Future Sex (8 page)

She questioned other people, too, and could come down harshly. Winning her approval or earning her notice became
a part of the room’s dynamic. A man sitting on the floor confessed himself a skeptic of the benefits of orgasmic meditation, and Nicole bristled. “Then why are you here?” she asked. “I’m not here to convince you.” A medical resident at Stanford University, a divorcee still in her twenties with whom I had been chatting earlier, said, “I’m here because I haven’t had an orgasm in five years.” When
another woman introduced herself, Nicole interrupted her with an air of psychic prognosis. “Are you from San Diego?” she asked. “I’m from the Bay Area,” replied the woman. Nicole stared at her intently. Then she looked around the room. “What’s the ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp’ movie?” she asked. “
Hustle and Flow
,” someone yelled out. Nicole nodded and looked back at the woman. “It’s hard to
be a witch when everyone around you is normal,” she said.

We broke for lunch. I went to a nearby café followed, to my dismay, by the man who had been sitting next to me, who ordered a beer. Several other people joined us. One of them, a woman in her early twenties named Lauren, was enthusiastically raising funds to try to enter OneTaste’s coaching program, which cost $13,000.

Lunch was a relief
from the frenetic atmosphere of a room where everyone was talking about sex. I waited until my neighbor sat down with his beer then chose a seat on the other side of the room. When we arrived back at the workshop, we were all much calmer. Alisha and Rob led a discussion about the morning’s events. Suddenly Nicole stood up from her seat in the back row and came to the front. She had changed costume,
and was now wearing jeans and a draping, oatmeal-colored cowl-neck sweater. She was worried, she said, that the energy had gone out of the room. She lamented that we had all returned to our usual, comfortable state of sexual repression. This was true. I felt much more relaxed. Nicole said this was a mistake. “A group of people gets very uncomfortable when things get hot,” she said. “This practice
is
necessarily
uncomfortable.” So before we proceeded, she asked us to go around the room and talk about our feelings some more. “The whole thing is for each person in this room to become who they are,” she announced. “The soul isn’t just connected to the heart, it’s connected to cocks and pussies.”

We continued going around the room, sharing our feelings, Nicole periodically stopping to interrogate
people further. A young olive-skinned man said that he loved women but felt like a different person when he was having sex. She stopped him. “Are you Italian?” she asked. He was, he said. She looked at him thoughtfully.

“Women love to fuck,” she told him. “They have no desire deeper than to devour you.” I had started taking notes again, but at this I stopped. Her eyes now scanned the room and
rested on me. “What?” she asked. “You look skeptical.”

I admitted that as interested as I was in being in a room with so much openly expressed desire, I was feeling hemmed in by it. I said I guessed I liked to have more control about who I could be sexual with, and that unwanted advances made me anxious. As much as I might “love to fuck,” it was usually only true for one guy out of several hundred,
and sexual interest from the rest bothered me.

In response to this, Nicole told a story about a guy who was leaving lascivious comments on her website. Every day, the man wrote to her how much he wanted to fuck her, about all the nasty things that he would do to her. She ignored him for a while, but then finally confronted him, asked him for his number, texted him, and said, “Okay, let’s do this.
Come on over.”

Nothing. He did not respond. She had proven herself bigger than his desire. By inviting rather than repelling this man, she had put herself in a position of power over him. Women, she explained, tend to receive sexual desire with anxiety. When Nicole walks into a room and perceives someone’s sexual interest directed her way, she now internally acknowledges it instead of pretending
to be unaware of it or doing everything possible to diminish it. She monitors the response of her body, specifically her genitals, to the other people in the room. She will even talk about this in speeches: “At all times there isn’t a moment when I’m awake that my ambient attention isn’t anchored to my genitals,” she said in a video I later watched online. “I can tell you at any moment—not that
you’re going to ask—what’s happening in my genitals. Right now my genitals are slightly swollen, they’re switched out a little bit, it feels like there’s a light layer, almost of like sweat or perspiration, it feels really warm and there’s a buzzing around my introitus. At any moment I keep my attention there, and if you keep your attention there you stay grounded with what’s happening. If you can
keep your attention located on the most intense domain of the body, then nothing out here matters.” Now, as a mental exercise, she makes a point of identifying who in the room she “wants to fuck.”

