THE DNC'S SAN FRANCISCO SEX CULT OFFERS CLITORAL TOUCHING FOR $150.00
We Went UnderCover With An IPhone In San
Francisco And Marin County
The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation
Company
Almost every member is a registered
Domocrat and some are highly placed in the DNC. OneTaste is
pushing its sexuality wellness education toward the mainstream.
Some former members say it pushed them into sexual servitude and
five-figure debts.
By
Ellen Huet
When Michal got married in August 2015, her
family and longtime friends didn’t attend. The woman who walked her
down the aisle, the dozens of beaming onlookers, her soon-to-be
husband—all were people she’d met in the preceding 10 months. Wearing
a loose, casual dress borrowed from one of her new friends, Michal
spent the ceremony in a daze.
She knew she didn’t want to get married like
this, in the living room of a rented San Francisco house without her
family’s support, yet she felt compelled to do it. That uneasy feeling
could apply to most of her experiences in OneTaste.
OneTaste is a sexuality-focused wellness
education company based in the Bay Area. It’s best known for classes
on “orgasmic meditation,” a trademarked procedure that typically
involves a man using a gloved, lubricated fingertip to stroke a
woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes. For Michal, like those at her
wedding, OneTaste was much more than a series of workshops. It was a
company that had, in less than a year, gained sway over every aspect
of her life.
Since taking her first class, Michal had
started working on OneTaste’s sales staff and living in a communal
house in Brooklyn with her co-workers. Seven days a week, they
gathered for multiple rounds of orgasmic meditation, or OM. (They
pronounce it “ohm.”) They spent hours calling and texting people who’d
come to a OneTaste event, trying to sell seats for the next, more
expensive classes. The company-hosted evening OM circles in Manhattan
sometimes held 30 or more pairs of strokers and strokees in one room,
the fully clothed men concentrating on their moving fingertips while
the women, naked from the waist down, moaned, wailed, and sighed.
Afterward, Michal and her co-workers would run that night’s OneTaste
event, where they set up chairs, jogged the microphone over to
attendees, and chatted up more sales leads. It was exhausting.
Michal had been drawn to OneTaste because she
felt unfulfilled sexually and in other parts of her personal life. The
group seemed full of glowing, attractive people confident they could
feel profound sexual pleasure whenever they wanted. She believed her
new life would bring her closer to the center of OneTaste, where those
who were experts in OM—especially the company’s co-founder, Nicole
Daedone—seemed to hold the key to sexual and spiritual enlightenment.
In OneTaste, Michal was constantly surrounded
by people who were her colleagues, roommates, sexual partners, and,
suddenly, closest friends. She was also $20,000 in debt from buying
its classes. She was married during a two-week, $36,000-a-person
retreat called the Nicole Daedone Intensive. By the time she and her
husband left OneTaste a few months later, they’d spent more than
$150,000. “The deeper I went, the more courses I did, the more I
worked for them, the closer I got to Nicole—I knew I was doing
something that later would be very difficult to unravel,” she says. “I
knew I was losing control. In OneTaste, I’d done that again and again
and again.”
Michal’s story is far from unique among those
who venture deeper into the organization, though it’s almost unknown
to the outside world. OneTaste pitches itself to the public as a
fast-growing company teaching connection and wellness to an
increasingly mainstream audience. But many who’ve become involved in
the upper echelons describe an organization that they found ran on
predatory sales and pushed members to ignore their financial,
emotional, and physical boundaries in ways that left them feeling
traumatized. Even given the recent flurry of stories about groups
known for fringe sexual activity—Nxivm, whose founder, Keith Raniere,
is awaiting trial in New York along with his alleged deputy, actress
Allison Mack; Rajneeshpuram, the community featured in Netflix’sWild
Wild Country—OneTaste stands out for its conventional appeal to
wellness.
Bloomberg
Businessweekinterviewed 16 former OneTaste
staffers and community members, some involved as recently as last
year. Most spoke anonymously because they signed nondisclosure
agreements or fear retribution. Some, including Michal, asked to
withhold their last names because they don’t want to be publicly
associated with the company.
Many of the former staffers and community
members say OneTaste resembled a kind of prostitution ring—one that
exploited trauma victims and others searching for healing. In some
members’ experiences, the company used flirtation and sex to lure
emotionally vulnerable targets. It taught employees to work for free
or cheap to show devotion. And managers frequently ordered staffers to
have sex or OM with each other or with customers.
OneTaste calls this characterization
“outrageous” and says its goal has always been to help victims. It
says it never directed employees to engage in sexual acts with anyone,
nor did it have the ability to do so, though it paid a six-figure
out-of-court settlement in 2015 to a former employee who said she
suffered sexual assault and harassment, as well as other labor
violations, while on the job. That settlement hasn’t been reported
until now because it was confidential.
OneTaste says that until 2016 it was more of
an edgy lifestyle community that’s since become a legitimate business.
The company no longer organizes group OMs among students or leases
communal homes in its own name. It has added teaching centers in
London, New York, and Los Angeles alongside the one that sits across
from Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco. It says it made $12 million
in revenue in 2017 and will expand to Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis,
and Washington over the next two years.
The company has hired executives and advisers
who worked at CrossFit and the juice maker Odwalla, and OM has won
endorsements from Khloé Kardashian and Tim Ferriss (The
4-Hour Body). OneTaste’s nonprofit arm has commissioned a study
on the health benefits of OM and expects to publish findings later
this year. “OneTaste is the Whole Foods of sexuality—the organic,
good-for-you version,” says Chief Executive Officer Joanna Van Vleck,
the former head of Trunk Club LLC. “The overarching thing is, orgasm
is part of wellness.” OneTaste didn’t make Daedone available for
interviews, nor did she respond to requests for comment.
