CHAPTER 9

The Glory of O

Perhaps the breakthrough came in 1989. That was the year audiences flocked to the Rob Reiner romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally, written by Nora Ephron.

In the film, Meg Ryan plays Sally, a wholesome, cheery obsessive-compulsive who has a bouffy perm and wears Days-of-the-Week underwear. The signature scene, set in a deli, shows Sally with Harry (Billy Crystal) as she demonstrates how women fake orgasms. He is convinced he can always tell the real McCoy; she insists that most women have phoned in their fair share of phony climaxes.

Her moans pierce across the restaurant (“Oooh, oh, oh God. Oh yeah, right there. Oh, uh, God! Yes yes yes…”) and make every patron stop eating, stone-faced, to glare. The kicker is priceless. A prim middle-aged woman sitting nearby turns to her waiter and says, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

I’ll have what she’s having became a national tagline. An earth-shattering climax—whether genuine or fabricated—had become the province of the girl next door and the matronly lady at the next table.

Overdub the pleasant, whirring sound of the all-American vibrator.

Sex toys—which used to be referred to demurely as “marital aids”—were no longer playthings for enlightened feminists (think Betty Dodson’s masturbation workshops in the ’70s) or the kinky lover or Miss Lonelyhearts. Formerly stowed on a closet shelf or concealed in the lining of a secret throw pillow, vibrators were now right there in the bedside drawer, alongside the lube. Sex toys began doing brisk business by mail order, over the Internet, and through companies like Pure Romance, which in 1993 started the Avon-style living-room demonstrations of sex toys for groups of women (Shtupperware parties, as it were). These onetime novelty items were becoming accepted as instruments that could liberate individuals and couples. When it came out in 1999, tech historian Rachel P. Maines’s book The Technology of Orgasm—regaled as the first definitive history of the vibrator—was favorably reviewed in the popular press. And many men who in the past might have felt threatened—“How can my tool compete with one that’s got a motor?”—were starting to welcome the implements as facilitators. After all, a preponderance of nineties guys were already at ease with gaming devices, intrigued by porn, and increasingly clued in to what their partners were perusing in catalogs and online.

Hilary Howard (in a New York Times survey of—what to call it?—Gen V) writes that the sexologist Carol Queen “attributes more-honest discussions about sex and pleasure to fear of H.I.V./AIDS in the early 1990s.… ‘There was something of a pendulum swing from the sex conservatism of the ’80s to the lively sex publishing of the ’90s, zines, anthologies, small presses,’ [Queen] said. ‘Then people in more-mainstream venues heard about toys. As soon as mainstream culture looks at an issue, it becomes fair game for everyone else.’”

But the Toy Story really hit home with the emergence of the Rabbit, a vibrator fitted with a protruding clitoral stimulator that resembled bunny ears.

Women in the know purchased the gadget discreetly. Then demand got out of hand. Sex and the City devoted a whole episode to the device in 1998. Sales exploded, and over the next year, Ann Summers, a U.K. purveyor of sex toys, lingerie, and the like, reported that it shipped a million units. The Rabbit became to the ’90s bedroom what the Cuisinart had been to the ’70s kitchen. Soon, women (and men) were buying more gel and lube (some even scented or flavored), more dildos, pulsators, Kegel balls, strap-ons, plugs, and special attachments that worked like a G-spot GPS. The Rabbit became the gateway drug for naughtier sex toys and a boon to the industry at large. (In 1976, the famous Hite Report on Female Sexuality—as the Guardian would later point out—had concluded that 99 percent of American women had never availed themselves of a vibrator. By 2009, according to a later survey, fully half of the country’s adult females admitted some familiarity with the device.)

The Rabbit was fruitful and multiplied. Today, of all the treasures on sale at America’s sex shops, it is the hutch of Rabbits that typically commands the prime shelf space. During a recent visit to the Pleasure Chest, for instance, I spied three racks with fourteen varieties of vibrator of every imaginable hue and cry—many of Rabbit-style design. Each was double-pronged: one shaft for insertion; a smaller adjacent bulb for outside maneuvers. Some had components shaped like ticklers, petals, or sea creatures. A pleasant sales associate walked over and offered a demonstration. She held up a remote control, adjusting the speed of the stim stem (“These ‘ears’ flutter externally on the clitoris”), then the other control for the larger tube (“The shaft rotates and you can adjust the swing so it hits the G-spot”). Running her hand along the shaft, she pointed out the internal beads—which rotate independently inside a cylindrical cuff—“that give a different feeling along the walls of the vagina.”

