Future Sex (6 page)

“Who wants to be in the hot seat?” asked Eli. At least a dozen hands shot up, including that of Melissa from Kansas City. The
moderators chose a small, dark-haired woman named Rebecca, with whom they seemed to be friends. “Rebecca, you’re glowing,” said Eli. She did appear to be glowing. She sat down and awaited her first question.

“Rebecca, why are you glowing?” someone finally asked.

“Because I found my orgasm tonight,” she answered.

“Thank you.”

Rebecca pointed to the next questioner.

“Where was it?”

“My entire
body.”

“Thank you.”

Another woman sat in the hot seat. The questions continued: “Are men who want to date you intimidated by you?” asked one. “I don’t know,” she said. Further questions revealed that the hot seater was actually in love with a woman, so later someone asked, “How did it make you feel when you were asked that question about dating men?”

A lanky man with harem pants, blue eyes,
and an indeterminate northern European accent took to the stool.

“Are you German?”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

“How did you hear about OneTaste?”

“Someone told me about it at a party.”

“Thank you.”

He said he was happy to have come because these were the kinds of things he always wanted to talk about.

“What sort of things?”

“Sensual things.”

“Thank you.”

“What do you hope will happen?”

“I hope
to meet people and maybe have sex with one.”

“Thank you.”

A woman named Lisa sat in the hot seat. She pointed at a man with his hand upraised.

“Jose,” she said, calling him by name.

“What are you frustrated about?” he asked.

“Jose,” she answered.

“Thank you,” said Jose.

“Why are you frustrated with Jose?” asked someone else.

“Because I want to fuck him.”

Everybody laughed.

“Thank you.”

Finally the moderators called on Melissa. She had looked happy, but once she was sitting in the hot seat she began to cry.

“Why are you crying?” someone asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She did not seem to be crying from despair. Rather, the idea was that she cried like someone who has been unhappy for a long time, has unexpectedly found solace, and now can hardly conceive of
the darkness to which she had previously confined herself.

We proceeded to the third and final game: Intimacies. Alisha explained that it was Intimacies that had made her realize, when she had first encountered OneTaste, that she had found somewhere she belonged. The rules of the game held that people directly addressed other people’s “turn-ons”: we went around in a circle, and each person was
allowed to make a statement to another person directly, or the group at large. A man named Rajiv told the woman named Lisa that he was attracted to her. When the game reached her she addressed him, “Let’s talk.” Somebody told the not-German man he had “turned her on.” Another man addressed all of the women in the group, expressing relief to hear them talking about their desires. Another liked someone’s
glasses. One man from across the room said to a woman on the floor with blond curly hair, “You’re not normally the kind of person I’m attracted to but you really turn me on.” Another: “When I saw you kissing someone earlier in the kitchen I felt disappointed.” Each of these statements was to be met only with a simple “thank you.”

A lot of people addressed Melissa, whose tears had acted as an
invitation to the more shy people in the group. When my turn came I told Melissa that the contrast between our shallow small talk and her tears reminded me how much is going on beneath every banal conversation. Much of the attention also focused on a small man dressed all in white sitting on the floor. He was pale and seemed to radiate illness and depression. At one prompt he had referred to the end
of a relationship. In Intimacies several people addressed him. One told him that he looked troubled. Another said that he was surprised to see him back for the second time. The sallow man in white used his chance to share an intimacy to thank the friends who had accompanied him. Marcus, the man who had been staring at the beginning, addressed me: he had been watching me during the evening, he said,
and would see me shut down, and then at other times open up and light up. “Thank you,” I said, annoyed.

After the “games” finished, Alisha and Eli launched into a brief explanation of what orgasmic meditation actually is. Orgasmic meditation, or OM, is a fifteen-minute practice between a woman and a partner. The word choice—
practice
—deliberately recalled yoga and meditation. For the OM-ers it
implied an ongoing, daily ritual in which one gained incremental expertise and wisdom over time.

