Riding Nicole’s wave
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A description of OneTaste could pass for a joke about the Bay Area if you didn’t know better: Have you heard of the cult, that was also a wellness startup, providing seminars on an “innovative” new approach to the female orgasm?
A little cartoonish, but it would get a laugh. The humor starts to fail when you learn that OneTaste was a real organization, dedicated to the spread of the practice of “orgasmic meditation,” whose founder and CEO Nicole Daedone was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in a “forced labor conspiracy,” some of the most sinister words one can possibly string together. In addition to sexually satisfying the organization’s largest funder, employees worked long hours in the organization’s high-pressure sales outfit, with women in particular being pressured to sleep with wealthy prospective customers.
In Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult, Oakland-based tech journalist Ellen Huet attempted to explain this apparently quite peculiar criminal hybrid of startup and cult, digging into OneTaste’s organizational history, Nicole Daedone’s life, and the stories of the people who participated in OneTaste’s operations—both harmed and harmers with plenty of overlap between the two. But while Daedone’s biography provides plenty of morbid pleasure for a reader in search of titillation, perhaps for this reason, the book struggles to explain the material, banal, and very unsexy reasons why the organization became abusive: the structural necessity of organizing as a business with the imperative to grow or die and with employees who also served as a significant customer base.
The book begins and ends with Nicole Daedone in a room, the singular object of our attention and fascination. In the prologue, she is nude in front of an audience of a few dozen people, all breathlessly awaiting secret knowledge and revelation; they are described as having “shuddered and gasped” as a bald man in a black button-up shirt strokes her clitoris in the precise style that defines OneTaste’s core trademarked practice, Orgasmic Meditation. He doesn’t even roll up his sleeves. Huet describes the procedure in perplexingly de-eroticized (but inescapably sexual) terms: “He reached under one of her legs and put his right thumb at her introits, the vaginal entrance. He added some lube to the tip of his left index finger, moved his hand close to her vulva, and then slowly slid the finger up, coming to rest on her clitoris. Ever so softly, he stroked with his finger, up and down.”
In the epilogue, Daedone is again the center of attention, this time in a courtroom as she receives her verdict: This time, the assembled crowd of witnesses gasp in response to the guilty verdict. The entire book is suspended between these two poles of focus on Daedone, all of us struggling to see and experience what she’s feeling.
The first two chapters focus on Daedone’s life leading up to the first time she encounters Orgasmic Meditation, on the history of the practice itself, and on the deeper organizational lineage that OneTaste belongs to. Orgasmic Meditation is a wellness-flavored rebrand of “Deliberate Orgasm,” a practice with origins in two Northern California sects: Morehouse, founded in Oakland in 1968 as an alternative lifestyle/sex cult, and Welcomed Consensus, a reclusive Morehouse offshoot founded in 1992 to allow its leader to marry multiple women and hit them with impunity. Daedone received her training in Orgasmic Meditation at Welcomed Consensus and also poached OneTaste’s first investor, Rob Kandell. Huet also identifies the remote compound as the source of “Total Responsibility,” a core component of OneTaste dogma: You are responsible for everything that happens to you, because people are only responding to the energy you put into the world. The ugly shadow of this ideology lurked beneath all the domestic violence and sexual abuse committed withinOneTaste.
This history is important for understanding why OneTaste became what it is. Huet recognizes this, but uses Daedone’s personal history as a window into her psychology, to understand why she did what she did. This is, of course, a standard convention of the cult nonfiction genre. Readers want to be fascinated by the leader from the safety of the page, to feel a little bit of the pull that the cult’s actual members experienced in full force. And so the first chapter is dedicated to investigating her personality in all its bizarre and salacious detail: She was the child who habitually bit people’s knees, spending years in an acid house tripping out of her mind, and then worked as a sex worker. Most tantalizing of all, her father was a convicted child molester who may have assaulted her, and Huet returns to this last detail multiple times without ever quite drawing an explicit connection, relying on our culture’s ready-made assumptions about childhood traumas causing our shortcomings as adults. There’s no denying that such experiences can be impactful, but our insight into precisely how this affected Daedone is limited to the realm of speculation.