OneTaste has also begun targeting businesses
as customers—not teaching their employees how to stroke one another,
but how to apply OM principles such as “feel over formula” and “stay
connected no matter what” to running a company. “We’re having
conversations with companies about #MeToo and how to teach connection
as preventive health for companies rather than treating the disease of
sexual harassment,” says Van Vleck. She says the National Hockey
League is among the businesses that have expressed interest, though
the NHL says it can’t confirm any record of a conversation.
A decade’s worth of periodic OneTaste press
coverage hasn’t really gotten past the titillating veneer of OM.
Reporters have occasionally used the word “cult” jokingly because of
the practice’s inherent kookiness and fierce devotees, but Michal and
others say OneTaste deserves the term’s full weight. “I lost my
understanding of money,” Michal says. “There was a lot of
psychological manipulation. This is an organization that really preys
on people’s weaknesses.”
According to the story she repeats onstage and
in YouTubevideos,
Daedone founded OneTaste in 2004 after she met a monk at a party who
showed her a version of the technique she developed into OM. For years
her company remained a far-fringe oddity, teaching small classes in
San Francisco and running a residential warehouse where dozens of
members and residents experimented sexually.
In 2009, though, theNew
York Timesput OneTaste on thefront
page of its style section, and the brand took off. Daedone,
who’d previously run an art gallery, published a book calledSlow
Sexin 2011, and in 2013 gave aspeechat
South by Southwest called “Female Orgasm: The Regenerative Human
Technology.” In a 2011TEDxSF
talkthat’s been watched almost 1.5 million
times on YouTube, she describes an essential hunger for connection
that especially plagues Western women, who eat too much, work too
much, shop too much, and still feel empty. The fix, Daedone says in
the video, is OM. The practice helps men and women “lose that sense of
hopelessness that you will ever be reached deep inside.”
OM has strict rules, and it’s supposed to be
separate from sex, meaning it’s not foreplay. The pitch to women is 15
minutes of meditative focus only on their pleasure and sensation, with
no obligation to reciprocate. Men are told it will help them learn to
be more sensitive to women’s needs, though former members say it’s
often strongly implied that fellow OneTaste students will be open to
sexual experimentation beyond OM.
Many students’ first encounters are casual:
They spot a free or almost-free event with a title such as “Tired of
Swiping Left? Let’s Talk Real Intimacy!” or “You Do Yoga. You
Meditate. Now try #OrgasmicMeditation.” At that event, OneTaste
staffers tell them about the $199 Introduction to OM class. While
attendees are no longer invited to try OMing during the intro class,
it still features a live OM demonstration between staffers, right
before lunch. The way to learn more, the intro students hear, is to
take more classes.
Currently, students pay $499 for a weekend
course, $4,000 for a retreat, $12,000 for the coaching program, and
$16,000 for an “intensive.” In 2014, OneTaste started selling a
yearlong $60,000 membership, which lets buyers take all the courses
they want and sit in the front row. Staff also encourage students to
repeat courses, telling them the experience changes as they progress.
OneTaste says about 1,400 people have taken its coaching program,
6,500 have come to an intro class, and more than 14,000 have signed up
for online courses and its app.
Some students take a course or two and drop
off. But often, those with a core yearning—to overcome anxiety or
resolve a sexual trauma, for example—are drawn in deeper. Volunteering
at events can lead them to work for the company full time,
usually in sales. Former staffers say they were trained to target
young, beautiful women and awkward, wealthy tech guys. They set up
booths at life hacking conferences and Daybreaker early-morning dance
parties, serving coffee in shirts with slogans like “The Pussy Knows”
and asking passersby, “How’s your orgasm?”
At OneTaste events, attendees often played
communication games prompting them to share vulnerable stories. Former
staffers say they took notes that might help them sell later—maybe a
student was recently divorced and lonely—and senior staff assigned
subordinates to home in on wealthy students who seemed attracted to
them or had experiences in common. They also say female employees were
told to wear lipstick, heels, and short black skirts.
OneTaste denies that its policies targeted
specific groups and says it only ever required workers to dress
“professionally.” That said, last month, around the timeBloomberg
Businessweekstarted asking OneTaste about
its sales practices, onetime sales chief Rachel Cherwitz resigned.
“I’ve realized not everyone makes decisions as fast as I do. I’ve
realized sometimes I’ve given my opinion when I should not have,”
Cherwitz said in a statement forwarded by the company. “For now, I am
focused on taking some time to reflect.”
Cherwitz was Daedone’s top lieutenant for most
of the 11 years she spent with the company, according to several
former employees. She’s in many of OneTaste’spublic
videos, calmly explaining how people who OM daily, like her, can
gain confidence, feel energized, and have better sex. Former staff say
they were drawn to Cherwitz’s intense charisma and terrified of
getting on her bad side, especially by not hitting sales goals. Before
events, sales staff often watched one of her favorite YouTube videos,
a clip of lions hunting in a pack. Some former staffers say they
called customers “marks” and referred to themselves as “lions,”
“tigers,” and sometimes “fluffers,” a term borrowed from porn sets.
“You fluff someone to get them energetically and emotionally hard,”
one former salesperson says. “You were the dangled bait, like ‘You can
have more of this if you buy this $10,000 course.’ ”
Former staffers and members say to make
parting with thousands of dollars easier, OneTastetaught
members that money is just an emotional obstacle. It encouraged
students to take out multiple credit cards to pay for courses, and
some turned to such sites as GoFundMe and Prosper Funding for help.
