A frequent media strategy to discredit OneTaste and Nicole Daedone is to allege that OneTaste was a cult or religion that treated Nicole Daedone as a prophet or cult leader.
Huet writes in Bloomberg Businessweek, quoting an anonymous former employee, “It was a religion…. “Orgasm was God, and Nicole was like Jesus or Muhammad.”
The BBC’s “Orgasm Cult” podcast quotes an anonymous source as stating, “The only choice someone at that point has is to accept the reality that Nicole is actually a messenger for God.”
In the VICE TV’s ‘expose’ of OneTaste, part of its six-episode ‘True Believers’ series, the keywords attached to the OneTaste episode on vicetv.com include ‘community,’ ‘cult,’ ‘prophet,’ and ‘Gods.’ A former OneTaste staffer is quoted as saying, “[Nicole] seemed godlike sometimes.”
And in the trailer for the Netflix film that aired on October 21, 2022, a former OneTaste student said, “At a certain point, by the time I was leaving, God became synonymous with orgasm. And orgasm was Nicole.”
This is a very confused distortion of the community culture that OneTaste was advocating. Since the idea of intentional communities has always been and continues to be a countercultural idea, it has often been mischaracterized by critics of OneTaste as being a ‘cult’ — the only concept for which we have a point of reference for a group of people who are treading a new path. The idea of a guru or a cult leader is a masculine ideal assuming a formal hierarchy and not something Nicole Daedone ever sought or assumed in practice. While it is true and to be expected that Nicole was afforded all the same authority and deference that any CEO and company owner could count on to support her in the running of her business, she actively discouraged people from idealizing her.
An emphasis on community living and group-based leadership has been one of OneTaste’s core values since the beginning and was formally incorporated into the company values, as follows: “We believe in bold dreaming from the words of Thich Nhat Hanh the ‘next Buddha will be a sangha’ and Margaret Mead, ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.’”
‘Sangha’ is a Buddhist term for a community of like-minded people. It was always the goal of OneTaste that a community of people, rather than a ‘Buddha’ or a single leader, would bring about the change that is so needed in the world.
When Nicole sold her shares in the company, she wrote a farewell letter to the OneTaste community where she said, “While I have been blessed to shepherd the birth of this experiment into the world, I have always envisioned a time when it would be stable enough, when there would be others who had been touched as I had, that I could pass on the torch of Orgasm. That day has come in ways I could never have imagined. With thousands who have gone through the coaching program and tens of thousands going through other programs, the Sangha has been born.” (Orgasm in this context refers to the practice and philosophy of Orgasmic Meditation).
Nicole has repeatedly and publicly insisted she does not invite or like the all-powerful image:
“I am of the belief that each one of us has a blueprint inside. What’s the purpose of this life, the potential? The purpose of this life first is for you to learn to read your particular blueprint and then to develop the courage to live that blueprint out. And that when you do that, you become permission for everyone else to live their blueprint. Does that make sense? So, I have a very deep, embedded, clear blueprint. I talk about it, I talk about crazy shit with pride in the pride that I have is that that is me, and that I’m going to live it out. In no way do I ever want you to believe that that’s a prescription for you… I’m much more interested in, in semantics it’s called description versus prescription, I’m much more interested in discovering what’s in there and then how do we have you have that, whatever that is?”
— Nicole Daedone, September 7, 2012
and further,
“One of the reasons why I wanted to bring it into the mainstream was so that there were checks and balances. Really, the model is Wikipedia, where everyone gets access, and everyone puts their part in.”
— Nitasha Tiku quoting Nicole Daedone, 2013, “My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.”
In fact, rather than try to discourage customers from engaging with the rest of the world, Nicole and the leadership of OneTaste actively cultivated an outward-looking orientation in the company. Nicole went to extraordinary lengths to create an environment in which she would not be the only voice, the only authority.
In its early days, OneTaste published a quarterly print magazine called ConnectED in 2007 that had articles by dozens of other teachers and leaders in San Francisco’s consciousness community and advertised over 40 ConnectED events at OneTaste’s Center offered by other teachers. At all of its in-depth programs, especially the Coaching Programs and Intensives, OneTaste featured outside experts, a total of 85 third-party teachers on topics from leadership, spirituality, social justice, meditation, wellness, science, healing, comedy, creativity, and nutrition. The reading list for the Coaching Program included outside books about coaching, consciousness, spirituality, human connection, and game theory.
OneTaste was open to new ideas. Not just to hearing them, but trying them on, living them, wearing them, as with all of its beliefs, lightly. Whenever someone had a passion or an interest in something, we would try to incorporate that into OneTaste (which, because it wasn’t a religion, was easy to do). Some of the things that would be incorporated into classes or the daily schedule at various times included Zen Dharma teachings, Soul Cycle workouts, Qi Gong, Feldenkrais Method, CrossFit, Kundalini yoga, Bikram yoga, Insight Meditation, sweat lodges, improv, and dozens more. We were seeking a Wikipedia world that incorporated the best of everything.
To conclude, Nicole Daedone was not the ‘prophet,’ ‘God,’ or ‘guru’ of the OneTaste community. These terms do not appear in any of OneTaste’s writings or teaching materials. The most common references to Daedone are ‘teacher,’ ‘friend,’ and ‘leader.’ Participants in the OneTaste community refer to themselves as ‘practitioners,’ not as ‘followers,’ ‘worshippers,’ or ‘believers.’ In fact, there is very little in the way of hierarchy of individuals or ideological purity of any sort. While there are specific terms that apply to the practice of Orgasmic Meditation — these are terms of art, not of ideology or religion.
