Future Sex (7 page)

Until the death of her father, Daedone had dabbled in spirituality, but now she waded into an active exploration of New Age ideologies of self-help, self-improvement, and self-navigation. She began her training
at a panspiritual “mystery school,” taking a vow of silence there for the better part of a year. She deepened her exploration into Taoism and Zen, part of what she later would see as an attempt to reject the messy business of death, sex, and the body. In speeches she refers to mysterious mentors, including three women who absorbed her into a coven and a “thug guru” who meted out harsh truths.
She speaks of having once lived in an “acid house” and of other experiments living communally. She practiced meditation, vegetarianism, and, for two and a half years, celibacy. She concluded her initial three-year foray into the esoteric with a plan to pursue a life of celibacy and monasticism at the San Francisco Zen Center. Before this renunciation, however, she went to a party.

At the party
Daedone met a Buddhist, an older man in his seventies. They began discussing sex. He invited her to try “a practice.” He explained that for the practice she would lie down, she would disrobe from the waist down, and he would stroke her clitoris for fifteen minutes. “I’ll stroke you,” he said. “You don’t have to stroke me back.”

Daedone told this story to a deeply attentive audience, who was so
eager to laugh that they would find hilarity in the mildest of verbal miscues or the blandest of risqué jokes. When she would use a colloquialism, or when she would mime a toke from a joint, the room would explode with laughter. Her speech did not follow any easily summarized rhetorical structure; thoughts began, but they did not always conclude, or would be rendered diffuse after drifting through
non sequiturs. Chronologies were hazy. She made statements that had protean referents, like the idea of “becoming the person you were always meant to be” or “accessing your inner teacher.” Still, the failures of chronology or logic did not affect her power over the room, because her strength as an orator lay in the intensely personal nature of her disclosures, the ease of her gestures, and her
glossy appearance.

Her session with the man from the party, she said, indicated to her that “something more was possible.” She had established a sexual connection with a person without having had sex with him. She had not had to worry about whether he was attracted to her, whether he was honest, if he would call the next day, who would pay for dinner. The “deliberate orgasm,” as the practice
was called, was neither sex nor masturbation. It unlinked sexual experience from love and romance in the way that casual sex never had for her.

“Rather than actually feeling the sex I would feel the relationship,” Daedone said of her life before OM. “I was very sneaky about never confronting my genitals as genitals.”

She meant, I think, that the stroking practice was a sexual technique that
allowed for an intimate connection but preserved an emotional distance, a sexual practice that allowed one to be close to another person while remaining autonomous. Her partner needed only to know what he was doing and respect the boundaries of the process. She did not have to love or even like him. I saw the appeal: if this strange method of sexual communication between friends could be available
to everyone, then a feeling of sexual connection need not be such a rare thing, but as common as friendship itself. It could happen abundantly, with people who failed every ideal of perfection.

Daedone now focused her research on orgasm, a term she used not according to its dictionary definition as a moment of climax but rather to refer to a generalized idea of sexual energy in the world. What
she began to hypothesize was that love and relationships in an era of sexual freedom followed an obsolete system of “crossed wires.” She described it as a difference between the map and the territory. Men and women believed that certain sexual behaviors would reward them with certain results: fidelity would be recognized with long and happy marriages, or honesty would be met with honesty. When these
ideas of sexual propriety failed to deliver the expected results, people mistakenly blamed personal deficiencies rather than systemic ones.

As many have before her, Daedone suspected the problem lay not in people, but in the network of rules and expectations that govern adult life. In particular, the tendency of women to link sexual desire with so many arbitrary expectations and consequences
that they cannot focus on the sexual experience itself. Orgasmic meditation, she concluded, would be the neutral space in which focus on the body could happen without the interference of romantic stories or behavioral conditioning.

