Everyone cheered. Daedone was the charismatic founder of OneTaste, a business which hoped to provide “one billion orgasms” to women and believed the sexual force of orgasmic mediation would change the world. It was the same year they had launched the “Nicole Daedone Intensive”, a course that cost $36,000 and involved hearing some of Daedone’s advice and being given a few assignments. There was a tacit understanding that devotees would “do whatever” they could to pay. Daedone considered herself a sexual prophet, but there was a slow distrust building in her community. Based on the surrounding tactics of Silicon Valley, her start-up scaled, going global, and as her sales tactics grew more vicious, followers were leaving who felt violated and sexually exploited.

“When you can own your ultimate taboo,” she told the cheering crowd that day, “what can anybody do to you?” It was a line delivered with the confidence of someone who believed she was untouchable. Even after the FBI began investigating her and her face appeared in a scathing Netflix documentary, Daedone continued hosting public demonstrations in Los Angeles. But last June, the taboo couldn’t save her: she and her chief sales executive, Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges — found guilty of coercing followers into sex and work by exploiting their deepest vulnerabilities.

Such exploitation seems obvious in retrospect. Beyond the crazy amounts of money OneTaste asked for, there was the strangeness of the practice itself: women lying half-naked, legs butterfly-open, in a room full of strangers, while men, often strangers, stroked their clitorises according to a ritualized technique. Not only would this transform the energy of the receiving woman, but she was supposed to transmit that energy to whoever was watching. You were told off if people in the room didn’t feel you. Often these were rooms full of men, showing up for a free demo session. 

A new book, Empire of Orgasm, written by the Bloomberg reporter, Ellen Huet, who first exposed the company’s inner workings, reveals the depth of Daedone’s deeper philosophy towards sexual relationships. At times, the philosophy bordered on rape apologia. Men were encouraged towards the practice of “skillful violation” and women towards “aversion practice,” which means having sex with people you don’t want to for spiritual growth, or vice versa. Many of her followers were survivors of sexual abuse, as was Nicole, and she taught them that “arousal” was the cure for trauma. Nicole said once in a lecture, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100%. Because then there’s nothing to rape”. Physical violence and domestic abuse was encouraged because of the “yin” and “yang” of male and female energy. Whatever was needed to preserve your “Divine Feminine”.

A young lesbian couple at the center of the trial were split up, made essentially indentured servants, and forced to become the sexual “aides” of Reese Jones, the Silicon valley venture capitalist whose millions funded OneTaste. He was also Nicole’s boyfriend. This happened regularly to women who joined. Daily blowjobs were assigned to many women as “aversion therapy” to “help their spiritual growth”. When colleagues fell out, they were told to take off their trousers and receive “the practice”. Nicole persuaded a man in chronic agonizing pain to leave his girlfriend, a key witness who later sued OneTaste for sexual assault, by instructing him “to give his money to the feminine”. Devotees gave tens of thousands to pay for Daedone’s courses, often going into extreme debt and falling out with family members. Daedone told them money was a “scarcity hex”. Such grim stories are rife within the OneTaste universe.

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But not everyone is convinced of Daedone’s malevolence. A fervent group of followers — “Team Nicole” — remain steadfast in support of her. They showed up every day to the trial. In fact, the certain fans’ behavior, like harassing the judge, superimposing a swastika on the Justice Department’s logo, posting a witness’s bikini photos online, and making faces in court, was considered so zealous that it might have impacted the conviction itself.  They seem to have put this behind them, and continue to post to Daedone’s 40,000 followers on Instagram. This week alone they’ve posted five of Nicole’s teachings about erotic power, and a video where Nicole refers to “some very public, challenging, things happening in my life”.

They post advertisements for a new, more low-key iteration of orgasmic meditation called “women over dinner” and for the new OneTaste organization, “Eros platform”, which shares regular videos of Nicole and Rachel’s teachings. Women who “stand with Nicole” host podcasts on the page. They describe themselves as “erotic artists” and “erotic nuns”. Nicole is still front and center on the “Eros Platform” website; and they still host regular OM demos and courses. In their description of Nicole there is no mention of her conviction, but sometimes, on Instagram, they post direct dispatches from Nicole in prison. When Charlie Kirk died, Daedone wrote in praise of a man “tried by fire to purify his heart”. The caption had the hashtag #eroticjustice. 