And here’s the rub. Part of the appeal of sex tech in the ’90s, and in the years ever since, has been the fact that masturbation, an act often freighted with shame, was slowly becoming acknowledged as a natural human function.1 In 1994, in fact, the topic emerged in a very public way. That year, Clinton’s surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, was asked at a U.N. forum on AIDS if masturbation could help curtail the disease from spreading among young people who might otherwise be exposed to potential infection. Her response—“I think [masturbation] is a part of human sexuality and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught”—led to great tumult in Washington and across the country.

Elders was swiftly dismissed, merely for suggesting the benefits of an open discussion with young people about masturbation. But her opinion resonated. Columnists, physicians, and world health advocates came to her defense and protested her ouster.² The Good Vibrations sex-shop franchise, for one, took up the charge.³ In 1995, one of its advisers, the ubiquitous Carol Queen, helped devise a public rebuttal to Elders’s firing: National Masturbation Month. To be held every May, M-Month was intended as a way to deflect embarrassment surrounding onanism; encourage safe-sex practices; and, by the by, sell sex toys. (One of the movement’s slogans: “Think Globally, Masturbate Locally.”)

Then, in 1999, Masturbate-A-Thon arrived. It would become an annual live event—organized by Dr. Queen and her partner, Dr. Robert Lawrence—at which attendees in several cities would get off “solo” in a group setting. During one session in London, Queen would recall, “a lovely matron who’d come down on the train from Coventry came out disappointed that she had not had 50 orgasms, which had been her goal, and said, ‘I guess I shouldn’t have made love this morning before [boarding the train].’” The holder of the longest-time-spent-masturbating trophy, said Queen, was a Japanese man “sponsored by the Tenga line of men’s sex toys [who competed while wearing something] like a Nascar suit with Tenga’s logo. And he totally won that title! Nine hours and 58 minutes!”

Throughout the ’90s, women and men were getting mixed signals about their orgasms. A widely reported University of Wisconsin study, which had sampled the sex habits of 805 nurses, found that two-fifths of them routinely experienced multiple orgasms. A team of U.K. scientists proposed a connection between the female orgasm and potential fertility: according to their research, a woman’s climax appears to be accompanied by a vacuuming spasm that suctions male ejaculate into the uterus, theoretically increasing the odds of conception. Rutgers University, according to New York Times science writer William Broad, had become America’s “ground zero” for studies in which “female volunteers put their heads into giant machines and focus their attention on erotic fantasies.” And in 1992, its researchers came out with a pivotal paper that, by Broad’s measure, had sexologists considering a “reassessment of the nature of orgasm.” The reason: Drs. Gina Ogden (who is independent of Rutgers), Beverly Whipple, and Barry R. Komisaruk had discovered that women in the Rutgers lab, without the aid of self-stimulation, could spontaneously climax through their imaginations alone.4 New books and research papers, meanwhile, were looking at Eastern sexual practices and describing men who routinely experienced multiple orgasms.

So much for the good news.

While some researchers saw every erection as half full, others counseled caution. A newly named disorder—erectile dysfunction—was said to have reached epidemic proportions, supposedly affecting as much as half of the adult male population over age forty. (We’ll return to this topic later on.) Many women, meanwhile, weren’t faring much better. Surveys in the early and mid-’90s concluded that a quarter of all women had persistent trouble achieving orgasm or exhibited signs of greatly diminished (even nonexistent) sexual desire. A 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association put that number at 43 percent. And yet while statistics suggest that two-thirds of women do not have orgasms through intercourse alone, neither is this a symptom of dysfunction.

