What Laitman Says About Women: The Cult's Doctrine in His Own Words

On August 22, 2008, Michael Laitman published “Football - You Are Sex!” on the cult’s official resource. To a student’s question he answered: “The foot is the phallus, the ball is sperm, the goal is the vagina.” The post has been there eighteen years.

He says the same thing on camera without the metaphor: power belongs to men, “many women are his due,” and dozens of “little monkeys” stand beside the dominant male.

Former participants usually describe cult’s exploitation of women. Here Laitman speaks himself: not in leaked correspondence but in his own publication and recorded lessons. The cult’s standard fable about “blackmailers and disgruntled ex-members” breaks down. This is a primary record.

The 2008 Post: “The Foot Is the Phallus, the Ball Is Sperm, the Goal Is the Vagina”

The question was ordinary: why men sit watching football. Laitman’s answer came down to body, desire, and penetration, citing “The Metaphysics of Football.”

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 woman never appears as a person: a goal, a hole, “the sweetness of betrayal,” a prize in “the struggle for the woman.” The referee is a “Father” who “regulates sexual life.” This is not a smoking room joke. It is an official cult publication.

Its readers had night lessons, internal discipline, the teacher at the hierarchy’s peak. In that environment a leader’s remark is not opinion; it is speech’s norm. How Laitman’s word gets fixed among students is explained in the article on sadnaot and submission.

Video Recordings

Three fragments come from journalist Gur Megiddo's investigation (the full recording is public); the same material appears in the article on silenced testimonies.

“He Is Owed Many Women”

Laitman explains how male power works.

Laitman: A man who dominates — and this dominance truly belongs to men — must therefore also present himself as a man, as a great one, with great potential for sexual satisfaction, and many women are his due. And he must show everyone that he is strong not only in dominance, but also like some big ape that really has male potency, yes, with dozens of little monkeys beside him. That's it.

The same formula as in 2008, without the football: power equals sexual possession, women become a retinue around the dominant male. Students hear the speaker as channel to the Creator. His words set a norm: woman as appendage to male strength.

Reshimo, Virginity, and the “Imprint” of Previous Men

Then science.

Laitman: Why do women have a special sign that this is a virgin woman? Because every man who has been with a woman leaves a reshimo of his own. And even if she has had ten men, in the child she bears, in the infant, there are reshimot from all ten previous men.

Nitza: What do you mean by reshimot?

Laitman: In that infant there are data — psychological, physiological, spiritual — from all the previous men she was with.

Nitza: That sounds very ambiguous. I can understand that we remember our previous relationships, but…

Laitman: We don't remember; it's not a matter of memory. I'm talking about something else here. It's a matter of genes, it's a matter of hormones, it's a matter of the inner impression within her flesh. And therefore, if a man wants to be sure that the child born from her will be only his, then he must take care to secure such a woman.

What Laitman presents as biology is telegony: the notion that previous partners “imprint” themselves on future children. Science refuted this long ago; genes do not work that way. Laitman builds hierarchy from this pseudo-biology: he measures a woman’s “purity” by previous partners and turns her into an object a man must “secure for himself.”

From there grows the cult’s working vocabulary, in which intimacy with a man of “spiritual status” is called a step of ascent. It is not spoken in anonymous chat. It is spoken in recorded lessons by the teacher himself.

For Her, One Man; For Him, Forgiven Infidelity

From a woman Laitman demands one man for life. Male infidelity he asks women to accept in advance, like weather.

Laitman: Tens of percent of divorces we could have prevented if we had prepared them properly to accept the man's infidelity. We must understand that this will certainly happen in every family.

Placed side by side, the two fragments give one standard with two measures. A woman’s fidelity Laitman grounds in “genes” and an “imprint.” Male infidelity he declares inevitable and deserving forgiveness. Laitman’s hypocrisy is arithmetic: it comes from two of his own statements.

Control over participants’ intimate and family lives is one steady marker specialists use to describe high-control groups; the criteria are measured in a separate article.

From the Doctrine to the Documented Record

Ilanit Yezerski, a clinical social worker and former participant in Petah Tikva’s circle, testified under oath in September 2022: several women told her about sexual relationships with Laitman presented as “spiritual ascent.” She asked Laitman; he first denied, then admitted he had “harmed no one.” Victim “A” told Channel 12: “He built individual relations with each woman to achieve spiritual enlightenment.”

This trickles down the hierarchy. In January 2023, Rachel Lichtenstein, director general of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims, said in court: “The harm to women is caused not only by Laitman himself… His behavior trickles down to other men in the community.”

What it looked like at ground level was described by Olesya. According to her statement signed before a lawyer, at her first congress in Israel in the spring of 2005 the cult’s men repeated to her day after day: “a woman can receive the light only through a man.” In that same environment she survived, by her account, an attempted rape: an unnamed man from the cult’s circle, another person and not Laitman, put something in her drink, drove her away and threatened her. She managed to break free. The teacher’s formula worked at the congress as a rule of conduct.

In the summary of five complainants’ testimonies, two describe the cult as a system: one complained of “a system of intimate relationships with Laitman and other senior members…using their spiritual authority”; another testified “senior members of the group exploited new joiners.” Mona recounted she was required to have relations “with men from the inner circle,” presented “through their special spiritual status.”

Five independent sources: Yezerski’s sworn testimony, victim “A” in her Channel 12 interview, police complaints, Olesya’s statement, and Mona’s account. The same sequence recurs in all of them: a man’s spiritual status is presented as the condition for intimacy with him. This is not a coincidence.

There has never been a full external investigation of Laitman’s actions. But one thing is on record in his own materials: he wrote the doctrine on women himself, repeated it on camera for years, and the 2008 post has been on the cult’s official resource for eighteen years.