“We took money from people that we shouldn’t have,” acknowledges Van
Vleck, the CEO, adding that OneTaste has revised its policies to make
sure customers don’t feel pressure to take on debt along with their
courses. The company denies manipulating students to buy courses.
“The first time I didn’t cover my credit card
bill, it broke something in my mind,” says Ruwan Meepagala, who went
to his first OneTaste event in 2012 at age 24, worked for the company
for about two years, and left owing $30,000 on his credit cards. “I
was no longer afraid of debt,” he says. “Once you break that barrier,
$3,000 is the same as $30,000.” At one point, Meepagala complained
that he and his co-workers hadn’t been paid in two months; he says he
was publicly shamed for having a “scarcity mindset.”
Even though OneTaste’s management pushed
employees to stop caring about their own money, they used the workers
to bring in more of others’ cash. And despite the strict rules the
company claimed to have separating OM from sex, initiates soon
realized the divisions could be porous when money was on the line.
Meepagala says managers told him to OM or have sex with older, wealthy
women right before Cherwitz or another staffer called to sell them
another course. Some members asked others to pay for their courses,
often suggesting they’d offer sex or attention in exchange. They even
called it hooking, former staff say. “A lot of women would be like,
‘I’m going to hook this guy for money,’ ” Meepagala says. “They would
brag about it.” The company denies using staff for bait and sex
for sales, and says Meepagala now teaches pickup-artistry-esque
techniques and isn’t a moral authority.
When Laurie, a 53-year-old private nurse in
Los Angeles, started taking classes and joining daily OM circles in
2014, she was overwhelmed by the community’s affection. Young women
treated her like a confidante, and men half her age paid attention to
her. She moved into an OM house in Santa Monica and signed up for the
coaching program. Her new life felt good for a while, but staffers
sometimes turned cold, especially when students hesitated to buy more
classes. When frozen out, she grew desperate to regain their
affection.
Laurie and other former students say they were
taught that once they started down the OneTaste spiritual path, they
would feel tortured and lost if they left. She says that kind of peer
pressure helped keep her in the coaching program starting in early
2015, even after traumas related to her childhood sexual abuse
resurfaced. “I was afraid of losing my soul if I left,” she says.
“This sounds so dramatic, but in my vulnerable state I believed it. I
thought I would be f---ed spiritually.” OneTaste denies that it taught
anyone they’d suffer if they stopped taking courses and says it hired
a trauma adviser in late 2016.
For some committed OMers, the experience
became even more complicated and bizarre. Hamza Tayeb, 33, was part of
OneTaste for about a decade. He started working for it to leave behind
an uninspiring Bay Area software job, he says. He also felt tied down
by his young son, born while he was still in college. Daedone heard
Tayeb’s story and said the mother’s choice to have the child shouldn’t
dictate his choices. She absolved him of responsibility toward his
son, he says: “I thought, I’m not going to hear that from anywhere
else.” He started teaching courses and eventually married Cherwitz.
OneTaste says Daedone never told members to separate from their
families.
In 2015, Tayeb took part in a five-day,
$6,500-a-head OneTaste event called Magic School, held near Northern
California’s Mount Shasta. The year before, the final evening featured
temporary ceremonial piercings and performers who danced with snakes
draped over their shoulders. This time, Daedone named a handful of men
and women, including Tayeb, “priests and priestesses of orgasm.” The
new clergy, dressed in white, conducted a group OM overseen by Daedone
in front of the hundred or so attendees. “It was a religion,” a former
employee says. “Orgasm was God, and Nicole was like Jesus or
Muhammad.” OneTaste says the ceremonies were “play” and compared Magic
School to Burning Man.
OneTaste teachings were often used to justify
sexual manipulation and abuse, several former members say. “Aversion
practice” is the company’s teaching that you gain power and expand
your orgasm—within the group, a broad term for sexual energy—by
performing sexual acts you don’t want to do, or doing them with people
you find disgusting. Meepagala says Cherwitz once saw him bickering
with a co-worker and told them they had to leave work and couldn’t
come back until they’d slept together. “Sometimes they’d assign
someone to be your sex manager for the week,” another former employee
says. “That person would go on Tinder or ask the community and line up
a person for you to sleep with each day, do all the texting, and tell
you who to meet when. … The authority figure would say, ‘You’re f---ed
up,’ and sex was always the solution.”
Although few members say they were forced to
do something they explicitly refused, consent in this setting was a
gray area. “You’re pushed to do it, and cornered,” says a former
employee. In 2015 the company paid $325,000 to settle a labor dispute
with former sales rep Ayries Blanck, according to a person familiar
with the matter. Blanck had said Cherwitz and others ordered her to
sleep with customers and managers, and two people familiar with the
matter say she considered the experience sexual assault. Blanck
declined to comment for this story.
OneTaste says the settlement was confidential
but that it has never required any employee to engage in a sexual act.
Van Vleck says supervisors may have suggested such things to employees
in the context of their friendships, but that the company wasn’t
involved. It referredBloomberg
Businessweekto nine former staff and
customers who say the company’s courses brought them close
relationships and new comfort with their sexuality. “People find
OneTaste because they’re deeply searching for something,” says former
membership coordinator Elyna Anderson, “and we often pass over a fair
amount of our own judgment and responsibility into the hands of people
we hope are going to turn our lives around.”
Former staffers say there were multiple cases
of domestic violence between employees in relationships, which were
sometimes characterized as one partner letting out his or her
aggressive desire, or “beast.” In one case, an executive repeatedly
slapped his girlfriend during a 2014 fight in the company’s Market
Street headquarters in front of employees, according to one
eyewitness. The executive was fired but has since been rehired.