Why do these people still believe nothing was wrong? Huet offers a compelling reading of the mechanisms of coercion; how intimacy, trauma, and longing were used to bind people to Daedone long after the harm had become undeniable. But there is another answer that feels harder to face: Big Tech has warped our idea of sex and freedom so completely that nothing about OneTaste seemed, to its believers, to cross a boundary. The cult logic didn’t feel like a cult logic; it felt like a natural extension of what the digital world had already taught them to expect from desire.

The arguments Daedone and Cherwitz offered in their defense were straight out of the Silicon Valley playbook. When arrested, they hired the same lawyer who had represented Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Keith Raniere; but unlike those men, Daedone and Cherwitz insisted they were being persecuted for innovating. They once sold themselves as sexual liberators, framing their orgasmic gospel as a kind of feminist therapy in the wake of Me Too — yet now they cried “cancel culture” and portrayed themselves as victims of a prudish, censorious state. Money from OneTaste loyalists funded sympathetic coverage in right-wing outlets lamenting the “criminalization of sex”, and their lawyers insisted to the New York Post that the government was punishing consensual acts because it feared female pleasure.

It was the same rhetorical maneuver deployed across the tech-sex economy whenever regulation or scrutiny arrives: any critique becomes moral panic; any boundary becomes censorship; any evidence of harm becomes an unfortunate side-effect of progress. And the unsettling parallel isn’t just rhetorical but literal: as Silicon Valley was building its world, OneTaste was building its own. They grew in tandem, in the same location, guided by the same ideological currents: frictionlessness, optimization, disruption, the belief that human attachment is a system that can be hacked. While tech platforms were reinventing connection and desire at scale, just a few miles downtown, OneTaste was constructing an embodied version of the same fantasy: that sexuality could be engineered and sold.

Many of OneTaste’s first joiners were Silicon Valley engineers. Huet points out that “in this spiritually optimized culture, it wasn’t weird to meditate; it was weird to have never tried it”. Non-monogamy was everywhere, and you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing someone reading The Ethical Slut. “Against that backdrop”, she writes “a mindful clitoral -stroking practice wasn’t strange at all. Orgasmic mediation for a richer, more connected, happier life? Sure, why not?” 

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One journalist for Gawker, who went to OneTaste’s 2015 conference OMX realized as much. “Everyone is interested in doing fun things with their bodies,” she wrote “but the impulse to systematize, replicate, package, sell and build an ideology around it is uniquely Silicon Valley”. OneTaste turned orgasm into a subscription product, Silicon Valley investors treated it like another life hack, its followers believed they were buying transcendence. Tim Ferris, the king of the life hack, wrote a chapter about OM in his book, The Four Hour Body. Sex, in this form, could be both optimized and commercialized. For men and women alike, women’s bodies became tools for personal upgrade; the site where higher living might be extracted and optimized. Sex, in this formulation, wasn’t intimate or relational; even if it was spiritual, it was still a system that could be monetized. And once you start looking at sex in these economic terms, you realize OneTaste wasn’t an aberration at all. It was simply one branch of a much larger project: the slow remaking of desire by the ideology of tech.

Because if Daedone built a Silicon Valley for the female orgasm, the male counterpart has been growing in plain sight. The corruption isn’t confined to a single cult but runs through the entire tech-sex ecosystem: porn platforms built for infinite scroll, OnlyFans’ gig-ified intimacy, the roboticized fantasies of the consumer-sex industry, and the loneliness that digital life quietly enforces. All of it culminates, in its most grotesque form, in the world Harper’s recently reported on: the universe of gooning.

Daniel Kolitz’s “The Goon Squad” reveals a community of men whose lives revolve around masturbating to online porn in pursuit of “goonstate”: a condition of total psychic collapse, a kind of orgasmic ego-death, achieved only by edging for hours or days. It is, uncannily, the same promise that Daedone offered, transcendence and becoming more than human through orgasm — even if the route there is vastly different. One gooner porn producer told Harper’s, “we humiliate them for the fact that gooning… is their sex life now. We encourage them not to have sex anymore, and to spend the rest of their lives spending money on femdom clips”. It is an unsavory annihilation. As OneTaste wraps its pursuit in the language of surrender and female empowerment; gooners frame theirs as a kind of spiritualized self-destruction. Both, however, are children of the same parent ideology: that the body is a machine whose ecstasies can be pushed to their furthest limit, and that the limit itself is the point.

