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> It’s best known for classes on “orgasmic meditation,” a trademarked procedure that typically involves a man using a gloved, lubricated fingertip to stroke a w

> It’s best known for classes on “orgasmic meditation,” a trademarked procedure that typically involves a man using a gloved, lubricated fingertip to stroke a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes Who would have thought that a company that offers this could have a dark side?

coldtea 8y ago
The company might have plenty dark sides, but what's described above is only "dark" in puritan sex-phobic cultures...
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  You may want to consider the idea that traditional, conservative attitudes toward sex exist in part specifically to prevent the kind of coercive bullshit that inevitable arises in "free love" environments.
  - allthenews 8y ago
    Yeah, because "coercive bullshit" doesn't exist in sexually conservative societies...
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      At least you have a good chance of avoiding coercive bullshit in monogamous pair bonds. Whereas almost every single cult that promotes alternatives to monogamous pair bonds somehow ends up being about providing the (usually male) leader with sexual access to some of the (usually female) disciples and then turning the rest of the disciples into personal servants.
      - stickfigure 8y ago
        I suggest you have some long conversations with ex-Jehova's Witnesses sometime.
      - allthenews 8y ago
        I imagine you're more likely to be raped by a spouse than to end up in a coercive cult. But I don't have data. 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.
      - passwordreset 8y ago
        The monogamous pair bonds _are_ the coercive bullshit.
        toasterlovin 8y ago
        It's like Churchill said about democracy: It's the worst system, except for all the others.
      - coldtea 8y ago
        >At least you have a good chance of avoiding coercive bullshit in monogamous pair bonds. 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?
        toasterlovin 8y ago
        You and allthenews seems to be mistaken in the same way. I am not saying that cults are disproportionately responsible for sexual coercion. They can't be. As you correctly point out, they account for a vanishingly small share of sexual activity. 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.
        rosser 8y ago
        > Whereas, if you are in a monogamous pair, there is a pretty good chance that you will not be coerced sexually. 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.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Because "conservative attitudes toward sex" don't produce "coercive bullshit" (and foster all kinds of sex related obsessions and psychosis, including rape).
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      I was responding to somebody taking a dismissive view of conservative attitudes to sexuality by pointing out that there are probably some positives to those attitudes, including that they are pretty effective at preventing the kind of heinous stuff that happened at the cult in the article. That's it. I did not make a general statement about conservative attitudes toward sex and I actually agree that there are issues.
- moate 8y ago
  Love sex. All about it. Done all kinds of weird, gross, kinky things. 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.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >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). 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.
- throwawayqdhd 8y ago
  I didn't know the definition of "puritan" had expanded to include "not willing to get orgasms from strangers in public" You do know that there is a pretty healthy distance from being "sex-phobic" to this, right?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >I didn't know the definition of "puritan" had expanded to include "not willing to get orgasms from strangers in public" 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".
    - 3131s 8y ago
      The broader context for those that haven't read the (interesting) article is that the sexual stimulation occurs in a room full of people, which is fine too of course. The creepiness sets in for reasons beyond that. 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."
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
If the Anthony Hopkins film was accurate, The original cereal producer Kellogg ran a "health farm" with pretty similar procedures at the turn of the 20th C. I believe it was a common cure for female "hysteria".
yongjik 8y ago
...So they are, basically, disrupting prostitution. /slowly backs off

coldtea 8y ago

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

toasterlovin 8y ago
You may want to consider the idea that traditional, conservative attitudes toward sex exist in part specifically to prevent the kind of coercive bullshit that inevitable arises in "free love" environments.
- allthenews 8y ago
  Yeah, because "coercive bullshit" doesn't exist in sexually conservative societies...
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    At least you have a good chance of avoiding coercive bullshit in monogamous pair bonds. Whereas almost every single cult that promotes alternatives to monogamous pair bonds somehow ends up being about providing the (usually male) leader with sexual access to some of the (usually female) disciples and then turning the rest of the disciples into personal servants.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      I suggest you have some long conversations with ex-Jehova's Witnesses sometime.
    - allthenews 8y ago
      I imagine you're more likely to be raped by a spouse than to end up in a coercive cult. But I don't have data. 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.
    - passwordreset 8y ago
      The monogamous pair bonds _are_ the coercive bullshit.
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        It's like Churchill said about democracy: It's the worst system, except for all the others.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >At least you have a good chance of avoiding coercive bullshit in monogamous pair bonds. 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?
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        You and allthenews seems to be mistaken in the same way. I am not saying that cults are disproportionately responsible for sexual coercion. They can't be. As you correctly point out, they account for a vanishingly small share of sexual activity. 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.
        rosser 8y ago
        > Whereas, if you are in a monogamous pair, there is a pretty good chance that you will not be coerced sexually. 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.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Because "conservative attitudes toward sex" don't produce "coercive bullshit" (and foster all kinds of sex related obsessions and psychosis, including rape).
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    I was responding to somebody taking a dismissive view of conservative attitudes to sexuality by pointing out that there are probably some positives to those attitudes, including that they are pretty effective at preventing the kind of heinous stuff that happened at the cult in the article. That's it. I did not make a general statement about conservative attitudes toward sex and I actually agree that there are issues.
moate 8y ago
Love sex. All about it. Done all kinds of weird, gross, kinky things. 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.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >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). 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.
throwawayqdhd 8y ago
I didn't know the definition of "puritan" had expanded to include "not willing to get orgasms from strangers in public" You do know that there is a pretty healthy distance from being "sex-phobic" to this, right?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I didn't know the definition of "puritan" had expanded to include "not willing to get orgasms from strangers in public" 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".
  - 3131s 8y ago
    The broader context for those that haven't read the (interesting) article is that the sexual stimulation occurs in a room full of people, which is fine too of course. The creepiness sets in for reasons beyond that. 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."

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

If the Anthony Hopkins film was accurate, The original cereal producer Kellogg ran a "health farm" with pretty similar procedures at the turn of the 20th C. I believe it was a common cure for female "hysteria".

yongjik 8y ago

...So they are, basically, disrupting prostitution. /slowly backs off