OneTaste says the incident was unacceptable, but that it rehired the
executive because of a belief in rehabilitation. It
says it’s unaware of other cases and has never promoted or
tolerated violence.
Policy changes since 2016—no more hosting
group OM circles, no more student OMing in classes or staff OMing in
the office—have lessened OneTaste’s liability. While OneTaste says
these changes were meant to position it for a more mainstream
audience, several former staffers say management was also worried
about legal consequences. No leases are officially connected to the
company, but staff still live and OM together in private, says Tayeb.
All of this is in keeping, he says, with how the changes were framed.
“Often it was, ‘We all know that this stuff is actually good, but the
world isn’t going to see it that way,’ ” he says. “ ‘So we’re going to
adapt and comply, but all the while keep the core of what we really
want to do sacred and hidden.’ ”
At age 28, Michal had been in a few long-term
relationships, but she always felt self-conscious about her body and
about asking for what she wanted during sex. She’d also never had an
orgasm. So even though she thought OM sounded weird, she went to a
free OneTaste event one evening in late 2014 to see if it could help.
She chatted with staffers who seemed open, ate the right food, and did
yoga every day. Unhappy in her job as a teacher’s assistant in a
Jewish school, she started attending regular OM gatherings in New York
and responded to the open flirting from the men she met there. “This
thing seemed to offer friends, potential mates,” she says. “Also, I
was on this whole high where there were so many men interested in me.
It was weird to feel that power.”
OneTaste quickly swallowed Michal’s life. She
quit her teaching job, gave her dog to her parents, and moved into a
crowded OM house in Brooklyn to sell OneTaste classes. OMing did allow
her to reach orgasm, but only rarely. Instead, the draw gradually
became more about community and purpose. A few months in, she wanted
to sign up for the coaching program but didn’t have enough money. When
she went to talk to Cherwitz about it, Cherwitz took out her laptop
and helped her apply for a new credit card. Michal had never been in
debt before. Her parents were worried, but “I was so swept in by that
point,” she says. “I wouldn’t listen to anything that said, ‘Wait,
take a moment.’ ”
Life at the OM house was relentlessly
scheduled. Every morning at around 7 a.m., staff convened for two
rounds of OM, switching partners midway. Then came an AA-inspired
“fear inventory,” writing out and sharing their worries with a
partner. Former staffers say they were encouraged to report to
management if they heard others express doubts about OneTaste. They
all went to Bikram yoga, cooked, cleaned, then spent several hours
making sales calls around a table, tracking their progress with
Salesforce.com. After an afternoon round of OM, they left to run the
evening’s public session.
Michal, like many of her co-workers, was
classified as an independent contractor, earning commissions on the
courses she sold. She says she was lucky to make $200 or $300 a month,
which supplemented the $900 monthly stipend she received from a
manager’s personal account. She says she spent more than 80 hours most
weeks working on the group’s formal and informal activities. Meepagala
says he worked around 100 hours per week, on a schedule similar to
Michal’s, but was told to log 30, and that his salary as a “part-time”
worker was about $15,000 a year. Blanck, in her settled labor dispute,
said she was misclassified as an independent contractor because
OneTaste dictated what she was doing most hours of the day. She’d also
said she was paid less than minimum wage and was owed overtime.
Workers exhausted by the long hours were told
they should OM more, that orgasm is an endless energy resource. Some
former staffers say frequent OM sessions left them in a constant state
of emotional and physical rawness that, combined with a lack of sleep,
blurred their ability to think.
During morning check-ins, Michal and her
co-workers chirped about feeling “turned on.” If they didn’t, Cherwitz
or someone else would drill down on why they weren’t feeling excited
to sell. Someone who wasn’t hitting sales goals chanced being deemed
“tumesced” or “off the rails”—in need of OM or sex. Staffers were
rarely alone even at night, because they typically slept two to a bed.
Their phones would buzz with 100 texts an hour from OneTaste group
chats.
“Like many startups, employees worked long and
varied hours at times,” OneTaste said in a statement. The company says
workers’ lifestyle choices were optional, that fear inventory was
confidential and wasn’t used to harm people, and that in 2016 it
started using time sheet service TSheets to track and pay work hours,
including overtime. It says it pays workers properly.
As Michal picked up more internal jargon, it
began to make sense why OneTaste called outsiders “asleep,” “Muggles,”
or “in the Matrix.” The stranger the experience became, the more
thrilling it felt, like she was gaining access to something the rest
of the world couldn’t see.
At the end of a whirlwind week of ritual at
the Magic School where Tayeb was initiated, Michal says, a OneTaste
executive took her by the hand and led her to a sales table to talk
about putting down a $12,000 deposit for the upcoming Nicole Daedone
Intensive. She didn’t have the money, so a senior staffer suggested
she ask another OneTaste member, a man who worked in tech and had paid
part of her Magic School tuition. “I remember in those moments, you
have this exhilarating feeling,” she says. “You want to do [the
intensive], because the people who do it are much better off than
those who don’t. You also know Rachel would love you more and think
better of you.”
Michal and her parents began to argue more
about OneTaste, especially when she told them she’d be marrying a
fellow member—the one who’d been helping pay for her classes. Around
the same time, Michal’s OneTaste life started to break down. Her
closest co-worker left the company, and Michal began to think of
leaving as the right, albeit terrifying, move. She regularly woke up
screaming from nightmares.
Eventually, Michal persuaded her husband to
leave OneTaste with her in September 2015, shortly after their
wedding. Under the stress of adjusting to life outside, they divorced
soon after. She moved in with her parents in New York, depressed and
occasionally suicidal. “I thought, Why do I want to kill myself? I
can’t control my emotions,” she says. “I thought I was cursed.”