Huet, wary of the word “cult,” offers a definition anyway: groups that “present an overarching belief system that proclaims itself the singular answer to all the big questions. Non-adherents are to be pitied, avoided, feared”. It is a neat description of OneTaste. It is an even neater description of Big Tech.

If Daedone’s conviction offers any clarity at all, it’s only that her empire was just a preview. A small, garish shard of the overwhelming technological machinery that now governs the world’s desires. We talk about OneTaste as if it were an outlier, a freakish aberration in the sexual landscape, but the truth is far harder to face. Daedone didn’t invent a new darkness, she made disturbingly visible what Silicon Valley had already been teaching us — that intimacy is a product, that bodies are interfaces, and that desire is a system to be optimized and scaled.

Gooners chasing ego-death through endless tabs of porn; influencers selling pseudo-intimacy on subscription; AI girlfriends engineered to be tireless, compliant, and always online; sex itself stripped of reciprocity and rebuilt as a productivity tool. All of it belongs to the same world that OneTaste was built on. Big Tech didn’t just corrupt our sense of privacy, or community, or attention. It corrupted our sense of what sex is for. 

Daedone’s downfall makes an easy morality tale: a manipulative guru, a predatory pseudo-feminist brand, a group of traumatized followers. But just as disturbing a story is the one Huet’s book gestures toward: that OneTaste wasn’t a deviation from the world Silicon Valley was building, but a mirror of it. A prototype of the future of sex. A reminder that the extremes we fear are often just the logical conclusions of norms we already live inside.

To truly understand how revolutionary Hite’s research and findings were in the mid-Seventies, it’s important to look at what male sexologists — back then, there was no other kind — had been saying up until then. The two most famous, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey, had both promoted the notion of the “authentic” orgasm, achievable only in the vagina — in other words, as a result of penile penetration — or as Hite put it, “the great male thrust”.

In her 1976 book, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, Shere offered a definitive debunking of the myth that women could only achieve orgasm through heterosexual penetration — and that those that couldn’t were “frigid”. As Hite pointed out, sexologists such as William Masters and Virginia E. Johnson had conducted their research in the laboratory, whereas hers focused on women’s experiences, told in their own words. The majority of the women who participated in the research disclosed that they could easily make themselves orgasm by masturbating, and that sex with male partners was far less satisfactory.

Of course, telling men that they are rubbish in the sack was — and remains — incendiary. The backlash was severe: Playboy magazine referred to the book as “The Hate Report”. And many found it difficult to take such a glamorous woman — one who had funded her PhD by posing for that very magazine — seriously. Still, it became a phenomenon; even today, 46 years after its publication, it remains the 30th-bestselling book of all time. In The Hite Report, Shere had put her finger on the pulse of the second wave of feminism: sex and sexuality. This was what feminists kept coming back to in the Seventies, in demanding both the freedom to live without the threat and reality of sexual violence, and women’s sexual liberation and pleasure. One cartoon that did the rounds showed a young girl asking her father, “Dad, what’s a clitoris?” to which he replied: “I don’t know, love, ask your mother.”

Hite was accused of using her research to make a political point — namely, that women didn’t need men. But what she actually did was lift the lid on women’s best-kept secret: their sexual dissatisfaction within heterosexual relationships. Women had not been asked about sexual pleasure by sexologists in the past. Her findings were damning: 84% of respondents to her questionnaire were not satisfied emotionally with their relationships; 95% reported “emotional and psychological harassment” from their male partners; 98% desired more communication, and just 13% of women who’d been married more than two years described themselves as being “in love”.