The condition was given several overarching designations: female orgasmic disorder, hypoactive desire disorder, and female sexual dysfunction (FSD).5 Soon the condition was being debated—some say conflated—by physicians, by Big Pharma (which provided increasingly profitable treatments to remedy the slate of dysfunctions), and by the media (which devoted many a headline and morning-show segment to FSD, “America’s silent scourge”).

Some clinicians had other ideas. In the 1990s, psychiatrist Rosemary Basson would formulate what became known as the Basson Sexual Response Cycle—flow charts that pointed to a new understanding among sex therapists about how to treat female patients who complained of diminished libido. As Daniel Bergner would observe in a retrospective article in the New York Times Magazine, many women did not seem to have an “initial hunger,” or what is often thought of as “lust or craving.” For them, desire did not trigger sexual arousal; instead, their responses, Basson posited, were driven by a closed loop of stimulus-response-stimulus—or, in Basson’s formula, “Desire follows arousal.”

In short, a woman’s sexual response (or lack thereof) was frequently misinterpreted by her physician, therapist, or gynecologist. In many cases, it was also misunderstood by her partner or partners, who were not attuned to how to arouse her. Moreover, FSD patients were often at the mercy of doctors and drug firms prescribing medicines to address arousal mechanisms, which in fact had multiple layers and deep psychological roots. (The possibility of a dependable and marketable female Viagra equivalent would not get serious until 2015.)

Nowhere, however, was there a greater sea change in the treatment of sexual health among older women than in the field of hormones. Estrogen supplements, which had fallen out of favor, had come back into general use across an aging population. Michael Mendelsohn is a cardiologist who some consider one of the fathers of estrogen-replacement-therapy science. “In the early ’90s,” he explains, “the national recommendations strongly supported [the belief] that estrogen, in addition to relieving the symptoms of menopause—hot flashes, sweating, and vaginal dryness—was also good for the heart and bones and cognition.” (In 2000, the model and actress Lauren Hutton would appear in ads for Wyeth research institute—Wyeth makes the hormone drug Prempro—discussing the merits of estrogen replacement.)

While such ads and treatments had been around since the ’50s, it wasn’t until the ’90s, says Mendelsohn, that “the stars aligned for estrogen. Molecular and cellular evidence began accruing that showed the hormone could actually be beneficial and important for the heart and blood vessels. When women reached the menopause and stopped having estrogen around, it caused dramatic physiological changes. By giving back the estrogen, the [premenopausal] responses and the biology were renewed. They had more vaginal lubrication. They became more comfortable sexually, and sometimes more responsive, and interest in sexual activity was sometimes restored. You basically were making women feel younger by restoring the hormonal milieu that, when lost, made their bodies feel different and older.” The payoff for many was a more youthful and invigorated sense of self, a healthier body- and mind-set, and better sex. That is, until the court dockets started filling up.

Within a few short years, findings by the National Institutes of Health would raise the possibility that “combination hormone therapy” might be far more complex than had been previously understood and might even contribute to an increased risk in adverse effects. Hormone regimens were tied to a percentage rise in incidents of breast cancer, and questions arose about whether hormones could prevent or cause heart attack, blood clotting, and stroke. Over the course of the decade, hundreds of patients would file lawsuits against drug makers, contending that the companies’ hormone treatments had made them seriously ill. (Later, the scientific consensus would shift again and hormone therapy for postmenopausal women would return to favor in many circles, especially around protection from heart disease, depending on individual risk factors.)

Estrogen migrated from medicine and popped up in movie plotlines and TV shows. But its place in pop culture didn’t hold a candle to that of the new, improved female orgasm.

The blow-your-socks-off orgasm scene was nothing new to the movies. But come the ’90s, it had become a film and cable staple, played for laughs. No episode of Sex and the City, for example, seemed complete unless Kim Cattrall’s Samantha was shown mid-moan (and then sharing postcoital cock tales with the girls). In the film American Pie, the bedroom shrieks of Tara Reid’s character—on the receiving end of a predinner snack—almost bring the house down. In Pleasantville, a send-up of ’50s-era conformity (shot in Ike Age black-and-white), Joan Allen, as the uptight suburban mom, is so enraptured by her first self-induced climax that her bathroom’s floral wallpaper turns brilliant colors and the tree in the front yard bursts into flame. If these comic depictions were any indication, Americans recognized great value in—and were validated by—the psychic power and healthy release inherent in better orgasms.

