Part One: The Orgasm Cult

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to weave the half-century long history of orgasm cults in the U.S., culminating in the rise of Nicole Daedone's OneTaste.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Buying. The Bastards stop the podcast you're listening to right
right now, worst people in all of history. We tell
you all about them, and you know, this has been
a rough year for a lot of us. Here behind
the Bastards, we've talked about a lot of pedophiles, and
I'm tired of talking about pedophiles. There are pedophiles in
this episode, but they're not the primary focus of the episode.

(00:26):
Jamie Loftus, how are you doing the day? I'm sorry for.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Work, and today we're talking to the biggest one of
them all, and we the White Well.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I was like, I wanted to go right into the title,
but then I hadn't introduced you, and I was like,
I should introduce Jamie before the title. But I also
party was like, should I introduce the title and then
bring in Jamie. I don't know I did it the
wrong way.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
I'm sure about the one complaint at the start here, Robert,
why are you not wearing a hat?

Speaker 2 (00:58):
I don't like cats.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
It's true, where's your statement hat?

Speaker 2 (01:02):
So I don't have a statement hat? But Jamie, you
are wearing a Theorrhose hat right now?

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Which am a well worn one?

Speaker 2 (01:09):
A well worn one around the clock. Yes, homes sweat
through that thing she was waiting to hear she just
died it.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah. I actually contributed to her bail fund and she
mailed this to me iconic.

Speaker 4 (01:26):
I'm wearing a hat that fit little very appropriate for
today's episode.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
It's this Disappointment Awaits.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, yeah, you're both going to get what you want
today because we are Jamie talking about a Silicon Valley
cult led by a female grifter. And best of all,
it's an orgasm cult. It's an orgasm cult. Everybody beautiful.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
And then the crowd bursts into a clause. They're like,
you muscled through six weeks of pedophile to get to
the orgasm cult.

Speaker 2 (01:56):
We did it, folk, Yeah, yeah, thank god. It's like
washing your face in a stream only Actually, this is
very abusive and a lot of people get hurt.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
Oh it is behind buddy Disappointment Awaits.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
But we get to laugh at like Silicon Valley's starter
fucking shit getting mixed in with like traditional cult abuse techniques.
It's very fun, and we love.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
To see women in a leadership role.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Exactly a woman who is who is really really hurting
and taking advantage of a lot of men in a
way that does even the scales on this show somewhat
like if You're just interesting. It starts the process after
she goes through a lot of guys after.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Specter and Savel.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Thank you, Yeah, I mean Sable abuses a lot of
boys too, Sophie.

Speaker 3 (02:46):
That's fair.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
But I want to hear about a woman.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Let's hear it. Yes, so we're going to Yeah, I'm
gonna guess you. There's a good chance you haven't heard
her name. She's Nicole to done like like d A
E D O N E.

Speaker 4 (03:04):
How many times is the word clatorus in the script?

Speaker 3 (03:07):
I see it in the lot?

Speaker 2 (03:09):
I see it.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Can we get a control off on this?

Speaker 4 (03:13):
Yeah, I just got really excited.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
I avoided it, but I used a couple of synonyms.
So here's the thing.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Well times, how many times is vagina in the script?

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Only six? Only?

Speaker 2 (03:27):
The cult is based around this. Lady comes up with
a It has an idea that like, if you get
a bunch of women in a room and you have
a partner masturbate them in a room, sometimes with hundreds
of people watching, it creates this sort of like magical
energy effect that has a bunch of health benefits.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
It's like an operating theater approach to Cummings.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
That's exactly what they do. That's exactly the heart of
the grift, Jamie.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
Okay, okay, listening.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
It's gonna be really fun. So what's also really fun
about this is that this practice getting all these people
in a room. I mean sometimes it was one person
at a time, but masturbating people in public totally detached
from sex. Right. Number one, it is only vaginas and
clatorus is being like manipulated, right, Like, that's the This

(04:20):
is not like a multi organ kind of deal. And
number two, this is not supposed to be erotic by
the end of it. By like the Silicon Valley stage
of the grift, we're treating this like you're taking like
a bulletproof coffee. And by the way, the bulletproof coffee
guys endorsed this business. So so many beautiful crossovers.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Ooh oh god. Yeah, anytime you have a Silicon Valley grift,
you have some incredible side players. Always a great series
of Tim Farris shows up.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's awesome. Really Yeah, we get Tim Ferris. We don't
get a Navy seal. I was bummed about that, Jamie.
I was hoping one of those navy seals who sells
like energy bars would be in this picture, but no,
tragically not.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
Oh this is okay, So the it's sex, but it's
not sex. So it's moorse than sex.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Yeah, it's it's way worse than sex, and it's not
supposed to be sexy. By the end, this does start
with a bunch of dudes in like the seventies, who
it very much is about sex for. But before we
get to the dudes in the seventies, we're gonna have
to have a little talk because it's very relevant about
the patterns that these this group that's supposed to be
kind of like breaking the mold and making this like
women centric and not abusive fall into. We're gonna have

(05:31):
to talk about the history of the female orgasm in
popular awareness and medical conception. Right, Okay, there was.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
A part of me that thought you were going to say,
we have to talk about the clittorus. Where is it?
How do I find it? Is it just all on
the same page.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
It's like a laser point.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
It's right, thing, just mining, So let's talk about it, ladies.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, I think my sex, said was so bad growing
up in Texas. I'm fairly certain I learned about the
clitterists from the South Park movie. I think that was
my first encounter with it when I was like nine
or ten something like that.

Speaker 4 (06:04):
I said, I took it over summer school, and they
just showed us multiple horrific birthing scenes.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Oh great, Yeah, we did see one of those, just
not one, not two, maybe four.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
God, well, at least they put in the hours. I didn't.
I saw one birth video, but no, I didn't even
get like period information. And it was like a running
joke in my town. How the fact that they did
not invest in sex ed But uh, I went to
this massive high school where there was a daycare at
the high school, and you just have to think one perhaps,

(06:42):
but some things my connected.

Speaker 2 (06:44):
Yeah, I remember. I don't think they even told us
orgasms at all existed. They told us that, like, you know,
how the active intercourse happens physically and that it feels good.
And I don't even think I think they're supposed to
tell us about like semen. But I think the gym,
the coach that was giving the lesson was way too awkward,
so he just kind of breezed right past it. We

(07:05):
didn't hear anything about that.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
It's a part of the great American tradition to be
full of visceral fear and think you're dying the first
time you come.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
It's important, Yes, it's really crucial stuff. So for as
long as there have been people, we've understood that sex
at least could potentially be very enjoyable for both participants,
right like that, people have been aware that it can

(07:36):
be fun, even if they've hated the idea of that.
But there's also been this understanding that people with penises
and people with vagina's experienced these pleasures somewhat differently at first.
So far as I can tell, I don't think there
was a lot of controversy about this idea. In ancient
Greek mythology, Hera and Zeus are said to have argued
over whether or not men enjoyed sex more than women,

(07:56):
and Zeus, who is a prolific rapist, argue that women
seem to take more pleasure in the act, and Haar
was like, yeah, I'm not surprised you said that, But
then she was like, obviously, guys enjoy it more. That's
why you're doing all the shit you're doing. Zeus, the
wide stage, Tyresius was brought in to give like an
answer to kind of adjudicate this, and he was like,
women feel nine or ten times as much pleasure as men.