Those who hated her findings — pretty much any man who heard about them — became antagonistic. She was accused by sexologists and academics of bias and flawed methodology. Hite had distributed 100,000 detailed questionnaires in brown paper envelopes to random addresses from the phone book. Around 4,500 were completed and returned to her. Some publicly and angrily claimed the data was skewed because the women most likely to have chosen to complete and return the questionnaires would probably be those who were unhappy in their relationships with men; in other words, those with an axe to grind.

But as Hite told me in 2011, “Freud only interviewed three Viennese women.” She went on television to answer her critics, only to find herself on the receiving end of vicious verbal attacks. In 1995, tired of being one of the most notorious feminists on the planet, she renounced her US citizenship and moved to Europe, eventually settling in the UK. Yet the vitriol continued, and she was regularly followed by paparazzi. Because of her uncompromising manner with male interviewers, and the fact that she had published very unpopular findings about men, she had alienated the press in the US. Although her books were translated into several languages and sold in various non-English-speaking countries, her unpopularity was such that no American publisher would print her subsequent titles.

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One of the most startling findings was that 70% of women who had been married for more than five years had had at least one extra-marital affair. The Washington Post was so angry about her findings in The Hite Report that they conducted their own survey by phoning women and asking them questions. Hite’s response was caustic, as ever: “Maybe if her husband is in and she’s making dinner she may not want to answer questions about how happy or unhappy she is in her marriage.” Male journalists and commentators didn’t like the fact that Hite had made millions by dishing it out to men, but couldn’t take it when they argued back.

Having read her book, I had wanted to interview Hite for years when she contacted me via another feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, to accept my request to write a profile of her. “I want the young ones to know how important my work is,” she wrote. We arranged to meet at a café in Walthamstow, near the modest home she shared with her boyfriend Paul Sullivan. He escorted Hite to the meeting because, as she told me, “I can’t do anything on my own anymore”. When I asked what the problem was, she said she was suffering from “a condition”.

Brandishing a camera and accompanied by a sound person, Sullivan informed me that he was making a film about Hite that he hoped to sell, though no one had asked me if it was OK for them to film my interview. However, my irritation soon dissipated as the conventionally beautiful, ultra-feminine Hite began throwing around words like clitoris, orgasm, thrusting and fucking. The men in the greasy spoon didn’t know where to look.

Her openness had its limits, however. When I asked Hite whether she had ever had female lovers, she changed the subject. Twice. I have since been approached by two women, separately, who have told me about their sexual relationships with Hite. For all her chutzpah, Hite seemed vulnerable when I met her. She said she regretted not having children, and was considering having a baby via a surrogate, at the age of 68. As we left that interview, she leant forward to whisper to me, “because I have sold a lot of books, I think that women think that I’m fine, but I’m not fine. I hope they realise that.”

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I was disappointed: this was not the kickass feminist I’d been looking forward to meeting. And anyone who looks into her life will find that her behaviour was often totally unreasonable. Hite was accused of punching and choking the driver of a limousine who was waiting at her Fifth Avenue apartment to take her to a coveted slot on Sally Jessy Raphael’s talk show. According to a producer, Hite was angry at the driver telling her that, because he had had to wait an hour, it was now too late to get her to the studio. He claims that she physically attacked him when he called her “dear”. Hite denied this. The next day, on another TV show with Larry King, Hite went berserk, storming off the set when the controversy was mentioned.

Her personal imperfections are stark, but her work still deserves to be remembered. The Hite Report is still relevant today; decades after its publication, the majority of women in the UK still reported being dissatisfied with their sex lives and feeling discomfort during sex. But though Hite was one of the most famous feminists on the planet, few talk about her now. As the second-wave feminist Phyllis Chesler remarked in The Disappearance Of Shere Hite, if she ever mentions Hite to young feminists today, they have no idea who she was. I hope the film — which includes fascinating archive material, including interviews with Hite and extracts from her personal journals — brings her work back into the spotlight, and helps more women to feel liberated.

Hite died in September 2020. Her funeral was a bit like a meeting of the Stevie Nicks Appreciation Society: lots of women with long flowing hair and cheesecloth skirts. Several of her old friends were there, almost all of whom told me that it had been a very long time since they had seen Hite. She had become something of a hermit. The last time I spoke with her, she had told me that she was writing a screenplay about her life. It never materialised. My interview with her turned out to be the very last one she ever gave.