The Cult of Orgasm

Helena Aeberli traces Ellen Huet’s investigations in “Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult.”

By Helena AeberliNovember 18, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• Cultural Studies

UNTIL SOMETIME IN the early 1700s, the female orgasm was thought to be a necessary part of sex. This surprising fact sits uneasily with what we think we know of the past as a place of sexual repression—of scold’s bridles and witch trials and the unfortunate fates of Henry VIII’s six wives. But early obstetrical manuals dedicated chapters to teaching husbands how to pleasure their wives. As one 17th-century writer put it, the clitoris “makes women lustfull and take delight in Copulation, and were it not for this they would have no desire nor delight, nor would they ever conceive”—so men ought to pay the organ particular attention.

It wasn’t all marital bliss, though. The theory that women’s pleasure was necessary for conception meant that early modern rape cases involving pregnant women were regularly thrown out, as the victim was assumed to have experienced pleasure during the assault. Female pleasure could be a tool of repression as well as liberation; when young women fell sick, they were prescribed sex and married off as a remedy. Orgasm was a source of pleasure, a health-giving force—and a tool of the patriarchy.

I wonder whether Nicole Daedone—wellness guru, program founder, and cult leader—knew this history of the female orgasm. She certainly knew how to write her own history—or at least how to rewrite it. Glamorous, golden-haired, and keenly ambitious, Daedone founded the OneTaste company in San Francisco in 2004, after years spent floating in and out of California communes, sex work, and the acid-house scene. Part hippie collective, part glossy wellness brand, OneTaste looked backward to the holistic health and spirituality movements of New Age California, with their charismatic leaders and sexual liberation, and forward to today’s era of branded wellness, self-optimization, and the girlboss she-EO. Its central premise? That female orgasm could change the world.

OneTaste evangelized the power of “orgasmic meditation” (or “OM”), a practice in which a woman is clitorally stimulated for 15 minutes by a clothed, usually male partner. Rather than a sex act, OM was branded as a “daily wellness practice that would help you focus at work, calm your mind, and unleash your potential.” OM was an exchange of “sexual-spiritual energy.” It was a tool of empowerment, personal transformation, and self-growth beyond limits. And it was a way, as the company’s first slogan put it, of “making your body a pleasurable place to be.”

But behind all the talk of female pleasure and empowerment lay a culture of sexual, economic, and psychological abuse. Even early on, OneTaste traded on an ideal of open, unrestricted sexuality that slid easily into exploitation; members were told to OM with customers who lacked a partner, and were assigned rotating bedmates (known as “research partners” because they were expected to study the science of orgasm together) at the Warehouse, OneTaste’s communal house. As Daedone’s ambition grew, OneTaste’s members-turned-workers were coerced into OMing with customers, sleeping with co-workers, and providing sexual favors to powerful investors. Women who serviced these investors were known as “handlers” and expected to regard their exploitation as an important responsibility and a privilege. Meanwhile, the company’s aggressive sales strategy, led by Daedone’s obsessive right-hand woman Rachel Cherwitz, involved sexual and economic coercion, including pressuring members to take out new credit cards or go into debt to afford exclusive self-development courses. Potential targets were termed “marks.” Earlier this year, after a lengthy FBI investigation, Daedone and Cherwitz were convicted on federal forced labor charges. Tellingly, their representative in court was Jennifer Bonjean, a high-profile attorney also known for defending Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly.

Ellen Huet, a technology reporter who first wrote a viral exposé of the group for Bloomberg in 2018 after a PR agency invited her to visit its headquarters for a puff piece, has conducted over six years of investigative research into OneTaste, including carrying out interviews with over 125 former members or connections. The result is Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult, a gripping new account of the rise and fall of OneTaste and the enigmatic woman at its helm. Full of shocking revelations about a company that promised empowerment but provided only exploitation, Empire of Orgasm also paints a concerning picture of the ubiquity of the contemporary cult. Huet recalls that as she reported on the case, cults, which had once seemed “a faraway phenomenon, began to feel unsettlingly familiar,” their telltale signs of manipulation, social pressure, and the promise of total enlightenment through total submission appearing in apparently ordinary parts of modern life. Reading Empire of Orgasm, I began to feel the same, and to wonder whether the only difference between a cult, a commune, and a company might be its branding. And in the start-up boom of the noughties, when companies from Facebook to Goop emerged to become global icons and OneTaste was beginning its ascent to infamy, branding was something of a corporate superpower.