(08:17):
So he agreed with Zeus, and Harah did some really
mean things to him. She did not like that.

Speaker 4 (08:21):
Not to be honest, I didn't know zeus slander was
on the calendar for today.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Zeus Slander's always.

Speaker 3 (08:28):
Slander is absolutely always on the calendar, and we do
talk about him like he is a guy that was.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, he was just a dude, yeah, like we met
him at a cinemon.

Speaker 4 (08:38):
My only compliment to Zeus is that story about when
Zeus birthed somebody from his forehead, and that's how I
think I got Anderson.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, oh there you go.

Speaker 4 (08:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
I like the one where he turns into like a
swan to have sex with a swan because he just
sees a swan that's so hot. But he's like, I
can't do this as a guy, like I gotta be
a swan.

Speaker 4 (08:59):
First of all, a swan's not nice. Second of all,
no beautiful.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
M sure that's what Zeus said. Because the United States
is a culture that was heavily influenced by Puritanism and
generations in which women were shamed and ostracized for even
sexual contact that they had no choice in. It's easy
to see that like, oh, the Greeks were like way
more sex positive than like their Western descendants were thousands
of years later, right that, like, well, that seems like

(09:27):
at least a more sex positive view, even though that's
still kind of messed up, and there are some ways
in which that's true. But Assistant professor of Classics an
editor for the journal idol On Tara Mulder makes an
important point about what this myth was really saying, and
this is relevant to everything that winds up happening in
the Silicon Valley days of this fucking sex cult. If
the ancient Greeks were supposed to take a message or

(09:47):
learn a lesson from this myth, it was that women
were the lucky ones when it came to sex. Women
could be assumed to always want sex, and when they
got it, to enjoy it substantially more than men, giving
rise to the need for men to control sexual interactions.
Sexuality of women, the companion to the ancient Greek and
Roman idea that women enjoy sex more than men, is
the ancient idea that women are sexually ravenous and insatiable,

(10:08):
their sexual appetites couldn't be trusted and had to be
rained in by male guardians. So that's going to actually
be relevant to every every modern day orgasm cold, all
of which are again wrapped in like this is all
about the women, and all of us are going to
wind up recreating that like ancient Greek and Roman shit
like it's crazy, how it's nothing shanges.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Okay, Okay, so we already have this is maybe a
record for being Robert of like, we can't talk about
this before we talk about ancient Greek mythology, and yeah,
we gotta. I fully believe it. I fully believe it.
So is this I'm guessing this is like, oh, this
is actually about like women and women's pleasure yep. And

(10:47):
women are obsessed with being controlled and need to be
controlled and that's actually hot and liberating.

Speaker 2 (10:54):
It's it's a little more complicated and honestly dumb than that, Jamie,
But I don't want to spoil how dumb it is.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
A sex cult is going to be better. This is
this is instructive.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
This is critical to understand before you start a sex cult.
And there's a couple more things that we need to
understand before we get into this, because there's a lot
of patterns the Greeks setup that we just never get
free of here in the West, at least. So the
sage Ovid advised his readers that women had a nasty
tendency to say no when they meant yes. Like he's
kind of the first guy in the Western canon to
be like a no, it's not a no, bra Like

(11:26):
that's that's Ovid, right, And this is endemic all over
ancient culture, just as it is like today. Hippocrates, the
father of Western medicine, weighed in on the pleasure debate
and essentially agreed with Tyresius, and through his descendants, medieval
Europe inherited the belief that female pleasure aided in conception.
The term orgasm didn't exist, but they knew what one was,

(11:49):
and they thought it made pregnancy more likely. That like,
if she enjoys it, you're likely to conceive a child.
That was like the widespread understanding in medieval Europe, which
breaks a pretty important misconcent about medieval life, right that,
like they were frightened and ignorant of sex because they
weren't nearly as ignorant as a lot of people who
would come later. For one thing, everyone lives in the
same room, see, like know where kids come from, right,

(12:12):
Like there's no missing that.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
You see them being created.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
Con Yeah, you're you're aware of how things work. There's
no like telling it. There's no getting kids to like
think that sex is not normal, like if you're growing
up in that environment. Several Catholic scholars, in fact discussed
prostitution positively. There was an idea around like Catholic theology
in this time that like you kind of need prostitutes

(12:39):
for society to work, that if they don't exist, things
go crazy. Like that was like a fairly widespread idea
among some circles. And there were even monks and nuns
who published work that was explicitly about sex. One example
was Constantine the African, a twelfth century figure who wrote
a book about sex, de Koitu on Sexual Intercourse. He
was actually translating the work of Muslim scholars, is often

(13:01):
the case with stuff like this. It been Al Jazzer,
but he filed that guy's name off of the paper
for obvious reasons. He was just like, I'm just gonna
cut this red off. Just put this out on her.
My name's my fuck book.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 (13:12):
This is my book about sex. Don't think about it.
Per a blog called Constantinus Africanus by Monica H. Green,
It opens very clearly stating that sexual function was established
by the creator himself to ensure the propagation of all species,
For if animals disliked intercourse, all the species of animals
would certainly have perished. Pretty hard to argue with. Many

(13:33):
of the same frank attitudes towards sexuality can be found
in others of Constantine's works. In fact, we find in
later manuscripts of the Constantinian Corpus a short work on
the potential harms and benefits of sexual intercourse, called again
the Liber Minor de Quoitu the Little Book of Intercourse.
That's that's all kind of fun, right, that's all interesting.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, okay, if you were so, like what Pad goes
way back, everyone's always been writing there for you, little thing.
Oh yeah. Ever specially think Avid is like spouting the game.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Oh yeah yeah, the first pick up artist.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
He's like, no, no, they love it, dude, they love it.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
Yeah, huge fans, So Jazzer wrote about sex, but he
wrote about it purely from the male standpoint, and to
the extent that Constantine was interested in gathering research about
sexual stealing, research about sexual pleasure. It was only stuff
from the male perspective. But they weren't the only intellectuals
weighing in on the subject. At the same time, you're
gonna love this this lady, both of you are. She's awesome.

(14:35):
One of my sources for these episodes is the History
of Women medium page by Mary Devrai, and she wrote
a really good article on a contemporary of Constantine's, a
twelfth century Benedictine nun named Hildegard of Bingen.

Speaker 4 (14:48):
I'm I'm like, she's so my buzzwords today. She's just
is the non fucking cool.

Speaker 2 (14:59):
She's she's a horny nune. But more than that, she's
every now and then. You like read about someone in
history and they're from long enough to good that you
don't get a ton of granular detail, but you can
just tell like, oh, you were smart as fuck, like
you were a genius. And that's Kilda Guard. So she
she comes into life, she's born into a rich family,
but she had that doesn't mean she has any choice

(15:20):
or agency in her life. It actually means the opposite, right,
because during this time, her family's very religious, and at
this period of time, if you're super religious, it's normal
to tie the tenth of what you have to the church.
And that's not just money. In this age, that means like,
if you have ten kids, you're given one of them
to the priesthood or to be a monk, or to
be a nun.

Speaker 3 (15:37):
Right like normal that is extended to flesh for.

