NXIVM might learn a thing or two about selling intensives from OneTaste – the ‘fingering cult’ where men pay to finger women in public settings.
According to various media reports, interviews I conducted and a report in Bloomberg Business Week, this cult demands a thorough investigation for possible sex trafficking.
Listen to the story of one woman – detailed in Bloomberg. It gives an idea of how both women and men are sucked into a bizarre lifestyle where, instead of the women who do sex work get paid for it, they pay and so do the men.
Michal, 28, was unhappy in her job as a teacher’s assistant in a Jewish school. She went to a free OneTaste event in 2014 to see if it could help, because she said she never had an orgasm.
After taking her first class, she started attending regular OM gatherings in New York and warmly responded to the open flirting from the men she met there.
At OM gatherings, the women would strip naked from the waist down and fully clothed men would insert their rubber-gloved finger into their clitoris and ‘stroke’ it for 15 minutes.
The group was full of attractive people, confident they found sexual pleasure, Michal thought.
“This thing seemed to offer friends, potential mates,” she said. “Also, I was on this whole high where there were so many men interested in me. It was weird to feel that power.”
She quit her teaching job, and moved into a OneTaste communal house in Brooklyn to sell OneTaste classes and become a strokee – the name given to the women who strip naked from the waist down and permit men [called strokers] to rub her clitoris for 15 minutes per session.
Life at the OM house was highly scheduled. Once she moved in, the stroking was stepped up.
Seven days a week, the group gathered for multiple rounds of fingering which OneTaste calls orgasmic meditation, or OMing.
To begin with, every morning at around 7 a.m., the staff convened for two 15 minute rounds of OMing, [fingering] switching partners midway – which meant that each morning began with two different men fingering Michal [and the other women] with a rubber glove for 15 minutes each.
Then came a “fear inventory,” where Michal [and the others] would write out and share their deepest secrets and worries with strokers. Staffers were encouraged to report to management if they heard Michal or others express doubts about OneTaste.
Living together in the OneTaste commune, they went to yoga classes, cooked, cleaned, then spent several hours making sales calls around a table, tracking their progress with Salesforce.com.
In the afternoon the women again took their pants off and there was another round of fingering the women.
After that – the third 15 minute session of the day – [45 minutes total of men fingering women with rubber gloves – every day] the strokers and strokees left to host and run the evening’s public session trying to get more people into their lifestyle.
Sometimes they would stroke at the classes to demonstrate the OMing practices.
Michal, like her co-workers, was classified as an independent contractor, earning no salary but only commissions on the courses she sold. She made $1100 -$1200 per month for her 80 hours per week, working on group activities. That included a full 5 hours and 15 minutes of being fingered by various men wearing rubber gloves.
Michal admitted that OMing did allow her to reach orgasm on occasion. She was constantly fingered by the various men there and evidently by other men who paid for classes.
After hosting the OMing events, the strokers and strokees would spend hours calling and texting people who had come to the OneTaste events, trying to sell the next, more expensive class.
After a few months, Michal wanted to sign up for the coaching program but didn’t have enough money. OneTaste sales chief Rachel Cherwitz took out her laptop and helped her apply for a new credit card.
A well-to-do man in the computer tech field,- a OneTaste member and a stroker – agreed to pay part of her tuition for a course called Magic School. What he got in return from Michal or other strokees was not reported.
At the end of Magic School, a OneTaste executive took Michal by the hand and led her to a sales table to talk about putting down a $12,000 deposit for an upcoming two week – $36,000 Intensive.
She didn’t have the money. The senior staffer suggested she ask the same OneTaste member who had paid for her Magic School class. She asked her stroker. He agreed to pay.
At some point, they also agreed to be married. Michal and her parents argued about OneTaste when she told them she’d be marrying the fellow member—who’d been paying for her classes.
Michal and her fiancé attended the two-week, $36,000-a-person retreat called the Nicole Daedone Intensive. They got married during the retreat in August 2015 in a rented San Francisco house without Michal’s family in attendance.
Shortly after their wedding, Michal persuaded her husband to leave OneTaste. By the time she and her husband left, they’d spent more than $150,000. They divorced soon after.
She moved in with her parents in New York, depressed and suicidal. She regularly woke up screaming from nightmares. Michal continued to struggle with her relationship to sex.
OneTaste founder, Daedone and her disciples prescribe sex with as many people as possible as a way to achieve enlightenment, according to several former staffers. They have lessons on aversion where they encourage students to have sex with people they find repulsive to expand the power of their orgasms.
OneTaste denies it is a cult.
So does NXIVM.
OneTaste also teaches women that they should get strong sexual pleasure by giving me fellatio for as long as 30 minutes at a time.