This statement offended my propriety. Shouldn’t I have the right to be in the world without having to contend with male desire? My whole life I had received strangers attempting to flirt with me with
the graciousness of a fence post. It had always filled me with annoyance. I could never take it lightly, as I saw my friends could, when we were interrupted at a bar in the middle of an interesting conversation to endure a dull performance by a man. My first impulse was always to indicate that I wanted to be left alone as quickly as possible. Of all the things Nicole Daedone said to me, however,
the idea of acknowledging and accepting the sexuality in a room, feeling it, naming it, and inhabiting it, was a kernel of a thing that I kept trying to dismiss but found I was unable to stop thinking about. To walk into a room and concentrate on the way my body responded to the people in it was a sexual inquiry I could conduct privately, without any risk. After thinking of what Nicole had said,
I discerned a duplicity at work in the archive of my own perceptions, whereby I had carefully excised my sexual awareness of other people from the naming of my experiences and pretended my own physical responses had not happened. I wondered what this façade of asexuality had cost me in confidence and decisiveness. Had I made choices on false pretenses? To shift my perception meant only that I began
letting myself name when I wanted to stare at someone, or that I fought the impulse to look away when someone stared at me. I tried to notice the catalog of subtle urges or repulsions that I would never name or discuss out loud. I experimented with my responses to getting hit on or hollered at on the street, forcing myself to chat or nod, letting myself experience the unsettled feeling that came
with a sexual overture, just sitting in the feeling and trying to know it, instead of immediately trying to close it down. It became apparent how much energy I expended in being affronted, or wondering whether I should be affronted. Other women at OneTaste would talk about conducting similar personal experiments. They might mention that they had spent a week sitting with their legs spread in public,
so as to test out the sense of entitlement or ownership over a space.

The time now came for Nicole to give a demo of the practice of orgasmic meditation. We took a short break and the staff set up a massage table covered in pillows. Justine Dawson took off her jeans, and the look that passed between Nicole and Justine was one of complete trust and mutual assurance. They were friends who knew
each other well. Sitting up while Nicole explained her process, Justine looked unembarrassed and cheerful. She was a fair-haired woman in her mid-thirties, slim and small. Once Nicole had adjusted the pillows, Justine lay back and splayed her legs.

“The first thing I’m going to do is safeport her,” said Nicole. She told Justine that her hands were cold. Then she described Justine’s vulva to the
room. This was where Daedone could be her most poetic, evoking seashells and flower petals. As house style, OneTaste always used the terms
pussy
and
cock
. When I asked someone why, the response was that the problem with female genitalia was that it was difficult to describe the whole thing—the word
vagina
, commonly used, at least in the medical sense of the word, refers only to one part of things.
So, too,
clitoris
,
vulva
,
introitus
,
labia
, and all the other parts. Nicole, former student of semantics, had therefore decided to use
pussy
. “I’m super big on reclamation of terms,” she told me.

She put lube on her fingers. She explained that she and Justine were old friends who got regularly tested for sexually transmitted infections. We should always use latex gloves. “Sex is not worth dying
for,” she said. She explained that she would be touching Justine’s clitoris with no more pressure than rubbing a finger across an eyelid. Around the room, men and women touched the pads of their fingertips to their eyelids. Then she began her performance.

It was like watching a medium in a séance, or an evangelical taken by a spirit. Nicole’s face assumed a look of intense concentration. She
had her right arm draped over Justine’s leg, and used her left arm to stroke. Justine almost immediately started moaning. As she stroked, Daedone would throw her head down and then toss her hair back again, biting her lip and gazing heavenward as she tried new configurations. Beneath her arms Justine quaked and shivered. The room was silent and rapt. The man to my right began to inhale and exhale
with deep, meditative breaths. The face of the man on my other side took on a deeper red flush. Justine never reached a recognizable climax. There was no clear peak followed by a lull. Her left arm grasped feebly at the air. Her legs vibrated. During the performance, Nicole asked several women up to the massage table, where they put their hands on Justine’s leg and felt the currents of feeling washing
over her. Justine’s vocalizations were consistently loud but varied in tone. When the timer sounded, Nicole ended the practice with a firm downward stroke. She closed Justine’s labia. She took a clean towel, placed her hand over it, and pulled it downward through her hand. Then she covered Justine with the towel. Justine lay motionless.