Speaker 2 (15:40):
The very religious. Right. I'm not gonna say every family's
doing that, but a number of them are. That's why
there's so many people in the church. Right she can
get to ten, Yeah, we get the ten, we'll give
one to God. And her parents were also may have
been motivated. She started seeing visions at age three, so
that may have been part of why they're like, well,
she's probably be in the church. I don't know if

(16:02):
I want to deal with this. So I don't know
what was going on there, and I actually don't know.
Part of me wonders was she seeing visions or did
she realize that if she had visions and talked about them,
she could manipulate her circumstances to improve them. And I
kind of think that may have been what's going on,
because the visions are always very conveniently articulated to get
her what she wants. My interpretation of her story is

(16:25):
that the latter is more likely. But yeah, I'm an
atheist in a scallawagon. I like to see like a
clever underdog find a way to win in a religion
that's stacked against them. Like, I think that's fun.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
That feels like, so you know, that's like the history
of women in religion is like, oh, actually a God
told me so you actually it's like the only It's
like when I am trying to get someone to listen
to me, and I just respond and like from a
separate email and be like, Hi, I'm Kevin Jamie's representatives.

Speaker 4 (16:56):
Kevin is such a great fake guy name.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yeah, Kevin's a person fake guy name.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
Could be a guy that's a great negotiator, Kevin. If
you ever get an email from Kevin, look out you're
about to get it.

Speaker 2 (17:06):
But you're gonna get fucking yeah. So I I anyway,
so she gets put up in this. I mean it's
a nunnery that's attached to a benedicting monastery. I don't
know benedicting nun is actually the proper term. But she's
like a nun and the nunnery is attached to this
Benedicting monastery and she's put under the care of an
anchoress named Judda. And an anchor is that that whole

(17:28):
thing means that, like Jutda is supposed to be anchored
to a place. She and her nuns are not ever
supposed to leave the monastery, like the world can come
to them, but they're not supposed to go out right,
and you.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Know as supposed to like there are there I guess
like the some nuns are loose.

Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah, yeah, well they're able to move around be in
the world. They can move to different nunneries or different churches,
are sure, like, because you know, the church starts a
new church, you got to be able to send some
nuns over. It's got to be one that's not anchored
to a place, right. I'm not an expert on this.
This is just what the reading says. It seems that
makes sense. I know I've heard of anchorises before. Her
anchor nuns or yes, yeah, your anchor nuns and your

(18:04):
loose nuns. Your pocket nuns, so to speak. And by
the time Hildegard's a young adult, Judda's died, and it
says a lot about how good Hildegard is at the
social game that Hildegard gets made Anchorius when she dies,
like Judda, passes the title onto her. So she's in
charge now, and she does not like this deal. She
does not want to be stuck in one place. As

(18:25):
Mary Devrai writes, she wasn't happy being attached to a
monastery and asks for permission for the nuns to move
away and start their own place. No, absolutely not, said
the abbot. Hildegard wasn't having that, so she went over
his head to the archbishop. Sure, whatever was his reply.
But the abbot was not thrilled with the end run
or losing this community of women handily attached to his monastery,
or the challenge to has authority, or some other reason
we can only speculate about. He didn't let the women leave.

(18:48):
You could say Hildegard wasn't going to take that lying down,
except that's exactly what happened. Hildegard was stricken, ill by God,
paralyzed and unable to get up. It was God's unhappiness
about the nuns not being allowed to move. Hildegard told
the abbot her fucking awesome.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
She's so cool, like, oh.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
You know, this guy you're telling me exists and talks
to us. He's talking to me right now, and.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Oh, I can't come to work if I'm not a
loose nun. Sorry, right, Oh that's genius.

Speaker 2 (19:20):
It's so cool. She's awesome. So the nuns are get
to leave her.

Speaker 4 (19:24):
The name Hilda guard back.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
It's a banger.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
Hildegard whips. Yeah, I love it, goes off.

Speaker 4 (19:29):
Sorry, she finds when you're talking about a cool nun
that just really it just gets me going.

Speaker 2 (19:35):
She's red really coming alive right now. She's only just begun.
So she she gets to leave with some of her
other nuns and they get to found a new nunnery
or whatever you call them, you know. And along the way,
while they're doing this journey, Hildeguard decides that God had
made her sick. And she's like around forty when that happens,
because he wanted her to do something that she hadn't
been doing. Uh, he'd been giving her visions all these

(19:56):
years totally. She'd been having but she just had kept
them to yourself herself. You never like told them to
anybody until now, But they'd always been there. And she
writes this, though I saw and heard these things, I
refused to write for a long time, through doubt and
bad opinion and the diversity of human words. Not with stubbornness,
but in the exercise of humility, until laid low by
the scourge of God. I fell upon a bed of sickness,

(20:17):
and I spoke and wrote these things, not by the
invention of my heart or that of any other person,
but as by the secret mysteries of God. I heard
and received them in the heavenly places. And again I
heard a voice from heaven saying to me, cry out
therefore and write. Thus, basically, God's saying, you need to
go out into the world and write books and hill
regards like, that's what God wants me to do. And sorry,
she reach.

Speaker 3 (20:36):
God wants me pivot.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
God wants me to pivot pivoting the books.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
I love this. It's the same like religious narrative we hear,
but it's like only being used to liberate her specifically.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, it's extremely cool.

Speaker 4 (20:50):
Yeah, so it's cool in the sense of like but
the same thing happens in like the FLDS for like
a new guy's like.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
I'm a prophet.

Speaker 4 (20:59):
Now the big guy told me I need seventy five
Why it works?

Speaker 3 (21:06):
No one can do it.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Unfortunately.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
This is this is that that strategy being used in
the right way.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
In the very coolest of ways. So Hildegard reaches out
to the pope and she's like, this is what God said.
She sends what I just read basically to the pope,
and the pope is like, tell yeah, God wants you
to write, Like here's some fucking money. Why don't you
pick out a team of like helpers and they'll like
transcribe and write out and like publish, you know, all
of all of your visions from God and books. And

(21:34):
so she starts putting out books that are supposed to
be inspired by God. I don't, I don't know, I don't.
I didn't look that up. This isn't a story about
a man.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
Anytime there's like a pope that does like a slight,
a slight cool thing, I'm like, noted.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
I should have looked into the pope. You're right, but w.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
Is few and far between.

Speaker 2 (21:53):
Yeah, especially in this period twelfth century.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
That's what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
She publishes a bunch of books, and one of them
is called cause at Kurai, and it contains what is
generally agreed to be the oldest description of a woman
having an orgasm written by a woman.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Right, Is this told by her? Or is this God
telling her what an orgasm might feel like?

Speaker 2 (22:16):
She says it's God because she couldn't know, obviously, God.
She hasn't experienced what God's like.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
You're none, So this is like I'm.

Speaker 2 (22:25):
Going to let you in you. It is fucked up
if you think about it that way.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
I love it. It's like God is taunting her. Yeah, yeah,
he's being a real dick here.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
So here's how Hildegard writes about the orgasm she definitely
never experienced. When a woman is making love with a man,
a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with
it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during
the act, and summon's forth the emission of the man's seed,
and when the seed has fallen into its place, that
the hement heat descending from her brain draws the seed
to itself and holds it, and soon the woman's sexual

(22:59):
organs tracked, and all the parts that are ready to
open up during the time of instruation now close, and
the same way a strong man can hold something enclosed
in his fist. So okay, now very Catholic, you know,
very twelfth century.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Okay, Okay, I honestly I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed. I wanted something.
I wanted something sexier.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
Something sexier. She's a nun, she's sight.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
Yes, if she was alive now, she would have loved
that song Pussy Palace.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
She would have been huge about that one.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, describing being horny for a guy
as a result of a brain fever is kind of potent.

