Both the BBC’s podcast and Netflix’s movie about OneTaste accuses OneTaste and its co-founder Nicole Daedone of teaching and condoning male predation through a concept called the Beast. These media pieces rely on scant evidence aside from often anonymized quotes from second or third-hand sources claiming knowledge of alleged abuse.
The BBC and Netflix pieces support their narratives by alleging that OneTaste encouraged men to be predatory towards women, was generally emotionally abusive, and was a place where one woman experienced sexual abuse. While the few (often anonymous) sources these media pieces have quoted seem to agree with each other generally, neither is true. The Beast was a concept used for a period of time at OneTaste to describe and acknowledge the part of each person who is seeking authentic connection and expression with others.
Here are the (inaccurate) ways in which the media sets up the idea that the Beast was a method of encouraging male predation:
“Sam would rape Cassidy. She’d say, ‘I don’t want to have sex’. And he would violently, you know, have his way with her, telling her that she just has to surrender to the orgasm and that it’s her resistance that’s bringing out his beast.”
“The beast. I heard a lot about the beast. The beast was basically your shadow. You know, the dark things about ourselves that we try to hide. As part of that teaching, OneTaste would say that people would have to take responsibility for things that happened to them. This often flipped into simply blaming the victim.”
"The beast, this violence, this rage that gets normalized. People were encouraged to be psychologically brutal with each other. The first time that they do something vicious towards someone else, people get encouraged. Yeah, you really showed your beast. There’s a knowledge that you’ve done something awful. But now you’ve completely rewired what good means and what evil means."
"OneTaste was encouraging women to appreciate the predatorial nature of male sexuality. That’s supposed to be some very evolved practice."
"They were really pushing this idea that it’s inherently natural for men to be predatory. And we should like be welcoming of the predatory nature of men that we should find it hot, attractive. And so when that thing about them finding some strangers to rape her happened, totally made sense to me as far as what the conversations I heard and the behavior that I witnessed."
"Audrey confirmed that the woman whose alleged rape she reported to the FBI, was Ayries Blanck."
(v/o) "The idea of letting out your beast was basically the equivalent of like, being a savage, or just like being totally expressed, which is a pretty common idea in personal development. And I think it was really healing for a lot of guys who maybe, like, had so-called nice guy syndrome. So I think in many ways, it was healing, obviously, everything in OneTaste was taken a little too far at times."
Even though Ruwan Meepagala’s description of the Beast concept is less distorted than the others, it still misses the mark.
Here is a video that shows an instance where the Beast concept was elaborated on at a 2014 OneTaste Coaching Program weekend in New York. In the video, senior faculty members Yia Vang and Rachel Cherwitz are training students on how to run their own TurnON events for their own coaching businesses. TurnON events were OneTaste’s introductory communication games nights, which also doubled as sales events.
In this clip, Vang talks about one of the three games featured at the event called “Hot Seats,” where one person volunteers to answer questions about themselves from the group. Vang tells the coaches-in-training to be careful about using jargon that newcomers would not understand, especially terms like the Beast that could be easily misinterpreted. “Safeporting” is a word used in the Orgasmic Meditation practice that simply means to tell somebody what you’re going to do before you do it.
This is one example of the great care OneTaste took to make sure people were educated and well-trained in the use of its teachings and etiquette.
Before BBC’s Orgasm Cult podcast in 2020 or Netflix’s Orgasm Inc. film in 2022 was released, Ruwan Meepagala published his own video blog on YouTube in 2019, where he describes his own experience of what life was like in the OneTaste community. Meepagala presents himself as an expert on OneTaste business practices and teaching concepts and is the only named source in every single major (and many minor) media pieces centered around OneTaste.
“So within a month or so, I kicked my Viagra dependency and I was able to have normal to great sex afterwards. But that was like, that was like a pretty small part. Cause like the real opening for me was that I was accessing confidence that never had before. Like what was great about OneTaste and that world was that because it was so different than the conventional world where like there were bullies and my friends would criticize me. And like people laugh at you."