Following this, we had a lecture from a doctor from Berkeley
about the benefits of regularly flooding the female body with oxytocin through orgasms. Then Daedone left and Alisha and Rob returned to their duties. Now we stacked the chairs and faced each other in two lines, men on one side and women on the other. This set of exercises involved an escalating series of interrogations followed by touching. With each exercise, we would step to our right, so
as to be in contact with a different person. The man would be asked to describe the face of the woman in front of him, and vice versa, with instructions to include mention of all the lines, blemishes, or errors in makeup. As a man described to me the traces of my makeup, a blemish on my chin, and other flaws in my appearance that I had convinced myself were too small to be noticeable, I felt a unique
experience of horror. We stood in front of each other and repeatedly asked the question “What do you desire?”—a question to which I could only stammer meager responses. I was conscious for the first time of the flat white screen that rolled down when I considered such a question, the opaque shadows of movement behind it. A vacant search bar waited, cursor blinking, for ideas that I, who did not
consider an idea an idea until it was expressed in language, had never expressed in language. What I said I desired was to surrender to another person without having to explain what I wanted.

The men took the wrists of the women and gently stroked them with their fingers in an up-down motion. We stroked each other’s shoulders and then interviewed each other about what we had felt. After it was
over, I did not take up the option to partner with someone else from the workshop and try an orgasmic meditation for the first time. I felt physically exhausted and emotionally drained. Every time I thought of the older man whose shoulders I had petted I felt a deep repulsion. There is a reason for boundaries, I told myself, not at all certain if it was true but knowing that I was certainly more
comfortable with boundaries.

I avoided all eye contact with people looking for partners, and quickly walked to the Muni stop and caught the bus home, where I bought takeout Vietnamese food, an ice cream sandwich, and a bottle of wine and watched the Norman conquest episode of Simon Schama’s
History of Britain
, my last birthday present from the ex-boyfriend whose average response time to my e-mails
was now four to six weeks, if he responded at all.

*   *   *

A few days later I was sitting in the Harvey Milk branch of the San Francisco Public Library when Justine Dawson called me. I felt a twinge of panic and ignored the call, then forced myself out into the sunshine, where a cold wind was blowing, to return it. Justine asked how the class had been. I told her that it had been overwhelming
for me. She again suggested I try the practice. She said that she could not tell me who to OM with or set it up for me, but that if I joined the secret orgasmic meditation group on Facebook I could message a couple of men who might be interested. I joined the Facebook group, and soon received a friendly message from Eli, the man who had led the first meeting I had attended. I liked that he did
orgasmic meditation all the time, so that it would be uneventful for him. I asked him to OM, he said yes, and we arranged for a Thursday at noon session at OneTaste. It was a sunny day, and I went running that morning, then showered carefully and shaved my legs. I walked to 47 Moss Street slowly, not listening to music through headphones. I passed a man carrying a bongo drum and a tambourine, a paper
sign in a window that said “The Center for Sex and Culture Has Moved,” and a lunatic woman with her pants down around her knees, performing a fanciful ballet dance.

The building on Moss Street was still and quiet. I went through the heavy velvet curtains that divided the room and closed off the event space from the entryway. Two affiliates of OneTaste were there. One, whose name was Henry, gave
me a pint glass filled with green tea and I sat on the couch. Eli entered with Matthew, an older man whom I had met the night of Nicole’s first lecture. Eli and I went upstairs. Off the landing were three carpeted rooms furnished with pillows and chairs. Eli went to gather supplies from a closet: one pillow for him to sit on, a smaller pillow for my head, a woolen yoga blanket, yoga mat, and towels
for me to lie on. “Is there anything I can do to make you feel more secure?” he asked. I said I didn’t think so. His presence, above all the ease and casualness with which he did these things, was reassuring enough.