The hardest answer is the fifth section of the Shulchan Arukh. I like easy living. How would the Rabbi write Jewish law the way the laws of evil speech are written? 🙂

I don’t live exactly in Haredi society, nor not — long story — but in any case I live relatively within separate frameworks.
But I assume your claim that it is all because of hurting someone is not relevant to the place I come from, but only relative to the public in which I am found right now. For example, even someone from the Gur Hasidic community at Tel Aviv University can behave differently from a Hasid at Machon Lev with the secretary (assuming that is the only woman he will meet).
When you refer to erection, do you mean specifically during the conversation? Or a concern that even much later it could happen, such as nocturnal emission?

Is there no room to distinguish between speech that I would in any case also say with a male friend? On the other hand, that could also permit a lot… as above.

In any case, how does all this fit with the implications in a mixed society, as has been raised here more than once…

Why is a person not supposed to flee to the desert in order not to violate prohibitions? Maimonides, for example, rules that one should.

Whether you like it or don’t like it, and whether the answer is hard or easy, is irrelevant. There are topics that are hard to define sharply, and it is not right to do so either. Can you define how much one needs to love the Holy One, blessed be He, in order to fulfill the commandment of love of God? How much Torah does one need to study so as not to be neglecting Torah study?
The laws of evil speech are indeed inventions of the Chafetz Chaim, who constructed them out of nothing. There is a commandment and a prohibition from the Torah, but most of the details that the Chafetz Chaim put into his book are extracted from aggadic literature and not-very-well-founded considerations, and thus a halakhic field was created that had never existed before. If I were writing that book of Jewish law, it would consist of one page with no details at all.
As for erection: if it comes afterward, then perhaps it is like putting oneself into a situation of compulsion, although I’m not sure — at least if the assessment is that it will necessarily come. But it seems reasonable to me that the erection is only a condition and not the essence of the prohibition. That is, it is not correct that the thought is forbidden because it leads to erection (and the prohibition is the erection); rather, the definition of a forbidden thought is a thought that brings about or can bring about an erection. The prohibition is the thought, not the erection. Therefore even if the erection comes afterward, there is still a prohibition.

A,
Maimonides does not rule this; he writes it. It is his own reasoning, and I disagree with him. It seems to me that almost the entire world disagrees with him. People do not refrain from going out into the street for fear of an accident, or from failing in evil speech, even though there is almost no one who does not stumble in that. The Torah was not given to ministering angels, nor to monks.

And by the way, even in Maimonides himself he is not talking about a normal reality. If there is a society that is fundamentally afflicted by a certain prohibition, then perhaps there is room for his claim that one should distance oneself from it. But a normative society in which, in the way of people, one occasionally stumbles (and even where it is clear that I will stumble) — there I am not at all sure that Maimonides would say to flee to the deserts.

Clearly you are right that it is hard to define these things — did you check all the eggs in order to know what the average egg size is? Or do you need to use the temperature of the slaughterhouse of a duck in order to know what heat the hand recoils from, and discover that it is somewhere in the forty-something degrees Celsius? But still, the custom of recent generations is to define much more than in the past, and perhaps that too is the idea with the Chafetz Chaim — to provide precise boundaries, and the aggadic passages clarify the boundaries.

Therefore, the original question I wrote is based precisely on the gap you presented in the answer between the halakhic part and the additional limitation you wrote, namely normal life.
And that was also my feeling when I wrote the question: that one should not take forbidden thoughts most into account — or rather only certain forbidden thoughts, say — because if a person conducts himself reasonably, then in the end he should ignore it and live normally, and over time one gets used to it after not too long a period, I assume… (Or perhaps this is the stage at which the best of our sons go bad, God forbid, as we see: “for she has cast down many wounded, and mighty are all her slain”!!)…

So I tried to set possible modes of conversation according to the levels that seem to me to lie between the situation that allows normal life in the most basic way — namely purely practical speech — and ending with a frivolous gathering whose whole essence is impractical and unnecessary, and concerning that it seems that even in a normal society one can forgo it. While the spectrum is of course much broader, those were the levels I thought to add in the question: how much one may develop the conversation between the purely practical and a frivolous gathering.
Therefore my question above still seems completely valid to me: what are the boundaries of normal life? Where does the line run, roughly speaking?…
Let’s say: up to where do you think that from there onward one should be concerned or keep a safety distance, even if it is not an outright prohibition, but in order to know where to examine it.