"Like in the OneTaste subculture, everything was safe. Like if you had a weird desire, if you had weird fears, if you had insecurities, if you had shame, you could talk about everything and no one would shame you. Like that was part of the ethos in this community. Like you can just air everything out. And like, people would still love you as a person, which was so healing for me because I felt like I could spread my wings for the first time. And that’s when I started really writing and expressing myself and eventually became a coach.”
“And the truth is this was a community where women were also very forward. This is a quick aside, which was interesting from a sociological perspective because women were the ones that had more power in this subculture. And they had more positions of power and, they were very safe to be sexually free. A lot of women for the first time would be very forward with their sex. They’d be like, I want to, I want to sleep with this guy. Or like, Hey, do you want to sleep with me? Or, Hey, do you want to do this? Like in a way that you would never see from women in conventional society.”Relationships and Cultural Expectations
Men and women have different cultural conditioning around what aspects of themselves they should hide. While this is a generalization, both sexes tend to hide the most powerful, potent aspects of themselves that they feel the least comfortable with: men tend to conceal their intimacy and women their desire. And it makes sense because culturally, these are the parts of us that stand to receive the most negative attention from others: men get ridiculed for being sensitive and women for being sexual.
Our observation is that this approach to our shared humanity results in many of the issues that plague modern heterosexual relationships (the same might easily apply to non-heterosexual relationships). These culturally reinforced issues often get expressed as guilt, shame, and self-rejection of the natural, as Vang alludes to in the clip above when she says the Beast “comes out in these really weird forms.” In relationships, it’s often expressed as the unspoken agreement that men will trade women’s access to their feelings for sex while women will trade men’s access to their sex for intimacy.
One of the common inquiries amongst OneTaste participants amounts to the question, “What if I stopped withholding for a trade and instead operated from my own desire for authentic connection, ie, related to others without the expectation of getting something in return?” Naturally, with the lowered expectation of being shamed that OneTaste offered, male participants often explored their feelings, and female participants often explored their desire.
Nicole Daedone’s Turned On Woman’s movement was a clarion call to all women to integrate their sexuality into their lives. As a result, women were equally, if not more, interested in exploring their Beasts as men.
This feeling part of ourselves is powerful, as Meepagala attests, and around 2013, the term the Beast was coined to give an identity to this powerful, ever-present, fundamental, and deeply feeling aspect of being human.
In a further refutation of the myth that OneTaste used the Beast as a free pass to encourage specifically male participants to be abusive and predatory towards women, we have provided a few samples of contemporaneous social media posts by women that demonstrate how the term was used in the OneTaste community. This kind of creative, vulnerable expression was common amongst all OneTaste participants. Each of these posts garnered numerous supportive, encouraging comments from others:
All names have been changed.
“I feel so supported and held by everyone in CP7, I love you. Thank you for being your beasty selves.”
“I feel I’m giving myself a new type of permission to be exactly how I am in the moment even if my judging mind thinks it’s bad or wrong. I haven’t gotten anywhere interesting by pretending and I’ve done that for way too long. Here’s to my Beast and the permission to show up exactly how I am.”
“Can we please agree we are all sparkling gems, tender beasts, full of love? And on top of that is piled layers and layers of a bunch of fear and conditioning that have us show up in the world in ways that hinder connection?”
“Ode to my Beast
I trust you, my dearest Beast.
I trust you know your way in the jungle.
I trust your appetite.
I trust your hunger.
I trust when you tell me your full
I trust that you see
that you hear
and that you feel.
Mostly, I Trust That You Know & Communicate that Knowing.”
“One of the exercises is still working on me. Candace saw me and expressed how she saw my 2 turned-on sides As I described how I would like my make-out. She saw my vivacious, playful, giggly flirtatious girl (who I squash) and the women/beast that knows what she wants and how she wants it. (But doesn’t get it) I would like help integrating them. Having them work together to love, protect, and defend the right to connection and orgasm.”