One of the classes Daedone taught at OneTaste was on how to revise one’s own life story to change yourself in the present (and Daedone’s framing of her own origins changed throughout her life). But at the end of the book, Huet finds herself sitting in that courtroom—after seizing the opportunity, moments before, to shake Daedone’s hand—speculating fruitlessly about what’s going on in her mind as she fingers rosary beads, playing up the image of the martyred saint. By the time Daedone is behind bars, Huet is no closer to understanding her motivations; former OneTaste members only give her contradictory speculations that add up to total uncertainty.
We see OneTaste more clearly in the moments when Huet steps away from Daedone, to see it within its larger context. One of the key pressures that she identifies is OneTaste’s need to grow and grow quickly, which she locates as a desire of Daedone’s that differentiates OneTaste from Morehouse and Welcomed Consensus. This need for fast growth is the reason, in Huet’s telling, why OneTaste needed the funding of a tech millionaire and a sales team dedicated to manipulating customers into enrolling in more and more expensive classes.
But why a startup? Huet’s explanation is somewhat vague, though not incorrect: startup fever gripped San Francisco through the mid-2000s, and OneTaste rode the wave. The reader gets the impression that the organization had a peculiar and ultimately volatile, dual nature: a cult that’s also a startup, which created unique pressures within the company, which led to its downfall.
This impression is wrong on a couple levels. Whether or not startups were exciting, there is simply no alternative for an organization that wants to grow and impact the world other than to operate as a business. Nonprofits, after all, are funded to be reactive, to patch over the holes left by capitalism’s exploitation of the vulnerable with government and foundation grant money. OneTaste could have registered as a church, but it didn’t have any overtly religious content (and The Church of Getting Fingered would have been a difficult sell). Only businesses have the right to attempt to change the world, and they’re allowed to succeed only if they can sustain themselves financially, which means growth.
Cult nonfiction presumes that a cult is an aberration, a pocket of strangeness on the margins of society that fools are lured into, into which readers are given an opportunity to peek, to satisfy their prurient interest without being endangered. But is the structure of a startup so incompatible with that of a cult?
If a cult is an organization with an extremely powerful hierarchical structure, it’s simply on the extreme end of the spectrum from businesses, which, also organized hierarchically, but in which leadership has less direct authority over the lives of the members. Extreme leader worship is another quality that most cults have, but startups also employ faith and idolatry, and many rely on the charisma of their leaders to convince employees that back-breaking work will all pay off, down the road. Seen this way, sexual abuse within the organization, promises to reinvent your life, and every other stereotypical quality of a cult are simply extreme placements on spectra on which organizations that fall within the bounds of normal life–startups, big companies, and churches–can also be placed. The recent profusion of AI startups working their employees 70 hours a week in an attempt to build the super-intelligent AI that will either deliver us from all our problems or, in some formulations, punish all who didn’t sufficiently contribute to its development, might occupy even more extreme positions than some cults. So a cult organized as a startup is not a strange, doomed contradiction; it’s simply an organization with more extreme positions on these spectra.
OneTaste’s particular positions were central to the appeal of the company, and its success. Huet describes the advice given to Daedone by Ray Vetterlein, a Morehouse affiliate and OneTaste collaborator, “He knew her gender gave her a key advantage. She could sell female sexuality in a way that no man could. Any sexuality movement with a female leader would instantly seem more trustworthy–and in a corporate America desperate to highlight women CEOs, it created the perfect marketing story.”
That perfect marketing story couldn’t find a better audience than the people of the Bay Area, desperately hoping that placing more women at the top of existing hierarchies would solve the contradictions of rapacious corporatism. But the contradictions persist. If the goal is to spread knowledge of a practice as widely as possible, turning it into a business’s flagship commodity is counterproductive: a commodity only has as much value as the exclusivity and desirability of the knowledge in question. Yet keeping the faith of the core members requires a continuous stream of special wisdom from the leader, different from what outsiders receive. It all culminates in a remarkable moment late in the book, when OneTaste is hosting a DreamForce-style conference called the Orgasmic Meditation Xperience—to maintain appearances as a legitimate startup, with conventional mass appeal—all while Daedone is conducting esoteric rituals in private, with ordained Priests and Priestesses of the Orgasm.
