Nicole Daedone, the founder of OneTaste, is the subject of a 2022 Netflix film called Orgasm Inc.: The Story of OneTaste. Nicole was the founder and teacher of OneTaste from its inception in 2005 through 2017, when she sold the company. In Orgasm Inc., an August 2013 clip filmed in Manhattan shows Nicole speaking to a room full of advanced students where she provocatively jokes, “Ok, this joke is so funny. This is going to be our new shirt: ‘I got raped, and all I got was a victim story.’ Or it could be like, ‘I raped someone, and all I got was a perpetrator story.’”
This was a teaching technique meant to shock the students and open them up to reframing their perceptions about a sensitive topic, not a heartless joke made at the expense of the suffering.
In the clip, she is seen on a chair at the front of a room, wearing an impish expression on her face and opening her mouth wide in mock surprise, indicating she is acutely aware she has broken a taboo. The filmmakers allow just enough of the recording to play so that the viewer can conclude that Nicole’s statement was, at a minimum, deeply insensitive and at most being related to the audience as her true intent to create company-branded crude, rape humor-based apparel.
To anybody in the room, the statement would have been ludicrous and an obvious lead-in to a larger conversation that ultimately promoted healing, which it was.
Her opening assertion that, “This joke is so funny…” was the tip-off for the audience to both listen closely and skeptically to what was about to come out of her mouth. This was not a callous joke, as it is portrayed. It was a calculated teaching technique, a bit of gallows humor with the purpose of grabbing everybody’s attention while opening the audience up to expose her belief that women who have experienced sexual assault deserve more than they are being offered.
While she is making a joke about the inadequate tools people who have these experiences are given, she does not find the reality of the situation funny for those who have experienced rape or sexual assault. The “joke,” in its many forms, is based on the concept that, after a costly experience, a person has nothing to show for it except a disappointing consolation T-shirt “prize.” Nicole goes on to explain that she, herself, has been the target of sexual assault and, as such, has the “cred” to approach it with humor.
Simon Lancaster, a former speechwriter for UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, gave a TEDx talk in 2018 entitled “How to Start a Speech.” Lancaster opens the speech like this:
“Who wants to get high? Yeah? You up for some? Shall we really get this party started? Shall we? You’re in the mood? Excellent! I’ve got tons, you’re up for it and there’s loads. There, look at this: I’ve got cocaine, ecstasy, speed, yeah. But mine are all Fairtrade organic and 100% legal. TED approves; I checked, so don’t worry. Today, I’m going to talk about how to start a speech, and that is how every speaker should start their speech by getting the audience high[…]” Lancaster is leading by example, instructing speakers to add some shock and humor in order to capture the attention of their audiences.
In October 2013, four months after Daedone’s original comments were made, a guest teacher who specializes in reconciliation and was in the room at the time she made them found Nicole’s words so powerful he references them in his own teaching segment while later speaking to a different group of advanced OneTaste students about the same topic:
“Master your story. Master your story. I didn’t hit on this [mastering your story] that strong when I was in Manhattan, I was looking at the radical, relentless part of it [referring to a slide in his presentation] but master your story. Regardless of what happens, regardless of what happens, no matter how bad it is. Alright, you know, I’m in the back listening, I’m listening to what will soon become the words on my favorite t shirt: “I got raped, and all I got was a victim story.” Or there’s another one… there’s a companion shirt to that I think it’s “I raped someone, and all I got was an offender story”. We listened to that, and we go “ugh… there’s something wrong with that…. there’s something wrong with that. It’s disrespectful”.
We are going to talk about victimhood today… That’s all most people get. That’s the shame of it all. That’s all that most people get is that they get to carry that story. That’s all they get. And so for the most part, everything around them could give a damn. And then there are enough people who have that story already, but there’s nothing original about yours! You don’t… there’s nothing original about the victim story. I trust and you trust and we know what Nicole was talking about when she says that. You think she thinks this shit is funny? Of course not. But she knows that the worse crime is to perpetuate the victim story. That’s a greater crime.
We have to master that story. We have to master that story. We got to reintegrate, we got to reinform, we got to redefine, we got to do some things that will take us out of that locked in space that formulates this thing that we call ‘trauma’. We get locked, we get stuck, we hold there and every time someone says something about something that reminds us of that, we get taken back to that place. There’s no freedom there. Why would you want to be there when there’s no freedom there? You can’t be liberated there. Unless you learn to master your story, you can’t be liberated there.”
Unequivocally, this teacher understood both the art of her technique as well as the true meaning of what she was attempting to convey.
In a recent podcast, Ruwan Meepagala, one of the primary interviewees in Orgasm Inc. who was also in the room when this comment was made when asked for his take at 35m17s says:
“[…] There wasn’t like, it wasn’t like anyone said rape is good, or that that should be a thing. It was more like, if you have a certain urge, we can at least talk about it, no one’s gonna shame you for it, which that in itself, I thought was very positive for everybody. I think there’s healing moments between men and women who maybe had the opposite ends of those things, or like resistance to the other or resentment of the opposite sex that were able to like, kind of let go of those kinds of things.”
Meepagala adds his own words to express that the spirit of Nicole’s comments was to create an environment of healing and reconciliation. Indeed, the point she is making is that most women who have experienced rape are left with nothing but a label, an identity of “victim” that, she argues, is both tragic and deeply debilitating in that it perpetually shapes how they view themselves. She is speaking to people who live constrained by the idea that they start from a one-down position in life due to a past assault.
Nicole continues by saying, “[…]What that does is create learned helplessness that has your consciousness numb out … The problem with the victim’s story for me is that it takes away your power.” George Bernard Shaw seems to concur with her that the most difficult-to-hear truths are best accompanied by a potent dose of humor. She equally applies this thinking to the rapist who sees the error in his or her ways, has paid penance, and leads a life of virtue but cannot let go of the idea that they are fundamentally a bad person.
In another TED Talk, Thordis Elva and Tom Stranger, a former teenage girlfriend and boyfriend, expose their process of reconciliation after meeting up 18 years after Stranger assaulted Elva in her sleep. In a review of their book, South of Forgiveness: A True Story of Rape and Responsibility, Emily Maguire from the Sydney Morning Herald relates,
“Elva asserts that she will not feed his self-pity, but still she listens patiently, urging him to give up the “the big, bad, rapist” self-image, to move on.”
Here, the person in the situation most likely to hold a grudge is doing the opposite: she asks Stranger to let go of his label and live free.
A master communicator having spoken to and taught groups hundreds of times during those twelve years as founder, Nicole is a dynamic speaker who uses a wide range of didactic techniques with her audiences, especially students who had enrolled in OneTaste’s premier Coaching Program. This particular lecture comes seven months into this program and was intended for learned audiences, hardly suitable to show an audience of people entirely unfamiliar with Nicole’s teachings as Netflix has done.
Dr. Daniel Kriegman, a renowned psychologist who has worked with countless individuals who have experienced sexual assault as well as those who have committed it — he was the Chief Psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Persons, a maximum-security prison housing the most dangerous sex offenders in the Commonwealth — says “it is absolutely clear that such stifling identities do get formed and do lock people into repetitive patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. One of the goals of treatment is to enable people to challenge such identifications to find new possibilities for themselves.”