Speaker 4 (23:41):
It's super funny, yeah, kind of relatable.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
Hildegard lives a great life the Church Center. She gets
to do all the things she'd always dreamed about. The
Church censor on four long speaking tours where she travels
around like Europe and gets to talk about her work
to learned audiences of learned men. She's super widely respon acted.
Her books are fairly widely distributed, and in addition to
that bit about the orgasm, she also wrote out descriptions

(24:06):
of the four kinds of men, and this doesn't really
directly talk impact our episode, but I couldn't read these
and not include them because some of them are pretty
spot on today.

Speaker 3 (24:17):
Okay, what men be like? What a men be like?

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Hildegard men be like? So you got to know first.
Her writing on this is somewhat influenced by the Greek
belief that the body is governed by four humors earthwind, air,
and fire, as well as something called bile. Right that
like the mix of these, the ratio of them determines
and like alters behavior and mood and personality.

Speaker 3 (24:37):
Right, they missed that nation in last airba hower.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, they have then. So the first kind of the
first kind of men, Hildegard said, are all fire. As
soon as they get sight of a woman, hear of one,
or simply fancy one in thought. Their blood is burning
with a blaze. Their eyes are kept fixed on the
object of their love like arrows, as soon as they
catch sight of it. And these men are terrible people
to be in relationship with, because all they can do

(25:02):
is fuck unless they're balanced by wind, which cools down
their fiery genitals and lets them have honorable and fruitful
relationships with women. And the second type of man is
a man who is a man of fire and of wind,
and quote, the eyes of such men can meet squarely
with those of the women, much in contrast to those
other men's eyes that were fixed on them like arrows.
Which is really interesting thing to note, is like, can

(25:25):
a guy just like see you as a person. It's
kind of what she's saying here, I think, right like.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
She's just describing a man who could be a friend. Possibly.
It is also sounding like vaguely kind of astrological the
way that she's categorizing them. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
And yeah. She also includes an incisive description of toxic men,
who she describes as being full of bile.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
They're vile men.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
It's really fun. They're incapable of having a genuine, loving
relationship with any being. Through that, they become bitter, avaricious,
and full of foolishness and abundant passion. In intercourse with women,
they know no moderation and act like donkeys. Definitely, she
never had sex. Definitely, she never had sex.

Speaker 3 (26:06):
This her ex was human when he read that. It's
that was I do appreciate it. That is that is
like a very like subtle but important distinction of like
a man who is just like wildly horny, and a
man who is both horny and really into mind games

(26:29):
that are like ruinous.

Speaker 4 (26:31):
Yeah yeah, like the retire fuck Boy and bring Back
You're full of bile?

Speaker 2 (26:38):
Yeah, yeah, you're full of bile. That's that's we got
to do that.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Yeah, you know who's not full of bile though, Robert, That's.

Speaker 2 (26:45):
Right, that's right. Soyvie, I was just about to do
it myself.

Speaker 4 (26:47):
Yeah, but I did it first.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
You did it first. You did it first. And the
sponsors of our podcast have no bile.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
At all, honey, bileless.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
And we're back. They might have had some bio in them.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
I don't know, We don't know.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Who knows what you people listen to?

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Oh the fuck knows.

Speaker 4 (27:10):
Who our sponsors are, not me.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, And so here's my favorite thing, And this is
something married of Rye points out in her article on
this is that Hildegarden might be the first writer to
describe in cells in the twelfth century. It's fucking amazing.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
Is this the fourth kind of guy? This is?

Speaker 2 (27:25):
She kind of branches out from that to discuss the
different ways different kinds of men responding celibacy. So she
lays out the kinds of men, and she talks about
here's how they respond to like not having sex. And
one of these types of men is obviously a gay guy,
but she does not understand that. So she's like, some
men are fine with it. And it's like, well, yeah,
you're missing a piece of the story, Hildegarden. That's fine.

(27:47):
But she she writes here about men who stay celibate
not out of religious obligation, but because they hate women. Quote,
they nicely receive any love from their fellow men, nor
have any inclination to a social life of their own.
All the more since they exhaust themselves with continuous figments
of their imagination. Then when they meet people, they are
already full of hate, malevolence and the wrong attitudes, so
they can't enjoy company anymore. It's amazing how spot on

(28:09):
that ship is.

Speaker 4 (28:10):
Just talking about Clovicular.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
That's the twelfth century.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
That could be.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
Man.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
We always think that like this jet, like whatever generation
has really reached the final stage of misogyny and like
being socially horrible.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
But nope, Hildegard described the manosphere.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
All the way back then.

Speaker 3 (28:37):
You could have told me that was in the cut
last week.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
That's nice. Yep, that's fucking crazy. Now. Unfortunately, this is
where we gotta leave our friend Hildegarden. It was awesome
and never did anything wrong, but we are not the show.
Our friend Margaret killed joyed us, so we're not gonna
talk about Hildegard anymore.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Margaret dropped the Hildeguard episode.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah, I love you, just as this episode is going
to be kind of downhill after Hildegard. The way women's
sexuality was discussed in like pot like medical literature in
the Western world went kind of downhill after hilde Guard. Unfortunately,
there's one bright spot in the word sixteen sixty, the
word orgasm gets coined for the first time. There's a

(29:20):
doctor named Nathaniel Hymour who used the term to describe
what happens during a pelvic massage. Even that early medical
professionals were experimenting with the idea that orgasms could treat
certain women's diseases. And you know this is this is
just like any anything to do with like the vagina
is women's in this era like that that's just the
way like all of the writing is in this period

(29:42):
of time, right.

Speaker 4 (29:43):
Sounds like a fucking red bull commercial. It sounds like
they're just saying, endorphins give you wings.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, that's basically the idea. Yeah.
Through the eighteen hundreds, in Western Europe and elsewhere, including
the United States, it became more and more common to
diagnose women with hysteria. This that they're like they're not
happy with like wearing restrictive clothing and hiding from society
and like never seeing anybody until they're married and they married,

(30:09):
go to school. Those I mean, they have eleven children.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
These these broads. When are they gonna It isn't just
because like this hysterias stuff is so well worn, but
it's like even framing it as like a cure of
like like an orgasm for us, this woman has to
be productive in some way.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Yeah, gotta get got to make some shit happen.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah, cannot to this day, cannot just be for fun.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
No, absolutely not so. Doctors in the Victorian area did
eventually hit upon the orgasm as a cure for hysteria,
and some of the first electronic medical devices were invented
to aid them. These are the first vibrators, right, and
before these first gadgets, doctors had to use their hands
to do this job. In eighteen ninety one, Directs invented
a steam powered manipulator that's like the earliest vibrator. It
was so loud you could not.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
The steampunk vibrator is steampunk vibrant. Yeah, it's like a
horny thing executed in the least sexy ways possible.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, there's actually there's a there's a sex store in
San Francisco, Good Vibrations that is a part of this story,
because this cult winds up and briefly involved there that
has a vibrator museum. You can see a lot of
these old vibrators if you go there, like.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
Were the Victorian vibrators also inextricably had forty settings that
you have to click through every single one to.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Turn it off.

Speaker 4 (31:26):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
Absolutely cool.