Like other startups, OneTaste couldn’t have survived without steady cash inflows, first from Rob Kandell, the co-founder flush with money from a conventional corporate career, and then, more lucratively, from tech millionaire Reese Jones. The need to keep investors happy is a common startup problem, but where normal startups can only promise investors growth and huge return on investment, OneTaste provided a return only a cult can offer: elaborate sexual services that could last days, on demand, psychologically tortuous (but apparently gratifying) situations that even the numerous kink dungeons throughout the Bay Area would have struggled to provide.
The tech industry, of course, frequently dabbles in the realm of alternative lifestyles, from microdosing mushrooms to hiring shamans for ayahuasca ceremonies in the conference room. Tech workers compose the bulk of the rationalist scene, whose hyperutilitarian worldview fetishizes logic to the breaking point. And this history goes way back, with computing and psychedelics sitting culturally adjacent to each other in the 1970s, quite concretely when it comes to tech executives’ involvement in the Esalen Institute, a core part of the “human potential” movement. Even now, tech billionaires are pouring money into research on how they can change their lives so as to prevent aging or even death, as they repeat ad nauseam that they, their computers, their capital, will transform the world into a paradise as they drag everyone down with them.
Huet’s stories of lives ruined by OneTaste repeatedly feature the figure of the wealthy software engineer, even when not rich enough to bankroll the company directly. When an affluent techie appeared in a OneTaste class, the sales operation deployed women to flirt with them; when they joined the organization, they were drained of money for as long as possible, often until they lost their jobs. OneTaste is San Francisco in miniature in this respect: The people flush with tech money are kept happy long enough for their wealth to be siphoned upward.
In Huet’s narrative, OneTaste’s undoing actually began when their own PR department contacted her to request a story about them, probably expecting a puff piece like the one they secured in The New York Times a few years earlier. Shortly after Huet discovered the legion of OneTaste’s bitter ex-members, her expose in Bloomberg Businessweek prompted the FBI’s investigation which would culminate in Daedone’s trial, conviction, and sentencing. That OneTaste essentially called the police on itself is an irony that gets at the core instability of the organization, in a sense: a cult committed to calling more and more attention to itself, inevitably brought attention to the parts that needed to remain in darkness. There was no chance that OneTaste could keep a lid on the story of their abuses forever; as a startup, they wanted to grow and grow and grow, and like Icarus soaring towards the sun, it was only ever going to end one way.
Was OneTaste a “cult”? As Huet was reporting the book, she writes that she began to question her initial assumption that cults were “a faraway phenomenon,” and she began to see them everywhere, from “the mission-driven tech startups” she was reporting on to the “toxic romantic relationships” around her; “I stopped believing in the comforting idea that the people who joined cults were ‘other.’ They were seeking the same things that I was: belonging, connection, and a sense of meaning.” But if this revelation leads to a kind of agnosticism about whether OneTaste deserved the name—after all, if everything is a cult, then nothing is—the book’s framing, appeal, and subtitle (“Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult”) make it clear that readers looking for a book about a cult will get what they want: to be scandalized, to get their blood pumping, a little bit scared, maybe even a little bit turned on. Huet does try to explain the context that OneTaste emerged from, and why it blended startup ambitions into a cultish organizational model, but the book’s preoccupation with Daedone, always draws her back, deeper, into the charismatic depths of the charismatic founder. Perhaps cult nonfiction authorship exists on the same spectrum as cult leadership: dispensing wisdom but also trapped by the necessity of giving the reader what they want, in order to keep them engaged enough, all to attain the dream of becoming a bestseller.
Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult, Ellen Huet. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 432 pp.; Nov 2025