She did not realize all of this right away, but only after years of research. In 2000, by then in her thirties, she met Rob Kandell, who later became chief operating
officer of OneTaste. Kandell had undertaken a similar navigation through California self-help, doing Landmark Forum workshops and studying the literature published by More University, an intentional community started in 1968 that produced reports on its “lifestyle experiments.” He told me, vaguely, that he met Daedone at “a social mixer with people engaged in sexuality.” Kandell was married at
the time, but he, his wife, and Daedone started going to sexuality workshops together. Soon they started discussing a curriculum for their own workshops.

Justine Dawson, OneTaste’s public relations woman, called it the search for a “clean, well-lit place, for people to talk about this stuff.” In relation to a New Age organization with evident roots in the human potential movement of the 1960s,
the aphorism was meant to dispel the lingering fear of fanatics and cults, of the aprons and lentil soups of the old male-dominated New Communalism. As Dawson explained to me: “There were other people teaching in communities but it often felt like there wasn’t necessarily the most urban, open, clean, clear feeling about it … it was sidelined as hippie or backwoods.” When she started her study, most
of the people teaching deliberate orgasm were men; Daedone wanted to create something woman-centric, a technique that was carried by women but that did not exclude men from the process.

In 2004, Kandell sold his house in the Outer Richmond area and invested the money in a new organization, now called the OneTaste Urban Retreat Center. Daedone signed a lease on a warehouse at 1074 Folsom Street,
in which an initial group of twelve people would live communally. They opened their doors on July 30, 2004, with the tag line “A Pleasurable Place for Your Body to Be.” Their stated mission was “to bring orgasm back into the world conversation and back into our bodies.” The warehouse had a space that could be rented for private events. It had a store. They offered yoga and meditation classes, workshops,
massages, and books about sexuality. A 2005 article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
described their naked yoga classes as “transforming, not titillating.”

The residents of the warehouse also experimented among themselves. Daedone does not speak in great detail about this, other than calling it the phase of “research and development.” The rooms in the warehouse had no doors. At its most active,
fifty people lived communally in the space, essentially volunteer human research subjects inhabiting a petri dish. They would rise each morning early, at 7:00 a.m., and OM. Then they would undergo a group session called Withholds, a discussion technique that Daedone had learned from Victor Baranco, the founder of More University, where communal residents voiced suppressed thoughts or feelings about
one another. Then they wrote in journals or practiced yoga.

The sexual research of the house’s residents went beyond the practice of orgasmic meditation, although residents would OM two or three times a day. A person with whom one shared a bed was called a “research partner,” and research partners would invite each other over for “sleepovers.” Through sex and discussion about sex they pushed
the boundaries of jealousy: an awareness of being near a partner, for example, while he slept with someone new, or forcing people to continue to communicate with each other even in the middle of the worst emotional upheavals. They explored the particularities of sexual responses by women who had experienced trauma or had eating disorders. They looked at how a woman’s sexual experience might evolve
with age. They discussed how a man should respond when a woman starts crying during sex, or how a man can discern a woman’s sexual satisfaction if she does not vocalize her enjoyment. The communal nature of the experience was essential. If a difficulty arose, the resident would have the rest of the group there to discuss the problem. If the world at large condemned their sexuality, the numbers of
the group would reinforce the worth of the experimentation.

According to one former resident, who spent three or four months in the warehouse in 2008 when he was in his mid-twenties, “there wasn’t that much sex happening,” despite “the sounds of orgasm rippling through the warehouse through the day” as people OM-ed with each other. As a man, he was not allowed to be stroked unless the woman offered
in return. (“We teach men not to ask and women not to offer for at least a year, or six months,” said Kandell, of the “male stroking practice,” which does in fact exist but the specifics of which are obscured to all but the more committed members of OneTaste. The idea is to eliminate the notion of sex as a reciprocal servicing contract, and to encourage women who consider the needs of others
before their own to learn how to receive rather than give.) The former warehouse resident found his experience living there beneficial, especially the work to eradicate gender-based preconceptions about sexuality. He felt he had genuinely learned to perceive and read what the OM-ers call “turn-on,” or the body’s physical responses to the presence of another person. He gave me a summary of their
theories about privileging the drives of the body, or “limbic system,” over the reasoning of the mind, or “cortex.” The downside of living in the warehouse was the heavy focus on recruitment, the pressure to make OneTaste a proselytizing endeavor.

