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In 2009, the New York Times ran a story about Nicole Daedone and her wellness company, OneTaste, which promoted women’s empowerment through a practice known as “orgasmic meditation” (OM).

“I don’t think women will really experience freedom until they own their sexuality,” Daedone said at the time.

The company was tremendously successful. At first, it operated out of a San Francisco warehouse where many practitioners lived communally, practicing OM day and night. Later, it opened locations in cities around the US, including San Francisco, Austin and New York City. Gwyneth Paltrow promoted it on her podcast, and actors like David Schwimmer, Orlando Bloom and Brian Cox reportedly attended presentations. In 2017, Daedone sold OneTaste for $12m.

Fast forward to this March. Daedone was sentenced to federal prison after a judge ruled she had used psychological, emotional and financial coercion to force vulnerable women into sex acts with company clients and investors.

The ruling came after a series of damning investigations into OneTaste’s top executives. In 2022, Netflix released the documentary Orgasm Inc, which explored the controversies surrounding the company. Former clients and teachers said they felt pressed to take part in explicit “demonstrations” and to take on huge amounts of debt to pay for courses and retreats, some of which cost as much as $60,000.

“One rule of thumb when exploring sex-positive spaces might be to ask: ‘Is someone getting rich from this?’” says Dr Anouchka Grose, a writer and psychoanalyst in London. “If the answer is yes, there’s a distinct possibility that money is more important to the organizer than your wellbeing.”

So what exactly is OM, the practice behind this company and controversy?

What is orgasmic meditation?

Orgasmic meditation was developed by Daedone in the early 2000s.

In her 2011 TEDx Talk, Daedone said her first experience of something resembling OM was at a party, when a stranger offered to introduce her to the practice.

“Somehow, I found myself lying there, legs butterflied open,” she recalled. The stranger shone a light between her legs and told her what he saw, describing the color and shape of her labia. “I couldn’t hear anything after that because the tears just started flooding,” she said. “I had never been looked at or felt that kind of compassion before.”

After he touched her clitoris for a while, she says, “the traffic jam that was in my mind broke open. It was like I was on the open road and there was no thought in sight, and there was only pure feeling.”

Over the next few years, Daedone said she “cobbled together” a practice that could be repeatable, and help others get to that state.

“The amazing thing isn’t just that you can hit that place – it’s that you can hit it with another human being,” she said in her talk.

OM is not the first practice to combine spirituality, mindfulness and sexuality. Tantra and sexual mindfulness, for example, are traditions “bound in with older ethical systems, ie Buddhism and Vedic knowledge,” says Grose.

But even these more established practices can be a minefield if not handled properly, she says. “Many modern, western schools of tantra are similar to OM in that they try to make money out of confused, repressed subjects,” Grose adds.

Tantra, kink and conscious-relating workshops can be great for learning about sexuality, Grose says. But, she adds: “They need to be prefaced with a huge amount of training around consent so participants know they can always say no to anything they don’t want to do.”

How is orgasmic meditation conducted?

OM is a mindfulness practice with a strict choreography. It is done in pairs typically composed of a man and a woman. During the session, the woman lies back on an arrangement of pillows and blankets known as a “nest”. She is unclothed from the waist down, with her legs open in a butterfly position, while the “stroker”, usually a man, uses his left index finger to stroke the upper left quadrant of the woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes.

(According to Daedone, this area of the clitoris has an especially dense bundle of nerves; it is unclear if this is true, and it was only this week that researchers finally mapped out the full network of clitoral nerves.)

Ellen Huet, a Bloomberg News reporter who has done extensive reporting on OneTaste and written a book about the company, explained on her Substack that during those 15 minutes, the woman and the stroker are meant to meditate on the sensation in their bodies. Also, it is intended to be a “goalless practice”, meaning there is no expectation of reciprocation or further contact between the two individuals.

“Serious practitioners often OMed four times a day or more,” Huet wrote. “Twice in the morning, twice in the evening.”

What claims did OneTaste make about orgasmic meditation?

According to various OM platforms, like its app, and the OM Foundation (the company’s research arm), orgasmic meditation helps with stress resilience, emotional regulation, positive affect and “mystical experiences”. There is very little third-party research – almost all the research on OM has been conducted by the OM Foundation, or researchers connected to the company.

The website for the company’s app also highlights stories from clients who claim the practice helped them with depression, PTSD and ADHD.

Orgasm does have physiological benefits, says Grose. “Under the right conditions, orgasms can reduce anxiety, help us sleep and even alleviate pain,” she says. Some studies have shown that they can also improve your confidence, put you in a better mood and even boost your immune system.

“But this doesn’t mean that women ‘should’ be having orgasms all the time, by whatever means necessary,” she warns. “If it becomes a kind of medicalised diktat, then you have a problem.”

One of Daedone’s stated goals was to remove the shame around sex and sexuality. This can be valuable, says Grose. “Much sexual harm is allowed to continue due to the privacy and secrecy around sex,” she says.

But coming together in a group and exerting peer pressure can also be harmful. Grose warns of the groupthink that can come from these situations, resulting in people “doing things they don’t want to do because everyone else in the group seems alright with it”.