On top of everything else, fleeing OneTaste
can be brutally lonely. Laurie, the nurse, spent months on disability
after leaving and moved to Boulder, Colo. She’s in the process of
divorcing a man she met and married in OneTaste. Tayeb divorced
Cherwitz after he left and is trying to rebuild his relationship with
his son, who’s now 13. “There’s just a lot of confusion and pain and
anger,” he says. “I leveraged myself financially, emotionally. I was
married. I was all into this thing. When it doesn’t work out, it’s
devastating.”
Like other apostates, Tayeb is conflicted
about his years in OneTaste, which he says taught him practical
leadership skills and exposed him to useful spiritual teachings. Even
OneTaste’s harshest critics often say OM can help people. But Tayeb
also says the company exercises “undue influence” over those inside,
and he regrets that he saw it happen for years and never said
anything. The threat of spiritual ruin is too powerful and is wielded
without a moral compass, he says.
OneTaste says the company has changed,
especially since Daedone stepped down as CEO last year to work on her
next book and teach the occasional class. (She also sold her stake in
the company to a trio of OneTaste members.) Van Vleck says OneTaste
isn’t a cult, but that it’s common for people to use the term when
something “changes their internal perspective.”
The newish CEO is betting that the study
OneTaste has funded on the health benefits of OM, which has taken
brain-activity readings from 130 pairs of strokers and strokees, will
draw fresh crowds. Led by researchers from the University of
Pittsburgh, thestudyis
expected to yield the first of multiple papers later this year. “The
science that’s coming out to back what this is and what the benefits
are is going to be huge in terms of scaling,” Van Vleck says.
For more than two years after leaving
OneTaste, Michal continued to struggle with her relationship to sex.
Daedone and her disciples had prescribed sex with as many people as
possible as a way to achieve enlightenment, according to several
former staffers. “You don’t realize until after what a damaging idea
that is. I feel really disgusted that I put myself through that,”
Michal says. By the end, “I felt so much more confused about sex and
the boundaries of my body, even though that’s what they say it helps
you cultivate.” She hasn’t OMed since leaving OneTaste, and she says
she never will.
(Corrects
company characterization of former sales chief and adds further
company comment throughout)
Report
alleges 'sexual servitude' at San Francisco-based 'orgasmic meditation'
company
Nicole
Daedone, former CEO and founder of OneTaste, is seen in her
Russian Hill home office on Wednesday, May 18, 2011 in San
Francisco, Calif.
Former
employees of OneTaste say the San Francisco-based wellness company
encouraged them to spend thousands of dollars on orgasmic meditation
classes and, in some cases, engage in sexual servitude, according to a
report.
Bloomberg
Businessweek interviewed 16 former OneTaste employees, some
of whom compared it to "a kind of prostitution ring" that sometimes used
its teachings to justify sexual exploitation and abuse. Some said they
were coerced into sexual acts they did not want to perform. The report
says OneTaste settled out of court with a former employee who filed a
lawsuit over alleged sexual assault and harassment in 2015.
Michal,
another former employee, said she and her husband left the organization
with $20,000 in debt, having spent $150,000 combined on OneTaste's
costly classes and retreats, which range in price from a $199
introduction course to $16,000 "intensives." Multiple interviewees said
staffers encouraged them to open additional credit cards to cover the
cost, and they acquired serious debt in the process.
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WISN
On
its website, OneTaste touts itself as a lifestyle brand intended to
increase "health, happiness and connection through proven methods
combining meditation and conscious sexuality."
Those
methods include "orgasmic meditation," or OM (pronounced ohm) for short.
OM is a trademarked practice that typically involves a clothed and
gloved man stroking the genitalia of a woman, who is naked from the
waist down, for 15 minutes. There is no goal "other than to feel the
sensation," the OneTaste website says. A container on the site describes
the organization as a "consciousness-based clit stroking community."
OneTaste
denied allegations of sexual coercion and abuse in an email to SFGATE on
Monday. The company said the Bloomberg story paints the company in a
"false light, hand-picking the sensational allegations of a few
while ignoring thousands of satisfied and happy customers," a
spokesperson said.
"Moreover,
all of the allegations are more than two years old from before OneTaste
transformed, under new ownership and leadership, into a traditional
company with strong corporate governance, clear-cut sales policies and
practices, and strict HR policies."
Bloomberg
Businessweek said some of the employees interviewed were involved with
OneTaste "as recently as last year."
The
OneTaste spokesperson said it is against sales policy to "pressure"
potential customers to take out multiple credit cards, and those who ask
for a refund typically receive one.
Since
its founding by Robert Kandell and Nicole Daedone in the early-2000s,
OneTaste and its clitoris-centric wellness practices have appeared in
the pages ofThe
San Francisco Chronicleand the New York Times.
In
its 2009 profile, theTimescited
former members saying Daedone, the former CEO of OneTaste, possessed
"cultlike powers over her followers" and "sometimes strongly suggested
who should pair off with whom romantically." Daedone, who previously ran
San Francisco's 111 Minna art gallery, stepped down as CEO in 2017, a
departure that coincided with the purchase of the company by new owners,
the OneTaste spokesperson said. Daedone taught four courses in
2018, but is not scheduled to teach additional classes at this time.
Over
the past decades, the company expanded from its mid-Market San Francisco
headquarters — next door to Uber HQ — to Los Angeles, New York and
London. It plans to open in four additional cities over the next two
years.
It
was supposed to be a sexy Saturday night. I texted a few friends to
let them know I'd be in San Francisco, lined my eyes in black, and
dressed in tight maroon jeans and black boots, a lace strap on my tank
top buried under winter layers. (I knew the lace was there; that's
what mattered.) Before leaving the house, I overfilled the cat's bowl,
just in case I didn't make it home that night. As I drove over the Bay
Bridge, I thought about the last time I'd had sex. It'd been awhile.
