Hitomi Mochizuki & Abigail Shapiro: the shallowness of spirituality.

the refusal to allow
human sexuality to be shallow is itself shallow the insistence that human sexuality is of spiritual significance is itself shallow i learned the bare minimum in school about sex so i took some further education into my own hands and started watching porn i just think that the kind of porn and sex that i was watching at a young age was just really scarring and not okay for my soul and my body and my spirit like i did a video entitled ladies stop hooking up a few months ago after making that video many angry people said that i had different standards for men and for women that i thought men could sleep around while women should wait here's the deal both men and women should stop hooking up there's a lot that you don't learn from porn but i started watching it and i started exploring my body really young i would do it in a mirror just because i was so curious what everything looked like and what everything did i am really grateful that my first sexual experiences were all with myself in my room in my safe space and i think that sexual exploration on your own is the most important thing when you're healing your sexual energy trying to reclaim your body giving that orgasm to yourself sharing that magic just with yourself if everyone could just wait until they got married the world would be a much better place so men here's my advice to you stop hooking up you might think that you'll have street cred if you sleep with a certain number of women that's a bunch of lies first of all sleeping with a certain number of women to prove to your male friends that you can keep up is a useless endeavor the same guys who care or would be impressed with your number are the same guys who don't deserve your respect in the first place and at the end of the day it won't make people like you it will rot your relationships and poison your friendships watching eight person gangbangs or watching i don't know just there's so much stuff online that i don't think young people should be absorbing and learning about sex through because we just get such a skewed perception about how this sacred exchange is supposed to go down being confident in who you are personable fun and charming will make you cooler and more popular than any number of women that you sleep with would i started to explore with other people in my life i didn't have any boundaries i didn't know how to communicate i didn't know about consent i didn't know that i could say no and this of course brought me into a lot of situations that i really didn't like and i felt like my body language i would try to say something and they wouldn't understand it or i would say no once and they would just try and convince me to keep going to do certain sexual acts like the boys that were my age that i was hooking up with and i was like okay i already said no and they're still trying and so i guess like i'm powerless in this situation and i kind of got used to those kinds of sexual exchanges all throughout not only my like initial high school looking up life experience but even up until my late teens and early 20s and i felt really awkward and introverted and shy and ugly and i was just like i'm just here like i'm lucky if someone wants to do anything with me there's a male fear that if you're a virgin it would indicate that you have no appeal or that you're bad at sex that's not the way it works a woman won't think that no woman would sleep with you she will think that you had options and still made the harder choice good women want a good man and if you're confident in your choice to wait until marriage it will only reflect well on you and it is embarrassing the amount of times i walked to a guy's house smoked with him got taken advantage of did things i didn't want to do and then walked myself back home at like 3 a.m alone i'm just like they were so lucky i didn't even realize how much power i had having multiple partners before marriage does not add to your relationship it opens the door to comparisons jealousies and other drama especially if one or both of the partners has a history of no strings attached hookups you might think that you won't catch feelings if you sleep around even if you don't catch feelings you're training yourself to think of sex as no more than a physical act i started to feel that my body wasn't a safe space especially as i actually started developing boobs and getting a lot more attention from the opposite sex i just started to feel like my body gets me into trouble and my body just makes me feel pain and my body makes me feel used and objectified and initially i was really excited to like get boobs and to be you know attractive and finally start getting attention from boys but then i started to get slut-shamed in my school boys would say things about me that weren't true i wasn't like i thought before because i wasn't pretty or cool enough or rich enough or whatever but now i'm not being liked just because of the way that i look and it just felt it just felt backwards and it made me start to feel unsafe in my body i think that this is where the internalized massage me started to kick in because i felt like then my only power was in my sexuality and i just assumed that that's all people were looking at or valuing me for also you are sleeping with another person and it's not all about you you might be leading this woman on or giving her the wrong idea and that's just plain wrong you might think that you just like sex and you want to do it no matter what stds pregnancy scares hurting women who actually care about you treating sex like a compulsion and losing out on the opportunity to meet the right woman isn't fun but i had an experience of sexual assault when i was working at a country club with my boss who was so much older than me when i was 15 years old i was 15 in junior year i graduated at 17 so i was pretty young i'm sure that other people are like in that same age range but i think that was one of the last straws where i just really started to become undone and feel just so shameful and resentful of my body he got me drunk and left me with no one else to take me home some things went down that i don't want to talk about and then i went to work like a few days later maybe even the next day and it was like everyone at my office knew about it at my job but i just felt shameful you know i felt so embarrassed