Open Publication: How an Official Bnei Baruch Text Normalizes the Language of Violence
Open Publication: How an Official Bnei Baruch Text Normalizes the Language of Violence
On August 22, 2008, Michael Laitman’s text “Football - You Are Sex!” was published on an official Bnei Baruch resource. This is not a marginal comment and not private correspondence - it is an official text by the leader, left in public view for almost twenty years. A member of the community asked about football. Laitman answered.
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Question: In our time football has become a religion, a way of filling life. What is its appeal? Why do men sit in front of the TV with beer and football, as you often say?
Answer: As an answer, I will offer a couple of thoughts from "The Metaphysics of Football," and you can think up the rest yourselves. All the words and terms come from there!
Football is a game played with the feet. The symbol of the foot is the male sexual organ.
The function of the foot is destruction (as they say: to trample underfoot, feet first).
The foot stands against the head, the ball. In the past they played with severed heads, a symbol of castration.
Football is like sex. The aim is a goal: with the foot (the sexual organ) to score into the goal, into the hole.
The foot is the phallus, the ball is sperm, the goal is the vagina.
The goalkeeper, defender of the goal, is a censor opposing the players' desires.
The referee monitors compliance with the rules, but does not prevent desire, like a Father regulating sexual life, as a social matter, within reasonable bounds.
I am the player, the aim is satisfaction. The ball, libido, the goal, the head of the penis.
The goalkeeper is the superego that interferes with the satisfaction of a goal, but pleasure arises precisely from overcoming the obstacle.
The player thinks about satisfying his desire. The goalkeeper thinks about the team.
The goalkeeper is the guardian, entitled to take the ball in his hands, to restrain sex within reasonable limits.
Football's contagiousness lies in its sublimation.
A man prefers not to play but to watch football (on television), because although he is tired, he still wants to "stick it in," and into "someone else's goal" at that: the sweetness of betrayal, of sin. The basic meaning of the game is the struggle for the woman, for the impossibility of excessive desire (it has built up, burned out!). Therefore watching football is indecent; it is akin to voyeurism (watching how others "stick it in").Now do you understand what your husband is doing?! (joke).
The issue is not that the text is vulgar. The issue is that an aggressive sexual metaphor is presented here as the normal language of authority - a teacher’s answer to a student’s everyday question.
The Environment in Which This Language Grew
The text was not random provocation. It addressed an audience that had spent years inside a rigid internal discipline - daily schedules, diets, unpaid labor, spiritual hierarchy. In such an environment, the leader’s language is not debated; it is absorbed. In a closed environment, words like these do not remain just words: they set the acceptable frame for perceiving the body, power, and refusal. If the authority of the system publicly describes football as sex and the goal as a vagina, inside a closed group this is not a challenge, it is the norm.
The text cannot be treated as harmless eccentricity. It was in this same environment that the stories of Mona, Katya Sukhova, and Olesya unfolded - women who later described how refusal of physical contact with the leader was perceived by them as a violation of the spiritual path. Their complaints remained stalled for years: how that happened is documented in a separate investigation. The person investigators questioned in the context of these cases, and who later went to the parliamentary podium with blackmail claims, is MK Hanoch Milwidsky.
The text “Football - You Are Sex!” is still available on the organization’s official resource. It was not archived away. It was not removed.
Continue reading: Katya Sukhova’s Testimony - the first documented case: how this linguistic environment helped build step-by-step access to a body.
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