a good way. Let me explain.

As I read your post, it hit me just how messed up the world we live in has become. (Note that the following is just a thought, a theory, if you think I'm mistaken feel free to tell me.) I believe that modern culture has (mostly) successfully convinced us that not only are women objects of pleasure for us, but, through movies, books, and particularly porn in all its forms, that women are just like men​, that they want what men want, they enjoy sex for it's own sake. They have convinced us that it's rational to assume that if you're lusting after someone, checking them out on the street, that there's something there, something you could have, she wants it too. Now, I know there's a GYE for women (so I'm told), and I know women have their own issues, sexual or otherwise. That's a separate shmooze. But, 9 out of 10 women on the street are not lusting after passing men (yes, I took that poll myself). To my understanding, women closely associate sex with what it's meant for, a way to express love, for a man to show how much he cherishes her and cares about her. Hence the pain they feel when betrayed by their husbands, even if it's just online porn. And their bewilderment at how their husbands can be attracted to a random girl on a billboard (to quote my wife 'I mean who says she's even a nice person'?!). So it's no wonder that we fantasize so easily, it all really seems realistic to us. And that's messed up. 

All this is to say, that for me personally, (and maybe some of those who disagreed with you), I get it. Hearing all this talk of 'humanizing them' didn't do much for me. #lizard brain. But maybe that's changing. I strongly suspect that you, R' Muttel, and certainly the greats like R' Chaimoigen and HHM, and the many others in this great yeshiva, are different. Why? Because as you start to rack up the clean days, months, years, you actually start to be able to think differently. Whichever way you come at it, I believe the יסוד of humanizing them is very much based on the point I mentioned above, that we've become accustomed to some serious wrong-think in the first place, מצד them. And while for me I think this מהלך of humanizing is still in the "על לבבך" stage, as I too count the days, maybe, just maybe some light is starting to shine through; maybe one day I can think it too.

Bennyh wrote on 26 Sep 2024 17:17:


      I get where your coming from but I have to disagree with your conclusions. The fact is that yes we are inevitably attracted to women in a sexual manner, but you are stripping the ethical part of yourself away if you say "it's in the briah so it's meant to be". Free will is also in the briah.
    I'll give you a scenario. I'm walking on the street and turn my head and there's a woman in front of me which is where my initial glance happens to fall, or I notice her in my peripheral. How do I react?
      With your logic it sound like your saying that I should continue staring/fantasize about staring and think that's OK bc it part of the briah.
      With my logic I glance away or focus on another thing to control my initial sexual attraction which is what is the ethical thing to do. 
      Do we need to go into a discussion of why that's the ethical thing?
      Theres a difference between sexual attraction and objectifying women. Did you know that other people have emotions? They are not a shell. Objectification doesn't only apply to women in the sexual manner but people as a whole. The person behind the cash register is a person with a life, not just someone that may be a bit too slow to take your order.
     I hope I'm not losing anyone on this point but the jist of it is that you can be attracted to someone sexually without acting on that sexual temptation. How we react is where the battle of this nisoyon lies.
      Theres a lot more to say but ill leave it at here for now.

Keep on Trucking, One Day At A Time!!