about what happened i just felt like it was all on me and that he didn't do anything wrong and i just felt embarrassed because everyone was talking about this thing and no one at all in any way was like are you okay are you like what happened um because i was 15 and he was definitely in his like mid to late 40s and so i quit my job kind of just left and never went back and i feel like i just went a little bit crazy after that hooking up is wasting your time it's like endlessly scrolling on twitter swiping on tinder or playing video games mindlessly for hours on end you are titillating yourself for the surge of dopamine that takes meaning out of your life so i was hooking up with people that i didn't care about that i felt unsafe with eventually this kind of settled down when i started talking to this girl who i really like i dated her for a month i think and we had sex and it was really nice i started to feel safe again and what i can say about all of my experiences with women because i started hooking up with girls when i was really young in like 8th grade first kiss with a girl i was stoned in my living room couch and we made out and it was amazing so with this girl the first girl that i hooked up with it felt so safe and so consensual and i was like whoa okay i can have this level of respect during sex it's vindicating to love and be loved by someone who you would give everything to and who would do the same for you i really learned that if someone can't respect my boundaries then there's no point of having them in my life because why would you want someone in your life who doesn't respect you or honor you physically and especially if they're not honoring you physically then they probably won't honor you spiritually and i was like wow i'm really letting the universe know what i'm worthy of receiving before i was letting all these people in who didn't treat me how i deserved and were giving me like less than half of what i was actually looking for in a sexual exchange or you know a partner and now that i've said no repeatedly to those kinds of connections i'm making space i've made space for something so much more loving fulfilling something that i can really grow with people think of marriage as something for the future they say they're too selfish to get married or too immature or they're just not ready for such a huge commitment you may have used these excuses yourself or you've definitely heard a friend say them but here's the truth you don't flip a switch that tells you that you're ready to get married you don't flip a switch at 30 or when you've slept with a certain number of women or at any other life milestone and know that it's time for you to settle down your own mentality and the choices that you make are the only things that can prepare you to get married basically nothing that you can feel is wrong none of your kinks or desires as long as you're not hurting anyone um yeah there is space for everything that you feel and everything that you are and please affirm that to yourself in this moment some feminists say that women should act more like men and hook up in the same way that men do but here's the truth men should act more like women treat sex with the respect it deserves don't waste your time sleeping around and treating sex like it's just another bodily need you have to take the steps to make you capable of marriage and that starts with stopping hooking up because hooking up doesn't just stop you from moving forward it actively moves you back it's relatively easy to ridicule the large traditional organized religions christianity judaism and islam for example um for the strictures they place on sexuality and the convoluted series of self-justifications they have to go through to make it seem that their subjective perspective on sexuality is the only objectively viable one it's a little bit more difficult to take a dispassionate look at what members of alternative religions do and free thinkers who don't consider themselves religious the ways in which those people tend to end up reinventing the same structures and living their lives very much by the same sort of rationale in the clips i played at the start of this video you might have thought i was just contrasting two people from opposite extremes partly true it's also fair to say that the two people being contrasted are engaging in very much the same mind game in presenting their spiritual values as something they discover within human sexuality and then used to justify completely arbitrary choices they've made in their lives choices like believing that a book that tells you to cut off part of your penis is the will of god it gets that crazy and on the other hippie hindu buddhist new age self-selected side of the equation things get even crazier if i were to say i had any bias one way or the other in this contrast with the two sides by the way i'd point out that at least the people who are engaged in alternative religion and people who consider themselves free thinkers at least they're aware that they've made a choice but at some point they took their library card or they went to the bookstore and they got that book off the shelf you know that they chose their own path no matter how terrible no matter how pathetic no matter how regrettable a choice it is they may have made it is at least a choice that that they can take some some greater degree of uh of responsibility for i had a professor who taught buddhism and uh to my knowledge he was never a buddhist monk but he had lived in a monastery he had received buddhist monastic training up to a certain level one of his students was a fully grown man in his 30s and the professor ended up sleeping with or stealing the student's girlfriend to the best of my knowledge that professor and that student's girlfriend who was at least in her 30s if not her 40s by the way these are all grown adults um to the best of my knowledge the professor and the student's girlfriend they're still together as a couple to this day um the professor you can imagine he's a white western guy raised christian who at some point rebelled against that christianity and became a bohemian and a free spirit and you know at some point ends up living in a buddhist monastery and at some point ends up finishing his phd and becoming a professor teaching buddhism the usual and at some point also uh he lost he lost his faith in in buddhism and just that part of the story i