A couple begins an orgasmic meditation session by first setting up a “nest.” They place a blanket on the floor for the woman to lie down on and a number of pillows to support her legs and head. The woman then takes off her pants and underwear, reclines, and opens her legs. Her partner sits down on
a cushion to her right, remaining fully clothed. He puts his left leg over her body and his right leg under hers. Then he sets a timer for fifteen minutes, puts on a pair of latex gloves, and puts lubrication on one finger. He looks down and poetically describes the woman’s vulva to her. He asks for permission to touch her. When she grants it, he puts his thumb into her introitus with his right hand.
With his left he gently begins stroking the upper left-hand quadrant of her clitoris, applying only very gentle pressure. This continues for the remainder of the allotted time, sometimes wordlessly, sometimes with the woman offering guidance or her partner sharing observations or physical feelings. When the timer ends (usually heralded by the “Bell” setting on an iPhone), the man cups his hand
over the woman’s vulva, providing firm pressure to “ground” her. Then the session ends. He covers her with a towel, and the two share what the OM-ers call “frames.” The man might say, as one did in an instructional video I watched: “I felt a bright, thin gold pulse from the tip of my finger up to my chest.” The woman might respond, as she did in the same video: “There was a moment where you slowed
the stroke and stopped for a split second and I felt a deep electrical exhale move through the upper part of my body.” Following these statements the OM is complete. The woman puts her clothes back on, the nest is put away, and the two get on with their day.

After this meeting I went back to my apartment and watched more of the organization’s videos on the Internet. They mostly showed couples.
There sat Marcus, sitting with his partner, a woman named Hadassah. In reality-television-style testimonials they said things like “Once I started to OM I realized how much was available,” and “OM-ing helped me find my voice. It’s not just the secret to better relationships, it’s the secret to a better life,” and “You are sitting on a volcano and you don’t know it,” and “The turn-on is there the
whole time.” Marcus and Hadassah looked at each other with love.

*   *   *

I went back to Moss Street the next day. The founder of OneTaste, Nicole Daedone, was lecturing that evening, in what Alisha had said was her first public appearance in months. Daedone had been working on her next book, about the “OneTaste theory of relationships.” The lecture was to be webcast via her Facebook page and
both the live audience and the Web audience would have the opportunity to ask questions.

Walking over to the OneTaste facility through the bleak streets of SOMA I was conscious of weariness settling over me. I was interested in their project but I did not want to have to talk to these people again. They demanded an enthusiasm and a positivity it exhausted me to have to muster and present. As
I approached the location, I saw the sickly depressed man walking with a female companion across the street. He still wore his curious draped outfit of white, including what appeared to be linen white culottes, which exposed his stockinged ankles and Birkenstock sandals. One ankle appeared to be supported by a tan ACE bandage, but I had merely conditioned myself, because of his white attire, to think
of him as a sort of hospital patient, oppressed with an unknown malady. In reality he was simply wearing a single brown sock on his left foot. I hung back to avoid overtaking them and having to acknowledge that we had both attended the group meeting last night, shared “intimacies,” and would therefore have to introduce ourselves to each other. In my efforts to avoid this encounter, I took a wrong
turn and arrived by way of a circuitous route, walking back toward OneTaste after having overshot my destination by several blocks.

Ahead of me, a woman in a long mustard-yellow skirt scanned the numbers of the buildings on Moss Street. She opened the door of OneTaste and disappeared inside. I followed her, passing through the velvet curtains into the entryway, which was now filled with people.
The clipboard phalanx remembered my name and welcomed me back as if I were an old friend. I greeted Justine Dawson, who did public relations for the organization. In the room where we had sat yesterday, the seats had been rearranged into rows. Lights, cameras, and cords gave the space the appearance of a floodlit production studio and added an air of significance to the moment. These arrangements
all oriented themselves toward a simple tableau: two high stools and an end table with a white calla lily and two glasses on it. Two bottles of Perrier stood beneath the table unopened.