As a lifelong serial monogamist, most of my sexual experiences had
occurred in committed relationships with courtships that would make
Jane Austen proud. To quote the Liz Phair song "Fuck and Run,"I
want all that stupid old shit/like letters and sodas. But
shouldn't I be able to have sex without the promise of romance? Maybe
OneTaste could change my perspective (ideally that night, so I could
go out and get laid).
A
few months ago, one of my more sexually liberated friends told me
about OneTaste, a San Francisco-based organization that has turned the
female orgasm into a form of worship and meditation. Here's how it
works: A woman undresses from the waist down and her male partner
gently strokes her clitoris with his finger for fifteen minutes.
OneTaste, which was the subject of a lengthy 2007SF
Weeklycover story, calls it "OM," short for
"orgasmic meditation," and advocates that having "an awake and alive
pussy" will increase a woman's physical and mental health. OneTaste
founder Nicole Daedone compares the practice to yoga.
Daedone,
who declined to be interviewed for this story, opened the San
Francisco art gallery 111 Minna in 1995, which she ran for one year,
then started OneTaste in 2001. Since opening its first location on
Folsom Street, OneTaste has grown to include nine outlets in the
United States and four in Europe. According to its website, women can
come to OneTaste with a partner or in search of one, and most start
with a weekly class that introduces the concept with a
question-and-answer session about sexuality. Learning to OM takes
place in a one-day workshop that costs $199, and six-month master
classes go up to $6,500. My friend never ended up paying to OM (and I
had no intention of trying it myself), but she said the intro classes
could be "transformational" on their own, a rare chance to discuss sex
with strangers and learn about yourself.
And
so, on a Saturday night, I found myself at OneTaste's headquarters, a
multi-storied glass and concrete building on Moss Street in San
Francisco's SoMa district, to take a women-only workshop called
"Relationship by Design." The lobby was sparse and tidy, with metal
shelves displaying a few copies of Daedone's book,Slow
Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, next to glass jars
of OneTaste's proprietary lubricant. I looked around for the pillows
and mats I'd seen in OneTaste's instructional video — "the nest" for
OM-ing — but there was no trace of such activity.
A
woman took my $15 and directed me to a large room containing a long
table covered with magazines and assorted craft supplies, and a
smaller table with hot water, tea, and trays of snacks. Maya, a
OneTaste staff member, quickly greeted me with a taut, wide smile and
asked me how I had heard about the class. I told her a friend had
referred me.
The
table was empty when I sat down, but it slowly filled up with the kind
of women I grew up seeing in suburban shopping malls: glossy-haired,
made-up women wearing pressed clothes and carrying designer handbags.
At any given point in the evening, I'd catch one of these women
staring into her cell phone with narrow eyes and an anxious crease on
her lips. There were a few exceptions, like the frizzy, gray-haired
hippie woman wearing clogs that sat down next to me and immediately
demanded that we all put on name tags, which Maya distributed.
When
about a dozen of us were seated, we started with the first of many
sharing-in-a-circle moments — to state our names and what brought us
there. About five women were first-timers. Then Maya explained what
we'd be doing in the class — creating written instructions for meeting
our sexual needs — an idea she had after some recently lackluster
sexual encounters. "A desire manual," she called it, or as another
woman said, "something to lay on the altar of sex." We were shown how
to construct our manuals using various supplies on the table, given
prompts like "Five things I want, but I can't ask for," and asked to
create our sexual résumés.
To
inspire our writing, a OneTaste staffer read aloud a sex manifesto
written by Daedone: "Would it be okay if your gravestone read: 'She
was an exceptionally mediocre woman?' Your epitaph will begin: 'She
redefined what it meant to be a good woman.' It will say: 'She scaled
mountains, in hiking boots and in heels.'" The manifesto finished with
the question, "What are you waiting for?" to which the group
collectively responded with a low and throatyhmm.
As
I worked on my manual, cutting out an image of Kurt Cobain and
Courtney Love from an oldBUSTmagazine,
I asked the women about OM-ing. Maya compared it to "eating chocolate
very slowly." A doe-eyed, long-haired woman in her twenties said
OM-ing had helped her come into her sexuality. The gray-haired woman
said she had been going to OneTaste for two years, and just signed up
for the level-seven workshop, an advanced course in OM. The
twentysomething said she was on level five, and still searching for
what she wanted from sex and love. Terms like "manifest" and
"gratitude" filled the conversation.
Later,
when I told the gray-haired woman that I planned to attend one of the
weekly intro classes, perhaps on Monday in Berkeley, she said she
would be there and also at the San Francisco class on Wednesday. "If
you're level seven, why are you still attending the intro classes?" I
asked. She smiled. "It's usually a one-to-one, male-to-female ratio,
if you can imagine, in the Bay Area," she said, adding, "and the men
are all there to learn about the female orgasm. It's a great place to
meet new sexual partners." I looked up from the red and white origami
paper in my hands (the cover of my "desire manual") and noticed a pile
of personal notebooks opened in front of the gray-haired woman. Inside
the notebooks were lists describing her ideal mate and ideal
relationship: "Likes to laugh," "affectionate," "makes time for me."
Even though she had OM'd a thousand times, she was also clearly
searching for Liz Phair'sletters and sodas.
