Writing for the Cut, Aurora Wells reported that the hippie hand jobs traded at OneTaste-branded “orgasmic meditation” workshops (OM, for short) left something to be desired. According to Gawker’s Nitasha Tiku, who spent three immersive days with team OneTaste at OMXperience, an “orgasm industry” conference in San Francisco, the meditations gets better. The company selling the pricey OM workshops (and even more expensive orgasm-coach training courses), on the other hand, might be some kind of pyramid scheme and/or cult.
OneTaste's business model is monetizing orgasms — basically the only good free thing left. And orgasmic meditation makes it so you can’t even give yourself one: OneTaste dictates that you need a partner to describe your junk before touching it at precisely eight o’clock (your one o’clock) and saying “thank you” a lot for exactly fifteen minutes. (Is there any other form of meditation that requires the assistance of another person? Where one "gets meditated"?) The mental-health benefits of orgasms are widely documented; what the (mostly male) “master strokers” get out of the whole thing is very vague.
According to Tiku, OM began as a New Agey spiritual practice and has, under OneTaste CEO’s Nicole Daedone’s palatably normal hand, pivoted into a fashionable body-hack technology. One that comes with half-naked chicks.
At the end of The 4 Hour Body’s orgasm chapter, the efficiency impresario Tim Ferriss declares: ‘This should be required education for every man on the planet.’ Many of OneTaste’s employees and devotees work in the startup sector. Reese Jones, Daedone’s sometime boyfriend, is also a venture capitalist and serial inventor credited with the first sound-recording software. During a presentation at the conference, Jones would compare the "OM container"—which refers both to the pillow-and-blanket covered ‘nest’ one [meditates in] time limits and emotional boundaries of the practice—to the Internet communications protocol TCP/IP.
Tiku reports that some cult experts have linked Daedone with Victor Baranco, the “responsible hedonist” Svengali who ran the controversial “intentional community” Lafayette Morehouse. (Her family background is also compelling: When Daedone was in her mid-twenties, her estranged father went to prison for molesting two girls, though not Daedone, who hopes OneTaste will "go into the belly of the beast and begin to heal this trauma about misused sexuality.") Tiku hints that 1080 Folsom Street, the three-story San Francisco residence where many OneTaste employees live (though not exclusively), might be its more benign, contemporary equivalent. The house holds a daily group OM session, and some use OM to resolve work conflicts. "You come in with certain boundaries," OneTaste's business development manager, Marcus Ratnathicam, told Tiku. "And because it gets so multidimensional, it starts to crack open ... Friends are lovers are friends."
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love and war
,misadventures in sex
,orgasmic meditation
,tech
,san francisco
,onetaste