Nicole Daedone was immediately recognizable, not simply from her photos online but because of the acolytes who now flocked excitedly around her. More than this I knew her by her charisma, which had a physical
component. She was in her mid-forties and tall. She wore a delicate bias-cut shift of milky white that revealed her décolletage. Her hair was dyed a pale gold and she wore gold hoop earrings. She was tan and her long legs were bare and impeccably depilated. She wore a pair of black suede wedge heels and a ring that was a sort of half gyroscope of diamonds. As the audience waited for her speech, their
attention was drawn to her, half-monitoring what she would do and what she might say as they carried out their own conversations.

The organizers turned off the music. Daedone came down the side of the aisle on the right and sat in front of the audience on one of the stools. After a brief introduction, where she was introduced as the “originator of the practice of orgasmic meditation,” Daedone
was left alone on stage. She began with the deliberate gesture the moderators had used the previous night: the calm, wise, glance around the room, until the audience became aware of a change and fell silent. Then Daedone began speaking, in a quiet, conversational tone.

She teaches, she said, one thing: “I teach about desire and the fulfillment of desire.” Women have been trained, she continued,
to think that men don’t want them to be happy. But desire was not about indulgence. It was not Harlequin romances or bonbons or shopping. It was the antithesis of that, an “unbelievably stringent mistress,” and the best way Daedone had discovered to feel desire was the experience called orgasmic meditation, a thing for which there was no “cultural context.”

“How many people know what orgasmic
meditation is?” she asked. Many people in the room, which held at least one hundred people, raised their hands. Daedone nodded. “We’ve actually gotten to the point where we sound like we make sense.”

Daedone then proceeded to tell her story, the details of which were filled in with each retelling I heard over the course of several weeks. She grew up in Los Gatos, California, with her single mother,
in what she frequently alluded to as a boisterous and emotional family of Sicilian descent. She had sex for the first time when she was sixteen, got pregnant, then had an abortion. She attended San Francisco State University, and in her twenties began to collaborate with a friend on an art gallery. She described herself then as an uptight and controlling person, who dressed in tight black dresses
with white pearls, who ate well and practiced yoga and surpassed all contemporary indices of personal fortitude and accomplishment. She had boyfriends, but there was no indication, in her early twenties, that she would go on to devote her life to spreading gospels of sexuality. She did not feel capable of sharing joy with other people. “I was a bitch,” she said.

Then, when she was twenty-seven,
Daedone received a phone call and learned that her father was on the verge of death. Daedone only rarely mentions her father in lectures, and doesn’t explain where he fit in her portrait of her expressive Sicilian family. Daedone’s father died in prison, convicted of child molestation. She has said that he did not harm her as a child, but that she had spent many years of her life “choosing the
option of the powerful-victim identity.”

She told the story of his death in mystical terms: she ascended in the hospital elevator toward his deathbed, and suddenly experienced a singular feeling, not of sadness but of rapture. Time seemed to dilate. The air in the elevator took on an aquatic quality. For a moment, every other aspect of her life faded. When the elevator doors opened, Daedone had
lost the illusion of purpose. In the days that followed her father’s death her resolve collapsed. A breakdown followed, until, in another epiphanic moment, while running through Yerba Buena Gardens a few days later, Daedone heard a voice, clear as a bell. It said, “You will not leave any part of yourself behind.”

I knew what she meant. Losing oneself, in the local context, was a reasonable fear.
Strange lives are led in Northern California, where one intellectual stumble can turn you into a wild-eyed apostle of pet acupuncture or shadow healing. It is the national headquarters of bronzed mystics speaking into wireless microphones, promising all the keys to “unlocking your potential.” An army of them waited, in thousands of YouTube videos, to validate pain and propose solutions. In mentioning
her own skepticism about the magic formulas Daedone was really addressing my own skepticism, and that of the other people in the room, who might see her speech as just another sales pitch.