Speaker 3 (31:27):
So that's a feature that ghost.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:30):
Cool.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
So the vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to
become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about one hundred years.
That's pretty cool. I think that's that's priorities. In nineteen
forty eight, Alfred Kinsey conducted his first major sexual survey,
and people started talking about orgasms of all types in
manners much more familiar to the modern sentiment, men and
women's sexual desire gradually became a more approachable topic of discussion.

(31:55):
The APA continued to diagnose hysteria and prescribe orgasms as
a treatment until nineteen fifth two, but things changed rapidly
after this point. In the nineteen sixties, Masters and Johnson
started conducting groundbreaking studies on why women orgasmed. As Sarah
Mansell writes, they discovered that women could have multiple orgasms
from both vaginal orculatoral stimulation, and also realized it took

(32:15):
women about ten or twenty minutes of sex play to
reach orgasm, compared to just four minutes for men. In
the decades since, we've learned a lot more about the
vagina and the clitorists, which is the only organ that
exists solely for pleasure, but we've learned even more about
the physiological benefits of orgasms. About sixty percent of people
with migraines experience of reduction or into symptoms after one.

(32:36):
And there's a bunch of other stuff about like it
has an impact on you, right including just like you know,
if you have a penis in terms of like your
eurogenital health, Doing it regularly reduces the odds of certain diseases.
There's a bunch of that that we understand.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
So I just want to make sure i'd be clear
after the eight nine years of this podcast existed, we
are coming and saying clearly coming is good, Coming is.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
Good is great. Has never been an anticoming podcast. Okay, okay,
this is just usually you don't want to think about
coming when you're hearing about Hitler podcast. Like, that's more
why we don't talk about it on the show.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
Cumming is medically good.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
Yes, cutting is medically good outside of the contexts that
people usually come in behind the.

Speaker 4 (33:18):
Bastards, consensual coming is good.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, So this actually gets to another really important point
about orgasm and sexual desire that we've come to understand
more fully in the modern age. And twenty fifteen, sex
educator Emily Nagoski published an op ed in The New
York Times during fallout over the failure of the FDA
to approve fibranscren. I think is the name, which is
a drug that was supposed to increase female desire. That's

(33:46):
like the description of what the truck does. I think
it's basically a drug that increases like vaginal lubrication. I
think is kind of the idea, and Naghoski had an
issue with this. She wrote that the biggest problem with
the drug and with the FDA's consideration of it, is
that it's backers are attempting to treat something that isn't
a disease. Her argument was that modern research suggests there
are multiple perfectly normal forms of sexual desire. Some people

(34:06):
experience more spontaneous sexual desire, which is like somebody with
a dick getting hard, right Like, that's what generally society
sees as male sexual desire. That's not the only thing
that male sexual that spontaneous sexual desire is, but it's
the kind of thing you can treat with a pill sometimes,
right like that, or at least you can imitate it
with a pill. A lot of people are way more

(34:27):
into and feel way more responsive sexual desire, and you
can't just drug somewhat into that because it's responsive to
a situation and a relationship, right, Yeah, as neghosts.

Speaker 3 (34:37):
I'd sooner drug someone than try to have an interesting conversation.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
With exactly exactly. Yeah, okay, And that's that's kind of
Nagoski's point. She writes, I can't count the number of
women I've talked to who assume that because through desire
is responsive rather than spontaneous, they have low desire, that
their ability to enjoy sex with their partner is meaningless
if they don't also feel a persistent urge for it.
In shure that they are broken because their desire isn't
what it's supposed to be. So the road for Masters

(35:04):
and Johnson to what I just read you has not
been as smoother and even one. Once people started to
accept that sexual desire was normal and even good for
both men and women, our culture experienced a sexual awakening
that took on many forms, a lot of them problematic. Right,
Some of what you get is like the free love
movements of the sixties and the seventies, and of course
the backlash to that movement too. Now our subject for
these episodes. Nicole Adone was born on August twenty fourth,

(35:27):
nineteen sixty four, right in the smack in the middle
of this massive period of evolution and how we talk
about and understand sex. She had a difficult upbringing. Her father, Joseph,
separated from her mother, Beverly, when Nicole was like seven,
and her earliest memories are of her desperate desire to
have more of a relationship with her father than she
was going to have. In the book Empire of Orgasm,

(35:47):
Ellen Hewitt writes he only visited sporadically, and Nicole adored him.
When he was away, she stood for hours under a
street lamp on her house's cul de sac, trying to
stummen him. She invented bargains with the universe, certain that
if she sang out loud the songs of al Green,
her day dad's favorites, and cross the street with her
eyes shut spun three times to the left, her dad's
car would roll into view from around the latest street.
And that's bleak.

Speaker 3 (36:08):
Yeah, that's heartbreaking. And also how many I'd be really
curious how many young girls were regularly singing weirdly romantic
songs to their dad. It's a writer zero, Yeah, in a.

Speaker 2 (36:22):
Way, Yeah, I honestly that fucked me up a little bit,
just because weirdly enough to coll and I, there's a
lot of points where we have like very similar beats
in our lives, Like like I was very adjacent to
this community and some of these coldest I'm sure it
was at the same parties as some of them, just
because of the places my life took me and the
communities I was in. But when I was like six,

(36:43):
my dad had to leave us for like two years.
Like we were in Oklahoma on the family farm and
we had no money, and he got a job in
New York City and he lived on his friend's couch
and he mailed us back money. And I did the
same thing, like I can remember doing the same thing,
like being like if I do this in this, he
won't leave again, right, Like it's a very normal little
kid thing to do. It's very sad story. My dad
came back. Hers never did because it turns and it's good. Well,

(37:04):
it's good that he didn't because Joseph was a creep
and a pedophile. In nineteen seventy six, he was arrested
in charge with child molestation.

Speaker 3 (37:12):
Sorry, forty one minute.

Speaker 2 (37:13):
Forty one minutes, forty one money all free. That's thirty
seven on mine. Yeah, okay, that's behind the Bast's the
new shirt forty one minutes pedophile free and twenty twenty six.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
We'll start so lout.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
I'm not going to sell that shirt, but I.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Yeah, Soviet does not like shirts that have pedophile on them.

Speaker 4 (37:31):
I don't know, I don't want to sell anything, thank you.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah. Well, so he gets arrested in seventy six and
charged with child molestation, including oral copulation with a child
under fourteen. We don't know who that was, but Nicole
would have been around nine at the time, and much
later she would tell a lot of people, like when
she's a young adult, she tells people that her dad
did sexually assault her when she was a child. We
don't know more than that. She's going to change that

(37:55):
story dramatically several times. She comes up with a different
version of it for every major pu read of her life.
And I just have no more to say than that, right.
I also don't know was her abuse connected to what
her dad got arrested for, or was it something nobody
ever knew until she was an adult, whatever the case.
As a little kid, she acts out in some weird

(38:15):
but understandable ways. She has a thing for Like she
she likes biting knees. Like she will obxcessively try to
bite the back of women's knees. She's like crawling around
and like bite her like aunt or whatever in the
back of the knees. It's like a thing. She's obsessed
with right, and you know, she gets yelled at.