Beyond the onscreen O, though, the true-life celebri-gasm was a bona fide ’90s thing. The singer-songwriter Sting almost single-handedly helped set a fire under the Tantric sex craze. In 1990, he spoke of putting off ejaculation at will: “It ends when you choose, it can go on for five hours.” In 1993, Rolling Stone reported that he and his wife, Trudie Styler, had marathon sessions. “The purpose of sex ideally,” Sting professed, “is for the woman to attain orgasm and for the man not to.” Over time, their lovemaking was said to stretch to seven or eight hours. (Years later, Sting and Styler did a bit of Tantric recanting, saying that their reputation for enjoying hours in flagrante was merely fallout from a goof started by some drink-fueled talk with a reporter, Sting, and his fellow rocker Bob Geldof.)

Tantra, nevertheless, caught on. By prolonging their encounters, couples professed to tap into one’s deeper reservoirs of sexual energy and magnify feelings of connection and ecstasy. On television in the late ’80s and early ’90s, two attorneys on L.A. Law (played by Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker—married in real life) would jokingly refer to the Venus Butterfly, a female stimulation technique. But it didn’t stop there. As Tucker would recount in a 1996 Maclean’s magazine story on the Tantric trend, “The [show’s] writers made it up and then, years later, we discovered what it was and it has become the center of our life.” He and Eikenberry, in fact, had become blissful Tantra practitioners, engaging the human body’s “chakras”—from groin to heart to head, and back again. “I always thought the point of sex was my pleasure,” he confessed. “But the point is fulfilling my woman in the deepest, most spiritual way, but also in a profoundly sexual way.… When my seven chakras are open and all of Jill’s are open and we are connecting, we can damn near levitate off the bed.” Eikenberry, equally enthused, would tell the New York Times, “I come from a strait-laced Unitarian background and at first I couldn’t believe I was going in this direction. We kind of feel we have a calling now.” (Just as celebrities’ blessings had helped legitimize the Brazilian, these endorsements were shining a light on sex practices that had grown out of Eastern spiritual traditions.)

Whether solo or in tandem, separate or simultaneous, by hand or by machine, orally or genitally or otherwise, Americans were building a better orgasm. And in terms of duration, frequency, and variety, a woman’s, by many accounts, made a man’s seem rather… anticlimactic. Naomi Wolf in 1991 wrote about this disparity. In her opus The Beauty Myth, she would attest, “Capable of multiple orgasm, continual orgasm, a sharp and breathtaking clitoral orgasm, an orgasm seemingly centered in the vagina that is emotionally overwhelming, orgasm from having the breasts stroked, and of endless variations of all those responses combined, women’s capacity for genital pleasure is theoretically inexhaustible.”

And if there was one inexhaustible and insatiably orgasmic woman in the 1990s, it was Nicole Daedone.

Nicole Daedone was celibate for much of 1997. She had recently navigated a series of complicated relationships with men. She had been buffeted by the death of her estranged father. Daedone—a San Francisco art gallerist who had studied sexual identity in college and semantics in grad school6—was looking for answers, having always been a searcher.

When things seemed darkest, she sought guidance from various spiritual teachers, eventually returning to the Buddhism and meditation practices that had grounded her when she was younger. As part of this journey, she renounced sex for a year. And then, finding herself at a personal crossroads, she decided to make a life-changing commitment. She would enter a Zen community in San Francisco and become a monk.

Daedone was not standard monk material. Her body was sinuous, her laugh vigorous, her hungers voracious. She had probing eyes, cocoa-butter skin, and long cinnamon tresses. (She has since gone honey blond.) Part Sicilian, part Romanian, she occasionally wrote steamy prose about her erotic encounters.

With only a week to go before her scheduled move to the monastery, she hesitated, wondering if she really had the will to refrain from earthly temptations. As a test, she now recalls, she decided to “go wild for a week.” She had spent a year in abstinence. Now she would roll full-tilt in the other direction.