Secondly,
A conversation that began permissibly (for example, as part of normal society, etc.) but from the man’s side reached the line of prohibition — may it be continued by virtue of normality? Or must one end it as quickly as possible?

Third,
I am not at all immersed in these topics, because even regarding topics connected to unmarried young men there are quite a few who are unwilling to talk,
but it seems that erection is not the prohibition, because even apart from women, the whole prohibition of deliberately causing oneself an erection — with excommunication / “this person is an apostate,” etc. — from the harsh language of the Sages it sounds like that is not necessarily the prohibition itself. Rather, the whole prohibition is on account of wasting seed.
Or perhaps one has to distinguish between wasting seed and “do not stray after your hearts and your eyes,” where there the definition is the result, whereas here it is the sign of it, and that is as you wanted to say?

Even according to those who say that the prohibition of deriving pleasure from the beauty of a forbidden woman is not an intrinsic prohibition but a boundary of precaution (a probability x of another prohibition, such that one must avoid approaching the prohibition at that level of probability), is there any halakhic decisor who thinks that this means it is not prohibited? It seems from Maimonides, Laws of Repentance, that one must repent even for not distancing oneself sufficiently from the prohibition, even if in retrospect one did not sin. Even if, let us say, it is permitted where there is a 100% probability that it will not lead to that — but less than 100%, how can one know? After all, in the past too there were different people and different situations, and they did not distinguish, and from this it appears that when there is even a small chance that it will lead to it, the boundary of distancing remains in place. Otherwise they would already have exempted such cases back then. Come on — what were the chances, even in the past, that someone would enjoy the beauty of another man’s wife in the presence of her husband and that it would lead to intercourse? Yet in practice it was prohibited without distinction. What exception is there besides “imagine them as beams” or “white geese”?

This is the language of Maimonides in Laws of Character, chapter 6, halakha 1: “It is natural for a person’s character traits and actions to be drawn after his companions and friends, and for him to conduct himself according to the custom of the people of his country. Therefore a person must associate with the righteous and always sit among the wise, so that he may learn from their actions, and distance himself from the wicked who walk in darkness, so that he not learn from their actions… And likewise, if he is in a country whose customs are bad and whose people do not walk in a straight path, he should go to a place whose people are righteous and conduct themselves in good ways. And if all the countries he knows of and hears reports of conduct themselves in an improper way, as in our times, or if he cannot go to a country whose customs are good because of armies or because of illness, he should sit alone in solitude, as it says: ‘Let him sit alone and be silent.’ And if they are evil and sinful and do not allow him to dwell in the country unless he mixes with them and follows their evil custom, he should go out to caves and thickets and deserts, and not conduct himself in the way of sinners. As it says: ‘Oh that I had in the desert a lodging place…'”

In my opinion this is an explicit halakha. If prohibitions are violated in the place where you live, go to another place. And if there is no other place, live alone and even go to the desert. This is not some opinion or example in worldview or a certain lifestyle, but the Jewish law according to Maimonides.

Is secular society not considered a bad society afflicted with hundreds of different prohibitions? As for relationships with women, as the questioner brought up, secular society is very permissive and is afflicted with many, many prohibitions surrounding that topic. According to Maimonides it seems that one definitely must do whatever one can to avoid contact with women. Secular society is certainly a sinful and sick society according to Judaism and Jewish law, and one certainly must distance oneself from it.

The question whether this is explicit Jewish law or not depends on how one defines Jewish law. Maimonides certainly writes it explicitly, and still I do not think he has proofs for it, so I do not see this as a halakhic ruling but as an expression of a personal position. But that is unimportant semantics.
I wrote above some distinctions even within Maimonides’ own view. Religious society is no less sinful and sick according to the Torah and Jewish law, so according to your view one would need to distance oneself from that as well. I explained why that is not correct, and I do not see any point in repeating the matter.

You can’t say that you disagree with Maimonides. You can note that there are those who disagree, etc. Surely that’s what you meant, and it’s important to be careful about this…

Your own eyes can see that one can.