OneTaste
didn't exactly put me in the mood I'd hoped for: I texted my friends
that I was going back to Oakland to hang out with my cat and watch
Netflix. When I got home, I hid my desire manual between two books on
my bookshelf, and picked up a collection of letters that had been
exchanged between the poets and ill-fated lovers Paul Celan and
Ingeborg Bachmann. Their story didn't end well — Celan threw himself
in the Seine and drowned, after which Bachmann took up correspondence
with Celan's wife — but the letters reveal a relationship that was
perhaps worth the suffering. Who am I to say a deep connection with
another human being can't be forged in a fifteen-minute orgasm? I
myself am sticking with poetry.
OneTasteis
a business dedicated to researching and teaching the practices of
orgasmic meditation and slow sex. Though it embraces certain tenets
based in Eastern ...
If
you’ve spent any time in crunchy circles — or just spent
time on the Internet — lately, you might be familiar withOneTaste.
After living in San Francisco — the “orgasmic meditation” or
“OM” business’ home base — for nearly nine years, I got
accustomed to hearing whispered, glassy-eyed praise from
seeking, lost-soul types. But concrete details were scarce,
which made the 13-year-old organization seem both more
alluring and more creepy.
In
case you’re in the dark, OneTaste is a thriving business
devoted entirely to spreading the gospel of female pleasure.
Curious sorts can go to a live event (the company now has
branches in 10 cities), fork over a few bucks, and learn
OneTaste’s unique 15-minute meditation practice in which
women shed their pants,lie
down in “nests” of pillows, and get their genitals
stroked in incredibly specific ways (i.e., “the upper left
quadrant”) by (usually male) “research partners” wearing
latex gloves. Oh, and I wasn’t kidding about that
“forking-over-bucks” thing — OneTaste offers a range of
services and events that vary wildly in price — you can
train to become acertified
coachfor $15,000, complete the
Mastery Program for $7,500, attend theOMXperience
conference($195-$395), or check out
a TurnOn event for $10.
ADVERTISEMENT
So,
is OneTaste another expensive, armchair-spiritual pastime
for damaged hippie types? An easy way for pervy men to get
in the pants of enlightened, half-naked women, all under the
dubious guise of “meditation”? Or just another everyday San
Francisco sex cult?
Illustrated By Ly Ngo.
Maybe
a little of all of the above. As Joanna Van Vleck,
OneTaste’s Los Angeles-based president, tells me via phone,
the company’s sole aim is to help people connect. But,
instead of doing that through, say, community service, or
dance parties, or weekly Bingo rounds, OMers do it through a
shared focus on being “powered by orgasm,” per the company
slogan. “It’s amazing how many people are willing to go
through life without their sexuality being touched,” Van
Vleck says. “Orgasm is a nutrient we need to be vital as
humans.”
But,
the goal of all that uber-precise clitoral stroking isn’t
the kind of orgasm you’re probably envisioning (“climax” is
the company’s preferred term for what we usually think of as
orgasm). As OneTaste’s founder/guru Nicole Daedone writes in
her bookSlow
Sex, OM’s intention is to give women
"permission to enjoy the journey, rather than pushing them
ever sooner to the finale." Think of OMing as public
fondling for the greater good — groping as a “gateway
to more vitality, connection and turn on.” (No, we’re
not entirely sure what “turn on” means in this context,
either, but OneTasters seem to love it.)
Joanna
Van Vleck also claims that OMing can help people with much
more than just getting off (er, “connecting”). She should
know; Van Vleck is a convert of the highest order. Though
she swears that OMing, which she now practices daily, has
changed nearly every facet of her life — from her “love/hate
relationship with carbs” to transforming her sex life by
“180 degrees” — she wasn’t always into kooky stuff like
public clitoral stroking. Before trying OM, which Van Vleck
didn’t get around to doing until she’d been working for
OneTaste for six months, the Texas-raised businesswoman had
never tried so much as a meditation or yoga class. She
remembers being “terrified” of OM. “We’re [doing this] in
the daytime, and you're not going to take me to dinner
afterward?” she laughs.
But,
sticking with the practice, Van Vleck believes, can help
both women and men with, well, almost everything. “I’m an
overall nicer person — I was kind of itchy before,” she
says. “I’ve seen women who were told they were anorgasmic
have intense, great orgasms. In couples I’ve seen [OM] open
communication, dialogue, and intimacy.”
Illustrated By Ly Ngo.
Van
Vleck says OM helped her get to know herself — and her
sexuality — infinitely better. “I used to watch every porn
[movie] possible to try to learn what to do in bed ... I
only knew sex in relationship to porn. Now [sex] is much
more quiet, with less movement, but I can feel every ounce
of it. The feeling of a hand touching my leg is vastly
pleasurable. Foreplay could go on for hours. Every part of
my body is way more sensitized.”
But,
what leads regular people who aren’t on the OneTaste payroll
into OMing? What makes them passionate enough to want to
stroke and be stroked hundreds — even thousands — of times,
dropping hundreds (even thousands) of dollars in the
process? Audrey Steele, a 31-year-old former OMer who has
since “abandoned the lifestyle,” says that, for her,
OneTaste started off as a way to meet interesting people
while she, “lost and confused,” tried to muddle through an
especially awful breakup. “I’ve always been a person who
craved really authentic experiences — people being real. I
found that there,” she explains.
Steele
moved into OneTaste’s San Francisco residence (members of
OneTaste’s various branches can come together to form OM
Communities, some of which include OM residences dubbed OM
Houses, but neither the Communities nor the Houses are
presentlyaffiliatedwith
OneTaste the company), living there for two years and even
completing a year of training to become a certified OM
coach. But, her experiences weren’t all rainbows and
glitter. “It’s a cutting-edge, fringe thing,” Steele says
about what first drew her in. “I went through the
vacillation of both hating it and loving it, from the
beginning right on through this day.” She’s first to admit
that OneTaste can be “a totally crazy situation; you're
living with 60 other people and they’re doing this crazy
sexual practice.” Still, she found the community inspiring.