On her first night out, pursuing what she calls “the six deadly sins” (murder: uncool), she found herself at a party in San Francisco, suddenly drawn to a French-Belgian stranger with black hair, black eyes, and a spiritual vibe. They talked about her pending entry into monastic life. In response, he offered to show her a practice he thought might help her. Intrigued, she joined him the following night in a quiet room at the ashram where he was staying. “Okay,” he said, after exchanging pleasantries. “Take off your pants.”

Daedone was suspicious, yet game. She did what she was told.

“Lie down,” he suggested, though he remained fully clothed. She lay down.

“Open your legs,” he said.

And as she spread for him, he directed the beam of an adjustable wall lamp toward her widened frame. Frightened and confused, she felt herself descending into a trance state, remaining motionless.

His voice was tender, deliberate, enveloping. “Your inner labia look like a coral,” he said. “There is a deep rose color at the edges and it fades into a pearlescent pink at the base. I can see your clitoris peeking out from beneath your hood, which is tilted slightly to the side.” For several minutes he went on describing each fold and ridge, his voice washing over her in waves. She felt tears coming, felt time slowing, felt deep compassion emanating from him.

He set a timer—for twenty minutes—and, as she would later write, “He sat at my right side. He wrapped one leg beneath my legs and the other over my belly.… He placed his right hand beneath my behind, and placed his thumb gently into my opening, anchoring me to his palm from the base of my introitus. He slid his left index finger up through my labia and onto the upper left-hand quadrant of my clitoris. He stroked.… He narrated, [explaining] everything that he was doing, everything that he felt in his body.” He began to stroke up and up, then down and down, his touch grazing the soft groove just to the left of her clitoris.

After a time, as she would describe it, “Everything in me ignited.… My entire consciousness became that spot.… The center of my body buzzed like a phone wire. I felt each stroke.… I felt him speed up, then slow down, shift direction.… A thought arose: I am home.”

Later, when the clock’s buzzer signaled that twenty minutes had elapsed, he “grounded her” and gently toweled her off. He arose, smiling, and offered Nicole her pants. “Come back any time you want to do this again.”

She would return, and often. She ditched the monastery thing. And she fell in with a set of women and men who, once or twice a day, would prop themselves on pillows, take out containers of lubrication, and engage in female-centric stroking sessions, which Nicole would come to know as “orgasmic meditation”—OM. The idea was to transform both stroker and stroked by concentrating on their point of connection at one special spot on the woman’s body.

The strokes would crest toward peaks—the apex of an “up” stroke—or descend to the nadir of a “down.” The women would surf these waves, riding, extending their time in meditative suspension. For a while, Daedone, in the undertow, would be consumed by embarrassment, anxiety, and the panic of confronting past trauma. But gradually, she says, she released her urge to repress her fears and came to experience a sense of overpowering humility. In time, she would learn to find a balanced mode in which she would spend twenty minutes, in her words, “in a state that was simultaneously orgasmic and meditative.” Finally, during one stroking session, she now recalls, “Everything flared open. I knew my life was changed. All the tentacles of your sexuality are repositioned, placing the locus inside of you rather than outside of yourself, so you aren’t bullied by your sexuality. You can use it, aim it, and direct it. A really deep meditative practice will rock your world.”

“I got rebellious,” says Nicole Daedone. “I went nuts. I got obsessed. I lost myself.” She began integrating sex into her life as a way of embracing, not dulling, both her human fears and her deepest spiritual yearnings. She lived in various, usually nameless communal retreats in the Bay Area and near the Oregon border. One community, she says, “was like a yoga ashram based around sexuality.” She would learn from Ray Vetterlein, who according to the New York Times “achieved fame of sorts in sex circles by claiming to lengthen the average female orgasm to 20 minutes.” Vetterlein, says Daedone today, “shifted my perspective of what a relationship with a man could be like. He was willing to be a man in service to opening a woman’s orgasm.” She would meet the purported father of orgasmic meditation, Victor Baranco, who, in her words, “codified and put the practice together. He’s the person who said there’s a way that you can have a sexual practice of stroking a woman’s clitoris that can have profound implications.”