Speaker 4 (38:30):
I liked Pokemon cards, but okay.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
It's weird.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
It's a little weird and hers and she does have
like an OCD kind of like yeah, or ritualize it, yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Sure, compulsions. She says, it feels like there's an animal
inside her trying to get out, right, Like. That's that's
how she would later describe it. As Nicole grew up,
she seems to have had fairly minimal oversight from her
mother and a deep hunger for self exploration and discovery.
She dated boys and girls, and she had a sugar
daddy at age sixteen. That's all we get about that.

(39:04):
But she's she's not very heavily watched. Right years later,
when she led an organization often described as a cult,
she was described in the UK Times as having grown
up quote a natural leader who says she didn't want
to be followed. But that's not really accurate, and it
leaves out a pretty important detail, which is that when
Nicole turned eighteen, she cut off her father right, who
is now at a jail, completely. She has no more

(39:26):
contact with him. After this point, she starts telling people
like whenever she gets to know someone that like, yeah,
my dad did this to me when I was a kid,
And this is like a story that she tells a lot.
She's like processing it right. She goes to college a
couple of different colleges, but they don't work out, so
she finally winds up back in the Bay Area, attending
San Francisco State University. The Guardian says she graduated, but Hewitt,

(39:49):
her biographer, denies this either way. Nicole spent her twenties
in the Bay during the early nineteen nineties, which was
both dealing and reeling from the AIDS crisis still and
also experience in the birth of the Silicon Valley tech set. Right,
a lot of things are happening at once, and also
Burning Man starting in the early nineties, and that is
actually a really relevant part of the show because these

(40:09):
episodes of Unfortunate, it's in the background, like a lot
of things here, like a lot of people, a lot
of people in this story meet at or like even
if they don't meet there, they get into like experimenting
with alternate you know, medicine and all that stuff because
they like take mushrooms at Burning Man. Like that's a
really common story with the for the men in this tale.

(40:30):
But like particularly every.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Time I talk shit about burning man, I get like
it turns out someone beloved in the room is like
it changed my life, and then I have to like
backpedal in an embarrassing way, even though I meant it.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
I mean, like I went to the the like the
small ones in Texas definitely had a huge impact on me.
But I never wanted to go to the big one
because there's fucking cops there. Like, yeah, I don't want
to create my own little city in the woods to
take drugs in if there's police officers.

Speaker 4 (40:59):
That sounds all that time they got stuck, mudded in
and all that shit.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
I know, that's fine. I got we had a flood
one year that nearly killed a bunch of people. It
was crazy.

Speaker 4 (41:09):
Somebody people die.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah, yeah, I think it's like my inter like New Englander.
But when I see pictures of Bernie Man, I'm like,
get a job, Like what.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Are you doing out there not having a job and
taking a lot of drugs.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
Or in this case, I'm assuming taking a break from
your job.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
In Silicon getting a break from my job. I mean,
we were like everyone I knew there, like half the
people I took drugs with like fucking er doctors and
ship like a lot of a lot of people with
jobs were like, I have a very high stressed job,
and I need a week to take drugs with my friends.
Otherwise I'm going.

Speaker 3 (41:46):
To wear some really bad outfits this week to blow
off some steam.

Speaker 2 (41:50):
Yeah, I'm going to address ridiculously good lord. So Nicole,
in her early twenties starts experimenting with drugs, namely methamphetamine,
which she would take by drop it. She's a parachuter.
She puts it in like tissue paper and eats it like,

(42:11):
which is a crazy way to do meth in particular,
but you do you, honey. I guess she experiments with
psychedelics too. She's taken a lot of acid, and she's
partying with people who are like involved in the first
Internet boom and also like and this is burning Man before,
by the way, it was like a famous thing that
the tech set attended. This is when there's like guns,
like people are bringing a full on machine guns and

(42:33):
it's like largely insane libertarians and wizards. So it's a
slightly different period of time.

Speaker 3 (42:41):
What a weird yeah, like transitional time in the Bay
I feel like I don't hear about it very often.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
Well, the lot after the Bay used to be a
lot cooler and a lot yes, less governed by all
of the people who are billionaires live here. Like it was,
it was always weird and maniacs lived there, but they
were often very cool maniacs who gradually got priced out
of the Bay. So again, I had a very similar,
like eighteen to twenty two year old ty, like I'm

(43:07):
going to a lot of parties and doing drugs with
people in weird places. And I also feel like Nicole
that I was very let down by higher education, which
I'd been told it was fun and there were a
lot of parties, but it was mostly just like high school.
Part two. Nichole's also let down by working in retail
and food service jobs, which you know, same, like it

(43:28):
sucks you're a young adult and realizing this shit is
not as fun as you thought it was. But periodically
you have, you know, these encounters and parties with people
where you're like spending like two days on acid and
time stops existing and you're like, boy, I wish I
could just escape regular life. I feel like there's got
to be a way to do that, and some of
us write for the internet to get that, and some

(43:50):
of us do want to cult us.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
She didn't need to start an orgasm empire. She could
have just started.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
A podcast, that's right. She could have started writing Cracked magazine.
You know, there were a lot of options.

Speaker 3 (44:02):
Yes, yes, liberated many many lost dot com.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
So the big difference between like kind of where our
paths diverge here is that Nicole starts like she decides
that the kind of work that's going to take me
out of this like rat race that I hated first
is like sex work, right, And she's a high, highly
paid escort. Apparently there's some evidence for that. She's fairly successful.
And she realizes she feels really powerful because all of

(44:31):
these men with a lot of money, who have been
much more career successful than her, aren't just paying her,
but they're often like crying in front of her and
like breaking down. And so she realizes, like she has
this very important relilation, which is that like, oh, it
doesn't matter how rich they are or like how what
title they have, Like men are dumb and I can
control them, right, Like that's the thing.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
She likes that that's an important day.

Speaker 2 (44:54):
It's an important lesson.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
I mean, we.

Speaker 4 (44:57):
Are I several friends who are sex workers, and that
is a very very common thread that men often just
like don't know how to go to a therapist, and
so they go and seek out therapy from a from
a sex worker. Yeah, and there's a lot of crying.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah, Yeah, I had I had a friend who was
an escort and one of her regular clients was this
like big Russian mob dude who would come in like
twice a year and didn't even want to have sex,
would just lay on top of her and cry for
like four hours, and like that was that was what
this guy was willing to pay for. Just like, okay,
that that implies some dark things about your days job, But.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
No follow up question, no.

Speaker 2 (45:43):
Follow the state. So she's, uh, she's she's doing this
for a couple of years, and Hewitt writes with each
client she practiced her cold reading, trying to deduce what
the man secretly wanted. She quickly learned that her sexual
insights held significant economic value. So the time she's twenty seven,
you know, this is kind of where she's at, and

(46:03):
she gets a call from her mom that her dad
is sick and dying in a prison hospital. She had
not been in contact, so she didn't know he'd gone
back to prison, but her mom tells you. It tells
her like, yeah, he's back in prison. And that's how
Nicole learns that her dad had been arrested for child
molestation again, this time for abusing two preteen girls, including
his twelve year old granddaughter who was living with him. Nicole,

(46:24):
this hits very hard. She's shocked by this development. She
travels to visit her dad, and as he dies, she
tells him that she forgives him. And again, we know
this because she tells this story a lot. I don't know. Again,
I actually don't know how true it is. But this
is like an important when she becomes a guru. This
is a story she will repeat a lot in the
early years of being a guru. Right, and the way

(46:46):
she tells it. His death kind of convinces her to
fully unmoor herself from mainstream society. So, like many of
us did, she moved into a warehouse. Hers was in
San Francisco, where a group of Theosophists live and operated
a sort of magical commune, and largely took a lot
of LSD. Right, many of us have had experiences like this,

(47:06):
I a perfectly fine way to deal with things.