One way to think of the Beast is as a form of Emotional Intelligence. Many people sought out OneTaste for answers to their questions about intimacy, relationships, sexuality, etc. A recurrent theme in many courses was the relationship between thinking and feeling. Nicole’s observation (not at all unique to her) was that our culture prioritizes logic and rationality, both of which are necessary faculties but become hindrances if they are cultivated at the expense of a person’s sensitivity to themselves and others, which they often are.
Put simply, emotions and desires don’t play by the rules of logic. This can be confusing for somebody who relies on it. It’s easy to tell somebody they should not have gotten their feelings hurt or they should not want what they want, but we all know it doesn’t work that way. Intimate relationships (which can be sexual or platonic) rely on authenticity, on being honest with self and others. And unless you are in touch with your true feelings, you cannot be authentic. OneTaste provided a place where these basic human aspects could be spoken about openly without shame as people became intimate with themselves while interacting with others.
Naturally, there is a relationship between the Beast and what might be characterized as “animal” behavior. There were a number of times when OneTaste deemed individuals unready to enter its programs because they demonstrated (often subtly) an inability or unwillingness to abide by basic boundary setting of others and their impact on others. These people are not uncommon in the world and can often learn these lessons in order to be functional within it. But this can take time and require a kind of work that OneTaste did not offer.
Every OneTaste program had student coordinators and coaches who kept a watchful eye on participants. In some programs, students were also asked to elect somebody outside of the community as a check-in buddy. At the same time, the overt agreement made by all participants in these courses was that while nobody really knew what they were doing, the only thing worse than awkwardly learning in a group of peers was trying to do it alone with people who would shame or shun you. So everyone agreed that they would offer fellow participants the grace and understanding they themselves would want as they stretched their wings for the first time in these ways.
As the video demonstrates, OneTaste’s teachings emphasized connected behavior and admonished antisocial behavior. As far as “animal” behavior is concerned, anybody who has ever observed or cared for animals will tell you that they respond to what they are offered. If you are playful, affectionate, and loving with them, they are a reflection of that treatment.
Much of the work OneTaste did with participants was spent undoing the social tendency towards the opposite, as Meepagala speaks about. Instead of meeting vulnerability with shame, the OneTaste community met it with love. The term Beast overlaps in one additional dimension: animals always show their inner feelings. You know when an animal is scared, happy, or sad. Unlike rational humans, they don’t hide their feelings for fear or shame.
OneTaste sought and still seeks to reacquaint people with the parts of themselves that have been disowned in today’s cerebral, rationality-driven culture. These are the parts of ourselves we’re most scared of being shamed for, looking foolish, or feeling vulnerable if we admit we have them: desire (including but not limited to sexual desire), fear, strong emotions, tenderness, etc. Paradoxically, these also happen to be the things that make us connectable to other people.
OneTaste curriculum was (in part) aimed at helping people stop rationalizing and apologizing for these parts of themselves and instead embrace them, reintegrate them, and include their potency and power in their relationships with others. Many individuals would come to understand that it was their distance from their true feelings that caused their issues in the first place, as Meepagala so eloquently describes in his video podcast. Invariably, as participants got in touch with their authenticity, it was a liberating experience.
Nicole often made the case for people re-sensitizing themselves by making the observation that people are biologically disinclined to hurt each other beyond what any set of imposed rules might dictate. The idea is simple and self-evident: people in touch with their feelings are naturally empathetic towards others. As such, when we are sensitized to the feelings of others, we are much less likely to cause pain to others because doing so would feel painful to us as well. Those who are not in touch with their own feelings are desensitized to the feelings of others and, as such, don’t as readily perceive their pain.
Practices like Orgasmic Meditation give participants a safe container in which to do the slow, rewarding work of becoming more self-aware and sensitive to the world around them. OneTaste’s curriculum also included an entire weekend dedicated to helping students identify moments in their lives when they had not been at their best with others and a method for how to return and offer authentic amends.