Nicole (as Huet refers to her throughout), who had first learned about the healing powers of “deliberate orgasm” through the Welcomed Consensus sex commune—and, prior to starting OneTaste, had attempted to stage a one-woman coup at its Bay Area offshoot, Morehouse—was well aware of the importance of branding. If OM was really going to become as ubiquitous as yoga, she had to be able to sell it to a mass audience rather than just her avid followers in the Warehouse. As OneTaste grew and sought legitimacy, Nicole began “to refine its origin story” and her own, “crafting a neatly wrapped personal history that explained why she had dedicated her life to studying sensation.” The sleazy Welcomed Consensus member who introduced her to “deliberate orgasm” at a party in the 1990s was reimagined as a Buddhist monk. Rather than focusing on her experiences of child abuse and sex work, Nicole tied her sexual awakening to her first taste of “something organic, wholesome, and drippingly Californian: an heirloom tomato.” This peaches and cream anecdote became the opening of Nicole’s book and public talks, but in private OneTaste sessions, and on a darker note, she depicted her abuse at the hands of her father as a consensual and loving, if transgressive, encounter with a man who was not a convicted pedophile but an “expansive,” “fourth-dimensional” person who had moved beyond the “arbitrary laws” of the ordinary world.

Nicole’s sense of the ordinary world as arbitrary, limited, and numbing, and of transgressive sexual acts as a way to transcend those limits, was integral to the cult of OneTaste. A belief system formed by trauma became a religion. According to Huet’s sources, Nicole was obsessed by the idea of life as an “infinite game,” one that exists solely for “the purpose of continuing the play.” A OneTaste rule was “never hurt the game,” while members referred to themselves as “players,” leaning into the exciting, transgressive, and confusing. “The game theory,” writes Huet, “primed OneTaste members to want to do whatever Nicole desired,” whether bringing her a cup of tea, driving her to an event, or performing sexual favors for her biggest investors, including at the elaborate BDSM birthday “experiences” she threw each year for one high-powered venture capitalist.

Other tenets of OneTaste’s ideology could be equally insidious. Members came to believe that women’s bodies were all-powerful, emitting strong sexual signals to men, whose duty it was to pick up on and respond to them. While this placed the impetus on men to understand women’s sexuality and respond to their partner’s bodily signals—a striking difference from the “he comes first” norm—it also meant, in Huet’s words, that if a woman experienced unwanted attention or assault, then “she was asking for it.” Like the premodern understanding of orgasm I referenced earlier, this created a victim-blaming culture in which women were always sexual agents, even in cases of rape. When women felt uncomfortable, they were told that they were the ones to blame, and that their aversion was something to be overcome rather than respected. One of the darkest stories to emerge from Huet’s reporting is that of Ayries, a vulnerable young woman who joined OneTaste with her older, occasionally violent boyfriend. Cherwitz prescribed her “aversion practice,” a bastardization of behavioral therapy in which Ayries and others like her were commanded to engage in sex they found challenging or unpleasant in order to attain a greater level of liberation. When Ayries cracked under the pressure, Cherwitz told her that tears were just “climax coming out of her eyes.” This was OneTaste at its most toxic, ruining a vulnerable young woman’s life in the pursuit of power disguised as pleasure.

Could OM have changed the world, as Nicole claimed to hope? Those who tried the practice did report spiritual and physical benefits, depicting OM as “a revelation,” “ethereal,” akin to “a drug-induced high.” Some women said that it had saved their marriage or restored their buried sexuality, while others claimed that it gave them their first-ever orgasm. Nicole was onto something, a kernel of truth buried deep beneath all the lies and abuse. Huet notes that, in interviews, “even OneTaste’s angriest apostates often consider OM a powerful practice, capable of great healing—except that it fell into the hands of an exploitative leader.” Perhaps it could have changed the world, but not with Nicole as its advocate. She clearly believed in OneTaste, but above all, she believed in herself, depicting herself, Huet writes, as a “goddess, saint, and martyr.” This was a woman who told her ex-husband she wanted her tombstone to read “Whatever it took.” Might OM be possible without that abuse, without the need for such a “Master Stroker” hovering omnipotently above it all? Or was the practice just too close to the old saying that everything in the world is about sex—except sex, which is about power?