Speaker 3 (47:08):
Who among us whom? It is interesting hearing that like
she was developing cold reading too, because it just like
you hear so many points where she could have like,
you're like, she could have been a fake medium. She
could have done all so many other jobs. Yeah, she's
got so many skills.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, yeah, she's got so many skills. And now she's
living with wizards in a warehouse and taking acid every day. Now, right,
this may not have been as fun because she would
later and again she's always saying this as she's like
giving parables to her followers to portray a message, so
who knows what's true. But a story she would later
relate while lecturing her followers is that she moves into

(47:49):
this with like a girlfriend of hers at the time,
and her girlfriend is like very abusive and is basically
applying her with drugs until she would burn out, and
then she would hand her off to someone else to
recover and then take Nicole back and feeder more drugs.
And you know, Nicole would say, quote until I was
insane looking for Jesus in the streets, adding up all
the numbers on every house I passed right that like this,

(48:10):
this is a very abusive relationship, and this woman like
uses psychedelics to kind of like shatter Nichole's psyche. You know,
make sure you know own someone for a while before
you start taking drugs with them. Kids, if you're gonna
take drugs with a with a romantic partner, don't take
ecstasy on the first date. That'll fuck you up way
more than acid. Well, boy, what you don't need when
you're starting a relationship is a massive oxytose and dump

(48:32):
artificially induced.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
And let me guess, all the men calling themselves wizards
she lived with weren't helpful.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
I don't think they helped. I don't think the will's a.

Speaker 3 (48:42):
Fucking kidding the wizard help.

Speaker 2 (48:49):
Oh man. So in Nicole's case, it led her to
remain dropped out of society once she leaves the warehouse.
She's around thirty now, and she decides, I'm to become
a Buddhist nun at a Zen monastery, like kill the
guard kind of.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
There is the kind of this mad Libs approach to
her life that I appreciate.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
It's very Bay Area in the nineties.

Speaker 3 (49:14):
Like, yeah, I feel like my equivalent of it is
like when you find out you're like Los Angeles therapist
was in three episodes of SVU twenty years ago, You're like, right,
this is the pivot. This was kind of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
When you live up in the mountains of northern California
and the twenty teens and everyone over forty that you
know in the cannabis business had previously lived in a
warehouse in San Francisco where they taken drugs with wizards
or there were cartels. Yeah. Anyway, so Nicole found aspects
of the non life appealing, but she was also really

(49:51):
anxious about the fact that she was gonna have to
give up sex. So she decides, like, well, before I
do this, I'm gonna just go wild for like a
week and have a week of just like craz sex
before I become a nun and don't have anymore. Right,
So that's her plan.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
A Buddhist rum spring a.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
A a Buddhist rum springer. In a twenty twenty five
article for The New York Times, Kareem Raimie describes what
happened next. She met a man at a party. There
is a practice you might want to try, Nicola calls him,
telling her before they headed down to his place, a
yoga ashrom. Take off your pants and lie down, he
told her, I'm going to take my clothes off. I'm
going to stroke you for fifteen minutes. It seemed insane

(50:26):
at first, she says, but she did as she was told.
The experience was eye opening. She says, I was walking
home at night and just felt so clear. And first off,
that's that's interesting, Like it really says a lot about
kind of where her life has led her that this
guy says this, and she's like, yeah, sure, I'll give
it a shot. That said, I've also done still like

(50:47):
that because I met a stranger at a party, So
I get it.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
Who am I? I mean? For I feel like it's
really luck of the draw of what kind of parties
you have access to have.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
Access offers to take you back to what ashram r.

Speaker 4 (51:02):
Yeah, And like that man could have been very scary,
very scary.

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Apparently he wasn't.

Speaker 3 (51:09):
I mean, it's it's some light yoga culting, you know.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
I think the worst that ever happened to me at
a party of that nature was that I briefly pretended
to be really into wweamie. You just never know.

Speaker 2 (51:23):
Yeah, I lived at a house in Houston with some
very strange people for like a week and a half
as a result of something like that. It didn't last.
Thank god, that ended badly, half buddy, So Yeah. In
other encounter accounts that she's given of this encounter, Nicole
emphasizes that before this guy got her started, he just

(51:44):
like looked at her genitals and described them to her
and told her that they were beautiful, and she like cried,
realizing that no one had ever said anything like that
to her before. And this has become like will become
an important part of like the her theory on orgasmic
meditation would she's going to invent based on all of
this later on. Right, this is like one of the
steps that you have to go through in this, which

(52:05):
makes being in a room full of like twenty people
doing this really strange. So she finds this guy again.
He turns out he's a dude named Irwan Davon, right,
and he's a student of a practice called deliberate orgasm
and the idea had come from a Bay Area commune
started in nineteen sixty eight, the Moorhouse Community, which could
have been founded by a guy named Victor Baranco or Vic,

(52:29):
who was some self a product of the free love
and the self improvement movement. He was also used appliant.

Speaker 4 (52:34):
Salesman contact here.

Speaker 3 (52:40):
That's fine, This is just like a neighborhood rumor, Like
you won't have any idea who you've just bought a
wrench from?

Speaker 2 (52:49):
Yeah, where his hands have been? So when I was
writing these episodes, I was planning for this to just
be a quick two episodes. I think it's going to
be at least three because I had to go into
the whole history of the different orgasm cults that have
existed in the in the Bay air is solely in California. Well,
they spread, but they start in California. You damn sure
about that? Sure? Yeah? So, uh here's how Here's how

(53:11):
Ellen Hewitt describes Vic's journey. Vic claimed to have learned
the meditative clittoral stroking technique deliberate orgasm in his thirties
from a self proclaimed witch when he and his wife
were seeking help with their sex life. The actual origin
of the practice is hard to pin down, but Vic
realized the value of the idea quickly. In nineteen sixty eight,
he started a commune in Lafayette California. He picked the

(53:33):
name Morehouse because it was the place dedicated to living
with more. Here's how one of vix lieutenants put it.
We at Morehouse believe that every day a Sunday. We
believe that we are on earth to have a good time,
to devote our lives to pleasure. We call it responsible hedonism.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
I can't this is it's so silly. It's so silly
that this is. It sounds like a man who realized
he never made his wife come in their thirties, and
instead of just making her come, was like, I have
to start a business.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Like there's money in this baby. Baby, did you know
you could do that?