Looking back, she says diplomatically, the overly loose structure of the settings made it impossible “to prevent inevitable problems from arising,” and some of the men took advantage of the system and the women. So she decided to branch out on her own. She spread the word of the virtues of orgasms by, for, and about the woman. Daedone had found herself. She had found her calling too. Her revelation, first received on a hot night in 1997, had become the foundation for a career and a way of being.

Today, after giving and receiving what she calls “several million strokes in my time,” she is America’s leading OM advocate. With her book Slow Sex, an online business, her erotica blog, various demonstration videos and seminars, as well as her orgasmic centers—called OneTaste7—Daedone, now in her late forties, presides over a growing organization. There is a OneTaste product line: pillows, instructional videos, OneStroke natural nonallergenic beeswax lube. There are workshops, coaching programs, and classes with titles such as “Advanced OM” and “Ignited Man II.” (The $1,000-a-month residency programs—and the naked yoga sessions—have been discontinued.) There is a retreat center in the wilds of California’s Mendocino County. Press coverage has painted OneTaste as everything from a meditative practice to an erotic fitness craze to a cult.

The faithful come every day for two or three sessions. The most observant practitioners gather in a common room, pair off, and engage in OM—the men (and women) stroking reclining women. They call out their own sensations, reinforcing a synchronous feedback loop as their limbic systems kick in. SF Weekly has described the scene this way: “Most pair up as ‘research partners’ to explore sensuality with one another. That can mean simply sharing a bed, making out, having intercourse, or some level of intimacy in between. Research partnerships can last for as short as a week or for more than a year. While some at OneTaste are monogamous, many are not.” Says Daedone, “The men who come to the center don’t care if it’s female-centric.… They get more than they could ever want. It’s too much. A woman in that state—she’ll want to devour a man.”

The rise of a practice devoted to transcendence through orgasm would parallel the rise of yoga in the ’90s. Looking back, Nicole considers the ’80s women’s fitness boom (Jazzercise, the Jane Fonda Workout, homebodies watching aerobics videos) as “a nationwide wave of people alone in their living rooms trying to V-step and grapevine their way to tighter buns, thighs, and abs. By the end of the decade, [that] wave collapses because it can’t support itself on a model that’s so geared around looks, achievement, and isolation. It’s like the McDonald’s version of fitness—empty calories. Eventually they need something nourishing and connected. So in the ’90s yoga reenters the picture.”

Yoga, in its way, opened the door for OM. “Vibrators and Internet porn and… hookups,” Daedone notes, were fast becoming “the primary portal through which people access[ed] sex in the twenty-first century [in tandem with a corresponding rise in] erectile dysfunction, hypoactive desire disorder in women, and increasing social isolation, [which had] reach[ed] chronic levels.… Enter OM, a 2.0 version of sex that… bring[s] the same level of consciousness and connection that yoga brought to the world of fitness.”

According to OneTaste doctrine, “In concrete terms, we define orgasm as the moment the involuntary musculature of the body is activated. One may exist in this state for extended periods of time without ‘going over.’ More abstractly, we define orgasm as the energy that exists in all living things at all times.”8

When I meet Nicole and her then partner Reese Jones for drinks in New York, they suggest I come out to San Francisco. (Jones is a visionary tech entrepreneur whom I have known for many years.) They insist I’ll benefit from witnessing a “demo,” a sort of OneTaste graduation. At a typical demo, they explain, a woman who has been in the practice for several years—and who is poised to become a more senior instructor—presents herself to an assembly of OM-ers who observe her being stroked for forty minutes nonstop.9

How can I refuse? I immediately invite my wife, Nancy, to join me. If there’s any research expedition for this book that might benefit both of us, this could be it.

A few months later, we find ourselves crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, then descending through mountainous passes toward Stinson Beach, northwest of Sausalito. It is nighttime. It is raining. Lightning illuminates the way. Reese Jones is behind the wheel, with Nicole beside him. Nancy and I are off to our first demo.

We arrive to thunderclaps. We approach a ranch house, set amid gardens and a lily pond. This is the Chevalier Estate, a retreat that OneTaste uses for what it calls invitation-only experiences. In the 1920s, Jones explains, the basement housed a speakeasy, stocked by local rumrunners. For years it was owned by Haakon Chevalier, a French lit professor at UC Berkeley. Local lore has it that during the ’40s, physicist Robert Oppenheimer, also on the Berkeley faculty, used to repair here to plan the Manhattan Project, the program that gave birth to the atomic bomb.

