Thinking with your head, and not with your pants
It's Down to This
Kimberly Tsao
Issue date: 4/15/09 Section: Opinion
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San Francisco's One Taste Urban Retreat Center, which houses almost 40 people, offers massages, yoga classes and orgasmic meditation.
The residents get up at 7 a.m. to stroke and be stroked. The women, undressed from the waist down, climax via their research partners - that's what they call them - who, they say, also benefit from the meditation.
A 2007 SF Weekly article reported that the center's founder, Nicole Daedone, hails "OMing," or orgasmic meditation, as the slow sex movement, coming on the heels of the slow food movement. Daedone aims to have branches in every major city, such as Los Angeles and Seattle.
"Many communal living situations centered on women have been about denying sexuality - convents, for example, or selling it, like at brothels," said Ted McIlvenna, president of the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.
I get it - the center empowers women's sensuality, which has been denied, even up until today. I don't have a problem with the center's mission of "making your body a pleasurable place to be" either. It's a noble goal.
Racheli Cherwitz, 28, said the center "has improved her self-image and given her 'deep physical access to the woman (she is) and the woman (she wants) to be.'"
That I have a problem with. It's one thing to allow orgasmic meditation to rejuvenate your sexuality, but to let it define who you are? The article states that the residents' ages span from the 20s to 50s. I realize that's when quarter and mid-life crises set in, but there are other, more constructive ways in which to find yourself.
Get a hobby.
Then again, a New York Times article found residents claiming that "OMing is really about the 'hydration' of the self, the human connection, not sex."
However, Reese Jones, boyfriend of the center's founder, said, "It's a procedure to nourish the limbic system, like yoga or Pilates, with no other strings attached."
"When you go to a massage therapist," he added, "you don't take the masseuse to dinner afterward."
Contradiction much. If the center is really about bonding, then why are some residents' so-called research partners not their life partners? They could stroke a person in the morning and share a bed with someone else the same night. The connection truly runs deep.
Viewing Comments 1 - 2 of 2
Quang Pham
posted 4/20/09 @ 4:29 PM PST
I am in agreement with the opinion of the author simply because this seems to be an addiction center. Sex, to most people, stimulates the brains in the same way as spiritual connection or a deeper filling of fulfillment. (Continued…)
Maureen Tamm
posted 4/22/09 @ 1:37 PM PST
I don't think the author really has any idea what she is talking about. Has she been to One Taste, has she actually talked to any one directly who lives there or has been there? No, she has only read other peoples opinions. (Continued…)
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