Inside the multi-million dollar orgasm cult endorsed by Hollywood
A story of idealism and desire, of Californian sex communes....and three-hour orgasms
ByMick Brown21 April 2021 • 5:00am
Founder of orgasm workshop OneTaste, Nicole Daedone CREDIT: Timothy Archibald
In 2011 an American author and businesswoman named Nicole Daedone gave a TEDx talk in San Francisco in which she spoke of her plans to build an empire on the female orgasm.
A tall, self-assured woman in her early 40s, dressed in a black silk trouser suit, auburn hair falling to her shoulders, Daedone did not, of course, put it quite like that.
In the course of the talk, which has since been watched more than two million times on YouTube, Daedone, who had recently published a book entitled Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, and was standing in front of two glowing, vulva-shaped lights, described how in 1998 at a party she had met a man who practised what he called ‘contemplative sexuality’.
He invited her to lie down unclothed, shone torchlight on her vagina and proceeded to describe her ‘colours’ in some detail (‘Your outer labia are coral…’). He then stroked her clitoris ‘no firmer than you would stroke your eyelid’.
‘I had never been looked at or felt that kind of compassion in that area before,’ Daedone told her audience – nicely dressed people in their 30s and 40s, nodding thoughtfully and bathed in a self-congratulatory aura, as TEDx audiences are wont to be. ‘I just broke open, and the feeling was pure and clean.’
This story, which would come to be repeated, in Daedone’s words, ‘thousands of times’, was subject to variation. Sometimes the man would be a ‘Buddhist’, sometimes ‘a monk’, and at others, in her words, ‘a cute guy’ who delivered ‘the best pick-up line I’d ever heard’. But the result was always the same.
‘For the first time in my life,’ she said, ‘I felt like I had access to that hunger that was underneath all of my other hungers, which is a fundamental hunger to connect to another human being…
‘And then, I had a moment of thinking, I want to know how to live here in this place and, in my philanthropic way, I want everyone else to know how to live here.’
‘Female orgasm,’ she continued, ‘is vital, for every single woman on the planet.’ A ‘truth’ apparently ‘so undeniable that I had to bring it to the world’.
And bring it to the world she did. In 2004 Daedone founded a group called OneTaste, disseminating (it is hard to go far in this tale without stumbling inadvertently across a double entendre) the practice of what she called orgasmic meditation, or OM.
At its peak, OneTaste was reported to be making $12 million a year; it had centres in nine cities, including New York, San Francisco and London, and was endorsed by no less a personage than the high priestess of the vagina, Gwyneth Paltrow.
But the organisation has now shut down following accusations by former members of the group, with the FBI reportedly investigating allegations of sex-trafficking, prostitution and violation of labour laws.
Those of a delicate disposition may choose to turn away at this point. For this is a story of idealism and desire, of Californian sex communes and three-hour orgasms, of the search for Eden and the worms in the apple of power and money.
It is also very, very bizarre.
Students at the OneTaste Urban Retreat in San Francisco, 2007 CREDIT: Gabriela Hasbun
Three-hour orgasms (not including cigarette breaks)
Daedone grew up in the northern Californian town of Los Gatos with her mother, a single parent. At 16, she had sex for the first time, got pregnant and had an abortion. She studied semantics at San Francisco State University and, with a friend, opened an art gallery in the city. She was 27 when she learned that her estranged father was dying of cancer in prison after being convicted of molesting two young girls. Daedone has said he had never harmed her as a child, but with his death, ‘Everything in my reality just collapsed.’
She turned her attention to spiritual matters, studying the Kabbalah and Buddhism. By her account she was planning to become a nun at a Zen Buddhist centre in San Francisco (‘Now,’ she would joke later, ‘they just call me “the nun that gets some”’). Then she met the man at the party.
Since the 1950s, San Francisco had been a Petri dish for alternative thinking, countercultures and free-love communes, steeped in libertarian ideas that would continue to flourish in the tech community of Silicon Valley.
In 1998, Daedone joined a group called The Welcomed Consensus – according to its Facebook page, ‘Researchers/instructors of Deliberate Orgasm (specializing in female orgasm), friendship, sensuality & living pleasurably since 1992.’
The group was largely modelled on another ‘intentional community’ in northern California called Lafayette Morehouse, which had been founded in the ’60s by a man named Victor Baranco – described in a 1971 Rolling Stone investigation as a former used-car salesman and ‘peddler of phoney jewellery’. It later styled itself as the More University, offering accredited PhDs in ‘sensuality and lifestyles’.
Particular attention was paid to the part the clitoris plays in the female orgasm. Baranco devised a technique called ‘deliberate orgasm’, or ‘do-ing’, in which a woman would undress from the waist down and a man would stroke her clitoris. In exchange, the strokee would give the stroker a token or a small gift. It was reported that in 1976 a commune member named Diana claimed that she was able to sustain a continuous orgasm for three hours, ‘not including cigarette breaks’.
A clothed OM demonstration, LA CREDIT: Alamy
'The focus was sex, how to have a great sex life'
Former students of Baranco set up their own practices and groups, among them The Welcomed Consensus. ‘They taught a philosophy of communal living, relationships and communication,’ says Ken Blackman, who lived at the commune for nine years and would later join Nicole Daedone at OneTaste, ‘but the focus was sex, how to have a great sex life, and that’s where clitoral stroking came in. The idea that both of us are going to put our attention on the woman’s body, that it can be a complete experience, and there’s nothing that she owes me in return – these were highly innovative ideas.’
Nicole Daedone lived at The Welcomed Consensus for some two years. She also spent time at Morehouse, allegedly suggesting to Baranco that she should be his successor. But the proposal came to nothing.
Morehouse and The Welcomed Consensus, Blackman says, regarded themselves as ‘the elite connoisseurs of exquisite gourmet sex. They had no desire to be mainstream.’ But Daedone had bigger ideas. ‘She wanted to reach hundreds of thousands – millions – of people,’ recalls Blackman.
To this end, she packaged the technique that she called orgasmic meditation. A woman lies on what Daedone called ‘a nest’ of pillows, and ‘butterflies’ her legs (again, Daedone’s term), draping one leg over the knee of a man, who is fully clothed, seated beside her. He sets a timer. Wearing latex gloves smeared with lubricant, he would then stroke ‘the upper left quadrant’ of the clitoris. While Diana had scaled the Himalayan peak of the three-hour orgasm, Daedone set the clock at a more modest 15 minutes.
In 2004, along with a business partner, she set up OneTaste Urban Retreat, in a loft building in a grungy part of San Francisco favoured by internet start-ups, promoting OM as ‘a way to make orgasm, connection and sensuality sustainable’. The community quickly grew to number around 50 men and women, most in their late 20s and early 30s, OM-ing two or three times a day with various ‘research’ partners, showering communally and negotiating whose turn it was to do the washing-up.