The central question that emerges from the discussions here, and yet you have not addressed directly, is: “How important is Jewish law?” In other words, is observance of Jewish law more important than our “normal lives”? Because a person who wants not to violate explicit prohibitions will distance himself from transgression and will not compromise. In my opinion, the problem with people who think that Jewish law is less important than “normality” is that they do not believe in the World to Come or in anything else that comes from keeping Jewish law. In their view, Jewish law is just something we do because… that’s what we do. But someone who believes that there is a World to Come (for which there is strong reasoning, because God created us with a basic awareness that someone who did something problematic ought to be punished for it, regardless of deterrence or other things — what is called “vengeance for its own sake” — even if no one sees the act and the person dies afterward) also believes that Jewish law has practical value regarding our eternal life, and he will distance himself from sin exactly as he distances himself from fire. (And of course he will not go near fire because of “normality.”)

A,
I will just note that the expression “in my opinion this is explicit Jewish law” reflects the situation well. Usually explicit Jewish law does not need your opinion. You simply bring it, and that’s it. But there is no such explicit Jewish law, and not even non-explicit Jewish law. Maimonides himself lived in a place where there were sinful and heretical gentiles, and he did not fulfill his own words. Beyond that, I have never heard in my life a recommendation from a serious halakhic decisor instructing someone to go to the desert in order not to speak evil speech (something that almost no one is saved from). And even if Maimonides did say this, I do not agree — and in my understanding the Talmud does not either.

In short — and here I come to Eliezer — normal life is definitely a halakhic criterion and not something that competes with Jewish law. It begins with “The Torah was not given to ministering angels” and “Her ways are ways of pleasantness,” and continues with the words of halakhic decisors who permit driving on the road or smoking despite the danger, because that is normal life. And the matter hardly needs elaboration. Therefore your question, Eliezer, is not relevant to the discussion. No one here is recommending violating Jewish law for the sake of normal life. Normal life is a criterion that determines, among other things, what the Jewish law is.
All your other remarks too, Eliezer, about the World to Come, reflect a misunderstanding of the discussion. The discussion here is conducted around the question whether this is permitted or forbidden, and if it is permitted then there will also be no harm to the World to Come.
And in passing, I am surprised that a righteous man like you recommends serving God in the way of women and children, in the words of Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of Laws of Repentance — that one serves God in order to merit life in the World to Come. Serious people, Maimonides writes, do things because… that’s so (that is, “to do the truth because it is truth,” in his language there).

Rabbi, I don’t understand why you’re exerting yourself so much. Just bring the Ritva (attached below) and they’ll leave you alone.
“Everything depends on how a person knows himself. If it is fitting for him to make distance from his inclination, he should do so. And even looking at the colored garments of a woman is forbidden, as is stated in tractate Avodah Zarah. But if he knows of himself that his inclination is subdued and subject to him and does not stir up any filth at all, it is permitted for him to look and speak with a forbidden woman and to ask after the welfare of a married woman. However, it is not fitting to be lenient in this except for a great pious man who knows his inclination, and not every Torah scholar can trust his inclination.” Ritva, end of Kiddushin.
A person who lives in a society where the norm is a mixed society falls into the category of someone for whom every little thing does not arouse the inclination, and therefore he can ask after the welfare of a married woman, etc.

”A person who lives in a society where the norm is a mixed society falls into the category of someone for whom every little thing does not arouse the inclination, and therefore he can ask after the welfare of a married woman, etc.” ???

What’s funny? Would a secular child who has lived his whole life in a completely mixed society get excited from seeing an ordinary woman hanging laundry? I assume you would agree with me that he would not. By contrast, a Haredi child who has almost never met a woman outside his family would probably indeed be affected by seeing a woman hanging laundry.

Clarification: I never meant that a person who lives in a mixed society is in the category of a pious man who controls his inclination. What I meant was that in certain matters his inclination is not aroused because he has been used to it from a young age, and regarding that specific issue it seems that the Ritva would not require those distancing measures from him.

But on second thought, this actually has nothing to do with a mixed society and with the idea of normal life, since it is only connected to the individual and how much distancing he personally needs to do.

But from what I understood, there is a place where the Sages rule because of ‘normal life,’ and that is regarding uncertain impurity in the public domain being deemed pure. I saw that this is because it would be impossible to function if they ruled that uncertain impurity in the public domain is impure. Meaning, because of ‘normal life,’ uncertain impurity in the public domain is pure.