“They were, to my chagrin, very much motivated to bring people in by selling the program,” he said. OneTaste earned revenue by charging for workshops
and coaching, and anyone who traded their e-mail address or phone number in exchange for the right to watch a video or attend a lecture could expect a long series of solicitations. The first workshop he took was very beneficial to him; the second class was “bullshit.” He found the teaching strangely anti-love, or at least averse to the building up of intimacy between two people at the expense of
others, elevating instead an idea of wider-ranging connectedness. The warehouse was not welcoming to those who fell in love. “I very much enjoy intimacy,” he said, and ultimately concluded the OneTaste way was not for him. It took him time to reintegrate back into the world of mainstream expectations, to remember how love and sex worked without the structure of OM-ing.

*   *   *

Daedone emerged
from this “research and development phase” having refined and codified the system and practice of orgasmic meditation, which she says provides a stable foundation from which to experiment. OM-ing every day, she said, gave her more security from which to pursue more emotionally demanding situations. (When I met her she was attempting a year of “extreme non-monogamy.”) At the end of 2008, OneTaste
abandoned its warehouse and moved its offices and residence to a former single-room-occupancy hotel nearby, which had the advantage of having doors. They brought their numbers down to twelve residents. “The heat in the warehouse, I think, was too high for the public,” said Kandell.

By the time OneTaste was profiled for the first time in
The New York Times
in 2009, the organization had adopted
a tone of friendly ambiguity. The opacity about what happened at OneTaste beyond the orgasmic meditation it publicly advertised allowed the organization to appeal to both monogamous couples and women who thought of themselves as reluctant sexual explorers. Daedone’s great hope was that one day asking someone for an OM would be like “inviting someone for a cup of tea.”

That night, before her live
audience, she described how the practice works. She set up the “nest” of pillows and one of her colleagues volunteered (remaining fully clothed, in this instance). Nicole set her subject in position, then put her hand on her legs. “I’ll feel the difference between the sensation in her body, and the sensation in mine,” she explained. Then she would put lubrication on her fingers, set a timer for
fifteen minutes, and begin stroking. “So if her clitoris were a clock” (the room found this hilarious), “it would be the one o’clock position. And you’re just going to stroke there, up, down, up, down, up, down, up down.” The lecture ended in wild applause.

*   *   *

In order to try an orgasmic meditation, the first step was attending a one-day workshop at OneTaste to get “certified” to OM.
The workshop cost $97. Justine told me I was lucky, because I would have the rare treat of viewing a live demonstration, and Nicole would be there in the morning.

After signing a release that said, among other things, that we understood that “OM-ing is not psychotherapy,” the workshop began with the same round of games as before, although this time discussion was led by Nicole. She looked casually
sexy in a short gray dress that revealed her long legs and bare arms and tan suede high-heeled boots. Again, in response to the question about the motives that brought us to the workshop, I responded, “Curious.”

Nicole challenged me. “You say that but I’m sensing some irritation.” I was irritated. The man to my left reeked of booze, was red-faced and bright-eyed, and I was pretty sure that whatever
was in his coffee cup, at ten in the morning, was not coffee. He would laugh loudly and frequently and would turn and stare at my profile. He radiated a grasping need. I felt he had come to the room with a question and had singled me out as an answer to that question. As long as I was conscious of his presence I felt almost nauseated with anxiety. The room was warm and oppressive, and the fifty
people in the semicircle formed a tight wall. I could not take notes without attracting attention, but needed to take notes. I could have said all this but instead I pretended I was relaxed and enjoying myself, even though I felt only more anxiety for having been singled out by Nicole.