“Gen,”
50, also speaks highly of the people at OneTaste. Like
Steele, she got involved with the group during a
particularly difficult time in her life — a time when she
felt “not taken care of, and scared, and damaged” — but she
found comfort in OMing. “Getting dressed up and going into
this community felt very life-affirming for me,” Gen, who’s
now only minimally involved with OneTaste, recalls. “It was
a healing experience — opening my legs, lying on my back,
having a man be in a very private place. And, over time,
realizing I was safe, having it be a place of pleasure and
not shame.”
Illustrated By Ly Ngo.
Despite
finding the practice of orgasmic meditation intensely
helpful, Gen stepped back from OneTaste after growing
disenchanted with some of its marketing and sales tactics
(remember those $15,000 courses?). “It’s important to
separate the practice of OM from the company of OneTaste,”
she notes. “The practice itself is an awesome tool when it’s
done respectfully. But, OneTaste the company I have a
problem with.”
Specifically,
she says, “I’ve been told they model their sales approach on
strip clubs, so when you first walk in, there are all these
pretty girls flirting with you.” (Joanna Van Vleck denies
this, saying, “I don't know how sales are even done at strip
clubs.”)
Despite
never having the chance to engage face-to-face with OneTaste
founder Nicole Daedone, Gen has primarily positive words for
the charismatic guru. “I sent her a Facebook message once,
asking for advice about something, and she wrote me back
almost immediately,” Gen remembers. “She felt accessible.
She seems like a pretty cool person, but she also seems like
a fanatical, eccentric person, and it’s not surprising that
she has such a following.”
And,
what a following it is. Daedone, now in her late forties,
launched the fledgling OneTaste in 2001, but she wasn’t
always a master of sex. She was on a doctoral track with a
focus on semantics at San Francisco State University when
her father, who had been convicted of molesting two young
girls, died in prison, throwing her life off kilter. Daedone
began studying Buddhism, then reportedly went on to study
with Ray Vetterlein, who,according
to theNew York Times,
“achieved fame of sorts in sex circles by claiming to
lengthen the average female orgasm to 20 minutes.”
Vetterlein
was himself inspired by Lafayette Morehouse, a controversial
sex commune (some say cult), founded by “responsible
hedonist” Victor Baranco in 1968 in suburban Lafayette,
California (outside San Francisco). Members of Lafayette
Morehouse, also known as “the purple people,” engaged in
broad research about sex and relationships — in 1976, they
presented what was believed to be the first public
demonstration of a woman “in a state of orgasm” for three
hours (!). The connection to Daedone’s later work with
OneTaste is pretty obvious.
Illustrated By Ly Ngo.
But
the question of whether OneTaste borrowed anything else from
the cult-y likes of Lafayette Morehouse might be a matter of
opinion. Sure, scores ofInternet
message-board lurkersseem to enjoy
railing against OT’s zealous ways, especially Daedone’s. The
typical accusation? That OneTaste is a “‘for-profit’
cult-like system masquerading as new-age spirituality,” as
one Yelp reviewer put it. Another Yelper offered, “Just your
basic sex cult with a clever urban twist. You'll leave broke
and possibly psychotic.”
But
not everyone sees OneTaste or its leader as anything overtly
creepy. “I don’t think it’s a cult because I’ve seen people
leave,” Gen says. “I’ve never been pressured into buying
anything; I never felt I couldn’t say no.”
Audrey
Steele, the former OneTaste resident, is a bit more
circumspect, saying, "[It] could be seen as a cult if that’s
the lens you're looking through. It’s really intense and it
does have that stigma. I’ve had that question [about it]
myself. Maybe [it has] some [cult-like] qualities, but not
all of them.”
Not
surprisingly, president Joanna Van Vleck is unequivocal in
defending OneTaste against such whispers. “I work for the
company and I can say: it’s not a cult.” She continues:
“Some of the world’s greatest things have been called a cult
because people love [them] so much — Apple, Crossfit ... The
reason OM has raving fans is because it has changed so many
people’s lives. I would not be who I am today without OM.”
Despite
all the swirling rumors about OneTaste and its offbeat
approach to female orgasm, the company doesn’t seem to fit
the traditionaldefinition
of a cult— at least not from where
I stand. And, aside from its potentially aggressive sales
tactics, no one I spoke with for this story reported any
major qualms or super-negative OM experiences.
The
center is a 5000 square foot temple-like structure
designed to provide an intimate environment for
interacting, experiencing, and learning from one
another. The Yoga studio is an impressive 800 square
feet of hardwood floors, natural lighting and open
air. ÂAt One Taste, we believe that spiritual
practice and sensual playfulness are best seen as
two facets of the same thing. Many traditional
disciplines and movement practices therefore
complement our workÂ, said Robert Kandell,
co-founder of One Taste.
In
addition to Yoga and meditation, the center offers
special events such as Spirited Sundays, a full day
of celebration for your body, mind and soul with
meditation, ecstatic dance, a vegetarian feast and
an inspirational speaker. It boosts a healthy
organic juice, vegan and vegetarian food bar.
ABOUT
ONE TASTE URBAN RETREAT CENTER
One
Taste Urban Retreat Center offers an integrated
approach to transformation, especially using the
doorway of the senses. Our approach is direct,
integral, and experiential. It emerges from a long
lineage of non-dual philosophy and spiritual
practice that honors the body for its wisdom and
gifts rather than seeing it as separate from the
true purpose of life. For more information and to
view the calendar of events, visithttp://www.onetastesf.comor
call 415-503-1100.