can relate to myself i was a rather nihilistic buddhist when i was part of the buddhist religion but i now identify as an ex-buddhist as someone who's no longer a part of the buddhist religion having returned to canada after many years of of living in asia now the strangest thing was that this friend of mine a fully grown man started having a relationship with a female professor okay so these are all heterosexual couples and everyone involved is over 30 years of age nevertheless [Music] nevertheless and this professor at our university is sleeping with my friend's ex-girlfriend and this bohemian ex-buddhist professor just utterly condemns this friend of mine for having this affair for having this relationship with a professor pot kettle black um absolutely harshly condemns him and i'll always remember what he said to him was what this professor would have said to us tell me what's the difference between what you're doing with that professor of yours and two dogs having sex in the street i was laughing and laughing because you know to me he was still showing the signs of his christian upbringing he was still acting out very much the same script that had been inculcated into him as a child and yes he'd taken on new vocabulary and new verbiage and new modes of excuse making but it was the same guilt trip and i responded this by saying oh well you know uh for one thing they were indoors rather than outdoors how how much different do you suppose it should be oh to me and and what it says it was you know do you think of human sexuality as something that's just a few steps removed from the angels do you think of this as something divine and transcendental that's therefore profaned that's therefore you know revealed to be something terrible and shameful by being compared to what what dogs do or what monkeys do i mean are you still so uncomfortable with looking in the mirror and accepting that biologically you're something not so different from a dog yourself or something that's different from a monkey yourself you know uh although there are certain ethical judgments i might pass myself on any or all of the four people in this love quadrangle that by the way did not involve me in any way i was merely an observer and i guess a friend several people involved uh although i might judge many of these relationships to be morally dubious or just kind of aesthetically questionable the professor's attitude his harsh condemnation and and where it was he imagined he was drawing this sense of uh moral superiority from you know his sense of authority in ruling on this matter that was just absolutely laughable to me and to me it showed that his life having gone through various ideological permutations from one degree to another in the most important ways he was still living an unexamined life the refusal to allow human sexuality to be shallow is itself shallow the insistence that human sexuality is of spiritual significance is itself shallow fundamentally i resist and reject the spiritualization of my sex life for the same reason that i reject the spiritualization of my diet ultimately eating food is just a biological function i do have to make ethical decisions about it i do have to care about the ethical consequences that's why i'm vegan but i'm not vegan for spiritual reasons it may be easier to embrace the message of spiritualizing your sexuality when it comes from a new age guru who speaks in terms of meditation or who even sells dildos as a side project here on youtube it may be easier to accept that message when it comes from that kind of figure than is to accept it when it comes from an authoritarian jewish christian or muslim tradition but when these people are telling you to embrace your sexuality what they're really doing is alienating you from your sexuality they're saying that your sexuality doesn't belong to you it belongs to this ideal this abstraction this fixed notion they have of what sexuality ought to be and if what you do with your sex life doesn't measure up to that fixed standard then just like my buddhist professor then whatever you do is going to be condemned as no better than a dog i think the most fundamental evil in this puzzle is wanting to know things that you cannot possibly know or refusing to admit to yourself your own vulnerability that is ultimately based in ignorance wouldn't it be reassuring to have this sense of spiritual mission in your sex life so that you don't have to deal with the gnawing doubt for example have i fallen in love with the right person have i fallen in love with a good person should i trust this person there's something quite different from whether or not you do trust this person you may trust them but maybe later on you can realize that you shouldn't have trust them people think of skepticism as something that only applies to sort of textbook philosophy but it applies to these most intimate decisions in our lives as well in chapter 8 of my book just in the process of writing i came up with this image where it's like look it's not the difference between seeing something and being blinded to the truth it's the difference between driving a car where you're aware that you don't have a rear view mirror where you're aware of what it is you're not seeing and you're concerned about what you can't see because you know that there's no mirror that as opposed to someone who really imagines there is a working mirror in this car someone whoever's often glances at the mirror and takes for granted that they're assured of of what it is behind them they imagine that they know something that they can't possibly know in this way a spiritual mentality no matter how secular it may seem no matter how inviting no matter how hedonistic no matter how self-indulgent in this way a spiritual attitude leaves all of us blind ultimately it cuts you off from the full range of the experience of your instincts it cuts you off from the process of learning because all of that begins and involves that most fundamental sense of doubt that you can't know that you can't trust other people that you don't even know what it is you want let alone what other people want let alone what will make the two of you happy together that's a very fundamental doubt that should never be taken away from people and replaced with faith faith allows you to live your life with the false sense of confidence that you already know precisely what it is that you never can tell