Speaker 3 (54:14):
And she's like, yeah, yeah, you could have done it
at any time. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
Married man in his thirties discovers orgasms and decides there's money.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
Monetizing women's or let's go, let's oh.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
This is all occurring as part of an explosion of
intentional and utopian communities around the time, and of those,
Moral House is not among the most toxic. This is
like on the low end of bad for what things
you might call cults in this period of time, although
it's still pretty bad.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
It's bad, and it's also corny. It's makes it.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Cults always are in religion, always is, folks, and that
mean it can't be an important part of your life.
Part of the real adore is an understanding that to
be happy you have to do embarrassing things. Right, But
that's it, folks. Sorry, you can't be cool once you're
no longer like nineteen give up. So Morehouse sells introductory

(55:20):
courses and these are all called the courses they sell,
like if you sign up and pay, it's called the
Mark group and people are told they're called Marks. You're
being told that. They're jokingly saying, like you are Marx
and we are like hustling you, right, Like that's very
open and they're open about them, like we're hustling you,
but you'll get something out of it, right, Like we'll
get your money and you'll learn how to have more

(55:41):
better sex. Right. So that's that's the way they're kind
of advertising themselves. KQED there's an article. Sorry, I found
an article on KQED News's website. Quote. One notorious Moorhouse
event was a public demonstration in nineteen seventy six of
what the group claimed was a woman having a three
hour orgasm and took advantage of California's loose post secondary

(56:02):
education standards to turn the La Fayette Commune into more University,
which offered PhDs in the humanities and sensuality and conducted
what the organization said was sexual research. In nineteen ninety two,
the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the courses cost as
much as sixteen eight hundred dollars. Oh my god, So
this is that KQED article came out after like some

(56:24):
lawsuits around this group, and there's a lot of negative
reporting that hits like come like the eighties and nineties
and stuff. Broncos over the years sues several newspapers for libel.
Those lawsuits all fail, but they make public some fascinating
details about how the group works during discovery, like that
they're more Universities Advanced Sexuality class, conducted research on quote engorgement, lubrication,

(56:46):
seminal secretion, and that one purpose of the class was
to make friends with another crotch. So they're also gross
and corny.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
It's starting to sound like a disgusting prison experiment. It is.

Speaker 2 (56:59):
It is pretty gross, like they're pretty gross about the wording,
but also they're hitting like a bomb in a culture
of like men who have don't know that you can
like actually please your partner that like, like that's something
that sex can have. So the fact that a guy
is being like no, actually, in a very clinical setting,
you can just learn how to like manipulate a clitterists, right,

(57:22):
Like you can just take that class and there are
dudes who are willing to pay money for that. It's
this it's a business, right, and part because people can't
talk about sex and they can't be educated about it
really in this period of time very well, so there's
a there's a hunger for this kind of thing. And
you know, what's what's going on kind of within the
cult's internal messaging is that the increasing scientific consensus on

(57:45):
sex and pleasure is being twisted to argue kind of
the same thing the Greeks had argued. Right, this is
set up is very we're trying to you know, make
men better and make you all have better sex and
make women make sure women have a better time. But
a big part of the scientific theories they come up
up with about sex and orgasms is that women don't
just enjoy sex more than men, they're insatiable and so

(58:07):
there's nothing wrong with treating them like sexual beings, whether
or not they want that. Right, it's the same conclusion,
right two thousand something years later, it's it's pretty wild
when you lay it out like that.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
Yeah, and now they're like printing money doing it.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Oh yeah, yeah, they buy a big commune.

Speaker 3 (58:27):
Very curious about who's who is teaching these classes and
what the gender split is there. It's it's so true
because it's like that on its face, you know, maybe
there's elements to it that are positive and like are
speaking to like how puritanical the US wasn't is about

(58:47):
sex and wanting you know, their partners to have pleasure,
But there is this element of like the profit, like
profiting off of it is one thing, and it's also
just like it just feels like a stealing of narrative too,
of like not only do I want to be able
to like manipulate a clitterist and make make someone come,

(59:11):
I want to be able to like brag about it
and have a graduate degree in dere So yucky and
just feels like still asserting yourself the you know.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
I'm imagining like a fucking seventies dude with a huge
mustache and like a bed but behind it is like
it's like the wall of a doctor's office with his
degrees and sex exactly exactly, Yeah, Vix. Whole thing was
in fact aping some really lazy interpretations of like feminism
and like kind of modern sex science and twisting those

(59:44):
to his own ends. For one, he agreed that women
shouldn't be expected to wear makeup or shave their body hair,
so he banned them from doing those things when they
lived in the Moorhouse cold compound.

Speaker 3 (59:54):
Oh so traslick so close.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Yeah. Well, he traveled his properties, usually in a golf
cart because he hated walking. He was waited on by
men and women, and the women were made to wear
French made uniforms. This service was called mating. When asked
why he did this, he answered sexual liberation. People had
very different experiences with the Moorhouses. Again, most folks are
not joining the cult. They're taking some classes, right, but

(01:00:18):
there are people who like live there, and over the
years they start they build separate moorhouses right where like
they're all over the country and they're selling courses and
people are living there and having like compulsory sex, right
because they're kind of told you have to constantly be
having sex. There's like quotas and stuff, and Vic keeps
a strict in and out list of his followers and
he'll encourage them to exchange sex with each other in

(01:00:40):
order to improve their standings per huit.

Speaker 3 (01:00:42):
Quickly does this like escalate.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Ten years or so? I think something like that, you know,
I mean it lasts longer than that, but it's over
like the first decade. I think that, like all this
is slotting into place as Hewitt rights, people were assigned
job shifts as technicians, and their only duty was to
fill a certain weekly quota of tricks or sexual service encounters.
The technicians would look within the community for customers to
have sex with that day, and they would take payment

(01:01:06):
using the group's internal paper currency. Residents were screened for
STDs and forbidden from sex outside the group. Vic was
criticized during his life, but the griff never exploded. In
some form of this community exists today. As one former
teacher later said, the institute is a good scam. We
call ourselves hustlers and other people marks. Victor hustles their
asses and their souls. He takes their dough to feed himself,

(01:01:27):
but he sees to it that they win two right now.
Whether or not that's true, it's something different. People have
very different tanks on.

Speaker 3 (01:01:35):
Yeah, I wouldn't say certainly. Not everyone is winning.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Not everybody. No, but the Morehouse Institute is mostly relevant
to our story because if you not, like in nineteen
ninety two, that's when they had, like the Warris Institute
has one of their big legal spats and they get
a bunch of bad press and one of Vic's students,
a guy named r. J. Testerman, leaves the group to
found his own orgasm cult, the Welcomed Consensus, which our

(01:02:00):
friend Nicole is going to join in nineteen I think
ninety seven in the late nineties.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Welcomed Consensus.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
The Welcomed Consensus. What an upsetting name.

Speaker 3 (01:02:10):
I don't I don't like that.

Speaker 4 (01:02:11):
I like it, honey, I don't like that at all.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
Yeah, if you have any problems, it's actually answered by
the name of the organization.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:02:19):
So let's go back to the sign, just having the sign.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Sign Jamie, you got anything to plug before we write
out for a day, before we get back to orgasm cults.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Before yeah, before we cool off, you can listen to
the Bechdel Cast. We're having our ten year anniversary soon,
which is nuts. We you can listen to be the
End House. I have a book that'll be available for
pre sale sometime in the summer. I'll let you know

(01:02:51):
check Instagram. Jamie Christ Superstar.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Mm hmmm, yep. All right, everybody, Uh, this has been
the episode. We'll be back with more of us having
to say it uncomfortable phrases to read in a broadcast,
like listoral stimulation that nobody wants to sit and read
off a script that's not anybody's ideal day.

Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
I don't know. I think we all had a nice time.
Part one is always the fun one.

Speaker 2 (01:03:16):
Part one is the fun. It's because I've always been
a pretty like sex positive guy, and by the end
of like the research for this, I was like, stop
fucking stop fucking you. People are doing it wrong. Stop
stop doing drugs. You're doing that wrong too, get a job,
all right, We're done.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
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(01:04:02):
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