As we enter, the parlor has the feel of a chalet. Trays of vegetables and snacks have been laid out. A few dozen young and middle-aged adults (two-thirds of them women) mill around, many dressed in dark, casual clothes. The vibe is expectant but unsettled, like the lull before a wedding ceremony at which the bride is running late and the bar is not yet open.

A double door swings wide to a large living room with dark wood paneling and a crackling fire. The setting recalls Sherlock Holmes’s study, with a touch of Goth: candelabra with flickering tapers, brocaded sofas, bookshelves, and a wall of heavy drapes that muffle the sound of pelting rain. There are Persian carpets, a piano, roses in a vase. A Mac provides the soundtrack: the subtle throbbing of drums. Straight-backed chairs with plush cushions have been set in rows ceremonially on either side of a center aisle, facing a makeshift stage set. This is Young Frankenstein meets Eyes Wide Shut.

Up front by the closed curtains, in the manner of an altar or a nineteenth-century operating theater, a bed has been rolled in, on risers, next to a stepstool. The end of the bed (more like a massage table fitted with white sheets and pillows) is directly in front of the chairs, its head slightly elevated so that the “audience” will have a clear view of its occupant. Nearby, a video camera is affixed to a tripod; the session will be streamed live to OneTaste staffers unable to attend the demo.

Forty-two “witnesses” take their seats and wait, speaking softly. The sound of a single guitar is piped in. An officiate emerges and stands next to the bed. “Welcome to the demonstration,” says Justine, twenty-four, a pale blonde woman dressed in a jet-black blouse and tights. “Everybody, please turn your phones to vibrate.” Vibrate it is.

“Tonight we’re all here to experience the energy in the room,” she says. The evening’s designated graduate, Racheli, she explains, has been in practice for three years; her partner-stroker, Ken, for almost ten. “Your job is to experience a woman having an orgasm for forty minutes. Be open to it all. As Racheli’s being stroked, she’s open to feeling all of us in the room and she’s sending back out energy—involuntary energy. This is a dress rehearsal for what women do as a ‘coming-out’ experience—eventually [experiencing] an hour in orgasm.

“People will be invited to come up to the table [and observe] closely. Speak whatever sensation you’re feeling… experiencing: fear, elation, whatever. Look for signs of orgasm: a flushing of her cheeks; dark circles under her eyes… fluttering of her stomach.”

Nicole sits in the front row, ready to chime in or assist. A spotter named Robert minds the clock. A young bald techie operates the Web feed, the music, the camera.

Ken walks in, stage left. He is stocky and wears a red plaid flannel shirt. He pulls on latex gloves.

Racheli emerges in a silver robe. A petite, almost frail twenty-nine-year-old redhead, she looks innocently nervous. She has been preparing for this day for nearly a year. She hugs Nicole, then drops the robe. Naked, she climbs onto the bed, lies down, and greets the crowd with a playful Charlie Chaplin wave.

Pillows are arranged under each haunch, along with a white towel. Ken leans over and begins to massage her thighs. “This helps ‘ground’ her,” he says, addressing the audience, though facing his partner. Her legs splay open. “This is her anus. Above the anus, this fold is called the perineum…”

The music shifts to chanting and thumping drums and Ken starts stroking. Almost immediately, Racheli shifts too. She sighs “heh-huh-huh” repeatedly, her toes curling, then her fingers. Nicole advises, aloud, “Start a downstroke to bring her back into her body.” Soon comes the sound of maracas, bongos, a bass guitar. Racheli’s breathing gets heavier. Her pert breasts rise and fall, in time with the strokes, the thickening bass beat.

Justine, standing off to the side, moderates, “Racheli’s belly is starting to really shake. Her lips and her upper torso are quivering.”10 Ken, ever stroking, tells the audience, “Her clit just grabbed on to my finger.” Her legs shake and flutter. “The clitoris is like a spinning top,” he says, “now spinning by itself.” Racheli’s hand echoes Ken’s, middle finger extended, stroking.

