The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Nicole Daedone is the founder.. but follow the links to Viktor Baranco, if you want to know more.
They used to run this "dorm" at 1080 Folsom in SF; but eventually got out of that business.
I remember once I was at one of their presentations. At the end of the presentation, men and women were paired up for a round of stroking. Of course, men outnumbered the women. So one of the organizers called up the dorm at 1080 Folsom (which was right around the corner) and told them to "send more women". And soon, a bunch of women showed up, ready to be stroked...
Once they had my number, they'd call me endlessly, selling some "retreat" or the other, for $$$. No thanks!
I've lost touch with them over the last couple of years, but it's a sex-addiction cult, if I were to label it.
Eww.
I am freaking out that such a dangerous cult could be so promoted and entrenched in the "influencer culture".
Wow
Source: extensive reading about cults.
When your boss tells you it's part of the company culture though...
Please lay off with the attempt to normalize any but your preferred flavor as deviant and wrong. You don't get to decide what happens in any bedroom but your own.
I was making an observation about organizations that promote non-monogamy and communal living. They are almost invariably cults, regardless of how they present themselves to the outside world.
>> The monogamous pair bonds _are_ the coercive bullshit.
> It's like Churchill said about democracy: It's the worst system, except for all the others.
That's totally about coercive organizational dynamics, and not merely moralizing.
But that's not even the point behind my criticizing your approach. People with non-mainstream lifestyles are already more often than not marginalized, sometimes to death. Please don't make that worse for them. You have no idea how alienating it can be to have something as closely tied to one's identity as one's sexuality generally is hand-waved about by people whose words carry clear disapproval.
If you did have an inkling of what that kind of Othering felt like, I don't think you'd talk that way so casually, or without qualification.
If you feel I mischaracterized your point, I apologize. It was not my intent. I just have entirely too many queer and non-mainstream friends whose lives have been terribly adversely affected by other people telling them the myriad ways they're wrong, not to be a little reactive to it.
Your overall point isn't wrong. How you phrased it (and how I phrased my response) could have been done in a way that was more cognizant of how broad the brush you're swinging might seem to people getting splattered as you swing it.
Is that an unreasonable ask?
Who would have thought that a company that offers this could have a dark side?
You are aware that nonmonogamous and nontraditional sexual relationships exist outside of cults, right?
Your perception of sex and sexuality outside of conservative societies seems to be skewed-both underemphasizing sexual aggression within conservative groups and overemphasizing preponderance of cults and coercion elsewhere.
Huh? That's the very province of coercive bullshit, from the abusive wife-beater to spousal rape, and tons of other shit besides (including obsessive jealously, repression, and so on...)
Cults amount to what? 1% of the population?
What I am saying is that if you join a cult, your chance of being coerced (sexually if you are what the person/people in power prefer, and financially/emotionally/etc. in all cases) starts to approach 100%. Whereas, if you are in a monogamous pair, there is a pretty good chance that you will not be coerced sexually. I am in no way saying that monogamous pairs are perfect (or even pretty good; there are all sorts of issues with them), just that, given the choice between that and a cult, you should avoid the cult.
Multiple analyses of spousal/partner rape put the incidence on the order of 30-40% of all adult rape cases. When there's co-occurring domestic violence, that number climbs to over 70%. Partner and acquaintance rape combined vastly outnumber stranger assaults.
Monogamy is not a solution to that problem.
I guess one could argue that ~7 out of 10 is a "pretty good chance", but that's still uncountably more people than have even belonged to, let alone were abused by, all the cults in the history of ever, combined.
I get it: cults are dangerous. Stipulated. "[G]iven the choice between [monogamy] and a cult, you should avoid the cult" is still a false dilemma, however, and no matter how strongly you assert you were just talking about cults, the language you used up-thread was considerably broader than that, as well.
OM is about a clinical setting. It's specifically billed as NOT about sex. It's 15 minutes, exactly, of the man stimulating the woman. Then they DO NOT have sex in the immediate aftermath.
Being sex-phobic/puritanical and feeling that this particular behavior isn't a healthy sexual adventure aren't the same thing.
This company's whole deal is supposed to be about how sexual experience is any important aspect of your healthy human life, but the way in which they help to encourage this is through something that removes the "normal" sexual behaviors and replaces them with rote behavior and a focus on one specific aspect of sex (the female orgasm).
There might be some good ideas there, and Mussolini did make the trains run on time, but overall the whole thing is not good.
In other words, they facilitate an appointment with a sex worker for people who would otherwise feel bad doing it -- by packaging it in the form of a clinical experience.
You do know that there is a pretty healthy distance from being "sex-phobic" to this, right?
As much as eating at a restaurant is "getting food from strangers in public".
But I responded to the parent who wrote about "a procedure that typically involves a man using a gloved, lubricated fingertip to stroke a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes" as being obviously related to something dark.
I explicitly quoted that part, and I explicitly responded to the parent's characterization of that part alone as "dark" -- not to some mention of "strangers in public".
Not a puritan, but I got a kick out of this line from the article:
"According to the story she repeats onstage and in YouTube videos, 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."
/slowly backs off