The company might have plenty dark sides, but what's described above is only "dark" in puritan sex-phobic cultures...
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.
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."
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.