A bearded man in the audience begins a soft shimmy in his seat. Some women near him, in high black boots, keep their legs wide as they watch; others sit cross-legged, hands folded, motionless. Several audience members twitch silently. Others emit reactions: “My whole body’s molasses… Warm and cool undulations… Waves of light walking over me.”

Nicole gives encouragement: “There we go, Ken, that’s a beautiful stroke.” Justine offers the play-by-play: “We’re thirteen minutes in…” Ken calls for more lube.

The audio switches to trance dance, Gabrielle Roth’s New Age song “Flowing”: “Each moment giving birth to the next…” Ken’s gloves glisten. Racheli grabs his back, occasionally stroking his hunched frame as he strokes. Leaning over her, his face and shoulders bent down, “Ken looks”—says my wife, Nancy, whispering—“like a plumber. And that flannel shirt. Is he a lumberjack?” Nancy occasionally rolls her eyes at me. (Translation: You’re not buying this, are you?) She adds, “I find this the height of self-absorption. And it’s tedious.”

To this witness, admittedly, the setting is much more clinical and much less sensual than the hype or the trappings would have led me to believe. But I am drawn to the vibe, resisting my wife’s skepticism. There is a distinctive, musky tingle in the air—a corona of fever and danger and animal heat. Perhaps that tingle comes from the instantaneous decay of the Eros across the room, a charge that sizzles out over the crowd like rays from Oppenheimer’s unstable atoms.

Nancy aside, the room is buying it. The rows of witnesses seem to comprise a closed circuit: here and there, people rock to and fro. Many seem in sync with the couple in a sort of libido feedback.

Robert the spotter signals “twenty minutes” to Justine. And suddenly Nicole has left her seat and is standing beside the bed. She wears a black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline. She tugs on gloves and steps in, as Ken recedes.

Nicole places a latex hand on Racheli’s thigh, then sets to it. Nicole’s strokes are more rhythmic than Ken’s, applied with increasing intensity. This is not the “slow sex” she writes about. This is contact jai alai. Her head bobs, bobs, her own chest shivering. Racheli’s breathy moans rise, subside, and rise. Nicole Daedone is a safecracker, placing her ear close in, her face almost brushing Racheli’s thigh, as if listening. She’s a symphony conductor—in the last movement of Liszt.

Soon Nicole is openmouthed, then she grits her teeth. As she bobs, the black sash of her dress seems entangled in Racheli’s moist center. Nicole keeps removing juice from the canal with a flick of a gloved hand. On she strokes, and on, her hips bumping into the bed like a pile driver in slow-mo. The pair seem to undulate, a Picasso canvas come alive.

I walk to the back of the room for a breather and see that a woman in black seems to be pressing herself against the hard-angled edge of a doorframe. The crowd offers up deep breaths or quivers or soft peals of joyous laughter. Occasionally, individuals come up for a closer view. One by one, as if receiving the sacrament or paying respects at a wake, they approach, stand in silence for a moment, and take it all in—radiant flesh and blotchy swellings, the flushing and panting and swollen genitalia—and then return to their seats.

Racheli rises to Nicole’s touch. There is shimmying. There is huhh, unnhh, hunnh. There is, coming from Racheli, something like rapture.

The spotter motions, “time.” And Nicole “grounds” Racheli, patting her own hand as it clasps her there, firmly. Then, after a time, Racheli rises from the table, cheeks flushed, in blissful, dazed relief, and she gives Nicole a hug.

Perhaps orgasmic meditators are on to something, a kind of clitoral affirmative action in a culture where sex has too often been weighted toward men’s desires. This is a very ’90s concept—the sex-positive woman taking charge. During the decade, says Reese Jones, “sex-positive sex or safer sex or militant lesbianism came to the fore because sex became a public-health issue [in the face of] AIDS in the ’80s. So you had to talk about the distinction between sex for procreation and sex for pleasure. Sex for pleasure [helped shape] the ’60s, but it became key again in the ’90s.”

But it is time to take a deep breath, collect oneself, and return, clear-headed, to 1992.