For some authors who have been directly involved in a cult or exploitative enterprise, an exposé is a means of telling one’s story, reclaiming one’s voice to speak truth to power (Sarah Wynn-Williams’s recent Facebook takedown Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work springs to mind). Such truth-telling can be brave and dangerous, and can have far-reaching impacts on society: Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (2025), Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous account of her victimization at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, led the British Parliament to propose stripping Prince Andrew of his royal titles on the very day of its publication. For others, like the hosts of true crime podcasts, an exposé is an excuse to revel in all the salacious details of a case. I don’t doubt some of Empire of Orgasm’s readers will read it that way—the title and coy cover invite a kind of leering interest. But Huet’s balanced journalistic tone—an extension of her original articles on the case—doesn’t invite readers to chew over the juicy details so much as it deals them out like grim medicine. Here are the facts, contextualized, no gawking like the voyeurs at the Warehouse with its doorless bedrooms.

Huet tells it to us straight. Indeed, she barely plays a role in her own book, relating her investigative research, the publication of her articles on OneTaste, and the subsequent FBI investigation and trial in just 40 pages. She met Nicole only once, during the trial, when they encountered one another in the courthouse foyer. “We have a strange intimacy,” Nicole told her, serene as ever in a beige power suit (tellingly, her acolytes were less irenic, with one OneTaste executive shouting “I fucking hate you” at Huet following the guilty verdict). This element of distance makes Huet’s tale shocking and painful reading, if at times unintentionally funny, as in her account of the jargon used by OneTaste followers: “stroke” could mean a particular mood or opinion as well as a finger movement while OMing, while “Finger off!” was a command to stonewall another group member.

Is Empire of Orgasm, then, a “cautionary tale,” as its promotional material claims? It could be read as such, though it is by no means a detailed study into the operations of cults and how they snare their victims. Huet’s research, while undoubtedly rich, is worn lightly. Quotes from “cult experts” and “cult researchers” are dotted throughout, used to identify OneTaste or Nicole’s behavior as coercive and charismatic, designed to bolster her authority and the devoted conduct of her underlings. But Huet can mostly show, not tell. Of course OneTaste was a cult—Nicole accepted as much, albeit in contradictory ways, first silencing all use of the c-word but later appearing onstage at an event in a black top “printed with big white letters that screamed CULT,” a gift from her mother. “It’s like the ultimate taboo, right?” she told her audience. “But when you can own your ultimate taboo, what can anybody do to you?” The warning bells weren’t so much ringing as flinging themselves furiously off their rockers.

Some of the book’s strongest moments—and I wish they’d been paused over a little longer, no matter the interruption to Huet’s pacy reportage—are when OneTaste is placed in the context of the other cults, semi-cults, and maybe-cults of the nineties, noughties, and today. Not just Welcomed Consensus or Morehouse or NXIVM, but also the wellness empires and tech start-ups and megacorps booming at the same time that OneTaste reached the apex of its influence. In Careless People, Wynn-Williams, a former executive at Meta, tells of how girlboss extraordinaire and ex-COO of Facebook Sheryl Sandberg coerced her female employees into sharing her bed on work trips and attending “sleepovers” where they tried on lingerie together, as well as undertaking unpaid labor to promote her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013). When employees like Wynn-Williams refused, they were cut out of Sandberg’s inner circle. The similarities to Nicole, who used her sexual charisma and personal magnetism to coerce workers at OneTaste, are striking, right down to the tailored power suits. But unlike OneTaste, Meta has managed to stay on top.

If telling the story of a cult can help us recognize the signs of one, from both the inside and the outside, perhaps we all ought to be more wary of some of the organizations and beliefs we take for granted. I’m writing this weeks after the release of Apple’s new iPhone 17, a brand and product that have cultivated such rabid consumer allegiance that huge queues continue to form at stores on release dates, despite the ease of online ordering and, more importantly, revelations about the company’s abusive practices and use of “conflict minerals” mined in the Congo. At the same time, a host of exposés not unlike Huet’s own have drawn attention to an epidemic of “AI psychosis”—delusions, and even suicides, stoked by the use of artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT, which have sent vulnerable users tumbling “down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems,” as one New York Times article put it. Sound familiar?

Not everyone suffers under the thumb—or forefinger—of a Master Stroker, but modern life might be one big cult, or a hundred interlocking smaller ones: the personal devices that monitor our every move and mood before selling our data to advertising agencies, the brands that buy our loyalty with phony affection and authenticity, the expensive treatments we shell out for, the workout classes that promise us total transformation, the overhyped consumer products we queue and trawl the internet for, the social media platforms we just can’t quit, the generative AI selling itself as so integral that we’re all forgetting how we functioned before it appeared.

But the lessons aren’t always that easy to learn, even when they appear obvious. Empire of Orgasm might be a cautionary tale, though as one former acolyte, who suspected early on that OneTaste might be a cult but thought that knowledge would keep him safe from its allure, put it, “knowing how alcohol works […] doesn’t prevent you from getting drunk.”