The orgasm workshop I went to rang alarm bells — now some allege it is part of a sex cult

“What turns you on?” “What are you afraid to admit to a partner during sex?” “Say more.” These are some of the quick-fire questions about my sex life that I remember facing while sitting in the middle of a circle of strangers in a nondescript and thoroughly unsexy conference room in central London.

There were 10 or 15 people sitting around me, mostly in their twenties and thirties, and all seemingly quite comfortable with answering questions like what their sex “sounded like” (responses included “don’t leave me alone” and “quack”).

It was 2014 and as part of my journalism course we’d been asked to find a funny or quirky activity to try out and write up. In signing up to this “communication games” session run by OneTaste, a group dedicated to a practice called “orgasmic meditation”, I knew the cringe factor could be high – but I still got more than I bargained for.

After blushing and lying my way through the rest of the session, I escaped into the cold night, aware that this wasn’t quite the “funny” experience I had expected.

The ‘orgasm cult’

Little did I know that the company would one day be the subject of a potential FBI investigation and facing allegations of sex trafficking and breaking labour laws.

OneTaste was founded by Nicole Daedone, a San Francisco gallery owner, in 2004. In a 2013 Ted Talk, Daedone described how she met a monk at a party, who asked her to “butterfly” her legs, and began touching a specific part of her clitoris for an extended period of time.

She liked this “orgasmic meditation” so much that “I wanted to live in that place, and in my philanthropic way, I want everyone to live in that place”.

OneTaste began selling classes and group workshops in OM (pronounced “ohm”). No OM took place at the session I attended – it was free and touted by the company as a kind of warm-up act before attending one of the main events.

Thanks to her focus on bringing female sexuality out of the shadows, Daedone was mentioned in an article on the “12 women who changed the way we look at sex” by Vanity Fair, and was featured in Cosmopolitan and The New York Times.

Yet in 2018, former US staff and students of OneTaste told Bloomberg Businessweek that the organisation was a kind of cult, and now a BBC Radio 4 series, The Orgasm Cult, has revealed further allegations.

Claims of coercion

Members in the US claim they were pressured into buying courses that left them in debt. These ranged from introductory sessions in the hundreds of dollars to a $16,000 (£12,000) “intensive course”.

Some alleged they had been coerced into sexual acts while living in “OM houses”, in which members had to practise OM several times a day, were assigned “research partners” to have sex with and would spend hours a day selling courses to potential clients for low pay.

In late 2018, Bloomberg reported that the FBI was making inquiries into the company’s practices. Onetaste has denied pressuring students or employees into buying courses or performing sexual acts. It has not hosted group OM events, or leased group houses, since 2016.

OneTaste said in a statement: “Any allegations of abusive practices are completely false. OneTaste was an organisation that helped individuals to increase health, happiness and connection through methods combining mindfulness and sexuality.”

A hard sell

There is no suggestion by either the BBC or Bloomberg that any of the alleged activities were happening in the UK, where the branch of OneTaste was known as TurnOn Britain and was dissolved this year. However, some of the hallmarks of the company’s operations were the same: the high price of the upper-level courses, and pushy sales techniques.

After I attended the session in 2014, I got calls and voicemails for months from people I’d chatted to during the evening, asking if I would like to pay to come to a proper OM class.

Whereas I would just hang up on a normal marketing call, that these were people I’d spoken to (and been quizzed about sex by) made it feel more difficult to tell them to stop calling.

The combination of breaking down emotional boundaries and then going in with aggressive sales techniques seems to have been a central part of OneTaste’s approach.

Former US staffers told Bloomberg that they took notes during the “communication games” to help them target attendees with courses later. OneTaste denies targeting customers in this way.

Cult-like tactics

Alexandra Stein, a psychologist and expert on cults, tells me that “immediate and rapid breaching of your boundaries” and “high pressure sales” are both warning signs for cult-like organisations.

The game in which we took turns answering sexual questions while sitting in the centre of an Eyes Wide Shut-esque circle was called the “hot seat” by TurnOn organisers; the same term is also used by cult experts to describe what Stein calls a “confessional element” of recruitment which is used to start lowering participants’ boundaries.

Another red flag for Stein is the promise that a group has a “magical answer” to all your problems: Daedone promised in her Ted talk that “orgasm” is the answer to the “gnawing sense of hunger” she observed in many modern women.

Richard Turner, a cult recovery counsellor and consultant, says even the seemingly tame games I was part of could be damaging, particularly for someone who has been a victim of assault or abuse.

“If you were in a therapy session with healthy and clear boundaries, with a qualified therapist working to an ethical framework, and you were in control of what you shared, it would be safer. But in the group context you were very quickly asked to share very personal things where there were group pressures in play. That could be harmful.”

Openness about sex is all well and good, but a room full of strangers probably isn’t the place to start.