I'm a passionate woman and I'm a woman
with depth and with desire.
For me OM has been more about surrender,
helping me open my orgasm.
Confidence and clarity.
It's a connection to that, like,
sexual and powerful woman inside.
This story's about a company called OneTaste
that is a sexual wellness company
that teaches a practice called orgasmic meditation.
When it feels that good, you don't want to move an inch.
Everyone should be experiencing this
and talking about this part of our lives.
This is the food I was searching for, you know?
And that I didn't have name for,
and they were calling it orgasm.
How did they say it?
It's like orgasm is God.
Desire is the force on this planet
meant to grow us into the person
that we know we can be.
It's just so incredible, and I really genuinely
want everybody to have access.
It just felt so understandable to me
how they could take those first steps
toward something that ended up in a place
that was really predatory and maybe even a cult.
My name is Ellen Huet, I'm a reporter for Bloomberg
and I wrote the story
The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company.
OneTaste has several different philosophies
that kind of guide what it does.
They first and foremost believe
that doing the orgasmic meditation practice,
which is a 15-minute partnered clitoris-stroking practice,
helps open up your connection to your body,
your desire, to other people.
Basically it just does many, many good things for you.
And they see it as a practice that should be taught
alongside meditation and yoga.
OM is a partnered practice where
the upper left-hand quadrant of a woman's clitoris
is stroked lightly and deliberately for 15 minutes.
Some of the benefits of OM include
feeling confident and self-expressed,
increased vitality, learning to use desire as your guide,
better sex and deeper relationships.
You know, some people just take a few classes
and some people it becomes their life.
And I think for those in the group
where it really takes over their life, some people love it
and some people feel like it's the worst thing they've done.
I spent a long time talking with,
she's named as Michal in the story,
that's just her first name.
She struck me as someone who was just really relatable,
she was in her late 20s when she joined,
she had been a teacher in New York.
And she had recently gotten out of a relationship.
She was feeling a little low, and thinking to herself
maybe I need to meet some new people
to make a change in my life.
And she encountered OneTaste the way that many people do,
which is through one of their free events.
Hi!
Ia, of course, let me back up,
is in our Desire Room.
You would show up, and it's a bunch of people,
and maybe you do something like play communication games.
I'm about to write down some desires
and put them on the wall.
Yeah, we're just going to paper the walls
And she leaves with this impression
that these people, like they've figured something out,
and they continued to get in touch with her and they said
hey if you want to learn more about orgasmic meditation
maybe you should take our Intro to OM class.
And this is a class where they talk
about the philosophy of OneTaste,
they teach you about orgasmic meditation.
They have a demo in which the two teachers
demonstrate one OM session in front of the class.
So how we'll do it is,
I'll describe what's going to happen,
and then I'll bring in two people
to do the demonstration for you.
And then at the end of the day's class
they would let students pair up if they wanted
and try orgasmic meditation for the first time.
So that's what she did.
And after that, they just kinda
kept getting in touch with her.
And it happens gradually and then all at once.
Like she got closer with these people, she left her job
to come start working for OneTaste.
And she moved out of her home to move into
an OM house, as they called it, in New York.
I don't think there are very many places in the world
where we can feel a full range of emotions,
even to their highest intensity,
and not have to shut them down in one way or another.
I've had people describe orgasm to me as a force
almost like the Force from Star Wars,
so people would talk about how like,
listen to your orgasm, what is it telling you?
And is it telling you to do this or that?
And they would rely on people
who were very advanced in OneTaste
to help them understand how they should be
sort of following their orgasm.
Hi everyone!
So, my name is Maya, I have been OMing for eight years now.
I was in the class, and I remember this experience
of feeling like I was having questions answered
that I didn't even know I had the question of.
The people I talked to who got involved
seemed really similar to myself.
They just seemed really normal, right?
These are people and I felt that there was something
pretty universally human about what they wanted.
They were looking for community, meaning.
They wanted to belong to a group of people
who felt like they were working all together
towards something really special and important.
For a while it was very popular within the group
to believe that if you were having sex with a lot of people
that you would free yourself from
the things that constrained you
in terms of how you related to other people.
And they often talked about how preferences
were something that would hold you back.
And this meant that you gained more spiritual enlightenment
if you had sex with or did sexual acts
that you didn't want to.
It taught members to ignore their personal boundaries
about what they did and didn't want to do.
Ultimately, OM is a practice.
So you don't need to be turned on or in the mood to do it.
In fact, OM cultivates libido.
And so Michal's taking more classes,
and these classes are very expensive,
they can cost anywhere from several hundred dollars
to some of them are thousands of dollars for a retreat.
And you can pay $60,000 for a year-long membership
which lets you take any of the classes you want.
So quickly she started spending more and more money.
It kind of leads into this larger teaching that OneTaste had
which was that money is just sort of an emotional obstacle
to getting what you want.
Going into debt to pay for courses was really common.
This was actually something that salespeople at OneTaste
would encourage students and customers to do.
They would say, "Oh, if you really want this course,
you'll find a way to pay for it.
Look, you could even open a new credit card."
There was a woman who I was dating, and she said,
"Hey I want to take this class with you,
and I want you to pay for it."
And I was like, what?
And we hung up the phone, and I just sat in this chair.
And I could feel the desire start
to almost like necrotize inside of myself,
I could feel it starting to die.
And I picked the phone back up and I said
no, no, no, wait, I want to do it.
The company pressured customers to buy classes
and to even take on debt to buy classes.
The company used sex to get sales,
and they did this in several different ways.
We have people who talk about they were, as salespeople,
instructed to OM with or have sex with somebody
who was then called up to, you know, buy a course.
Partway through the year, Michal met somebody in OneTaste.
They got married; they got married at a OneTaste retreat.
And all of a sudden she and her husband,
they just had sort of gotten swept up
in this whirlwind of the OneTaste life.
She was around $20,000 in debt.
She and her husband together had spent
about $150,000, that's their estimate.
Eventually, soon after they got married,
Michal kind of reached a breaking point
for a variety of reasons.
She was feeling really stressed.
Someone that she worked with, who was
like her closest friend in OneTaste, left,
and over time she and her husband
decided like, we need to leave.
Leaving OneTaste is this very lonely thing,
because once you leave the group,
people inside the group are told to never talk to you.
People sometimes refer to people
who had left the group as dead.
And so it can feel very lonely,
because you have left this group that was your friends,
often the people you lived with, the people you worked with.
And you often break from them very suddenly,
and then you don't really have anywhere to go.
And the people out here think that
the group that you just came from is super strange
and they don't understand.
There are a series of allegations in the story
and OneTaste had different responses to each of them.
So they say that they never required anybody
to have sex with each other in the work context.
Generally the company says they never used sex for sales
and that this is not something that they taught
Many people who had past experiences with OneTaste
said that they felt pressured to take on debt to buy courses
and the company said we took money
from people that we shouldn't have,
and that we've changed our policies since.
I saw parallels between the way that OneTaste ran
and the way that some startups run,
which is like, you really want
to be part of a tightly knit group
that is charging toward a very unique solution
that has a lot of meaning.
That's what drove people to become
super involved in OneTaste.
That's part of what drives people
to work crazy hours for very little money
for the chance at equity at some company
that you think is going to change the world.
And for many of the people I talked to
after the story ran they were grateful
that this was something that was finally being told.
And their reactions to seeing their personal and confusing
and weird and isolating story told in a major magazine
was really heartening to me,
and was really meaningful to them.