Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Orgasm Cult

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to weave the half-century long history of orgasm cults in the U.S., culminating in the rise of Nicole Daedone's OneTaste.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also media. Basterds. That's the podcast. You're listening to it right now. Worst people in all of history, we tell you all about them. And, you know, this has been a rough year for a lot of us here at Behind the Bastards. We've talked about a lot of pedophiles. And I'm tired of talking about pedophiles.

There are pedophiles in this episode, but they're not the primary focus of the episode. Jamie Loftus, how are you doing the day? I'm sorry for saying pedophiles right before introducing you. My name was so close to pedophiles there. That didn't wind up working well. And today we're talking to the biggest one of them all. We landed the white whale. I just was like, oh, I wanted to go right into the title, but then I hadn't introduced you.

And I was like, I should introduce Jamie before the title? But I also, part of me was like, should I introduce the title and then bring in Jamie? I don't know. I did it the wrong way. I have one complaint at the start here. Robert, why are you not wearing a hat? I don't like hats. It's true.

Where's your statement hat? So? I don't have a statement hat. Jamie, you are wearing a Theranos hat right now, which... I am a well-worn one. A well-worn one. Yeah, Theranos hat that's been around the block. It's kind of frustrating.

Yeah, it looks like fucking Liz Holmes sweat through that thing while she was waiting to hear she was getting indicted. Yeah, I actually contributed to her bail fund and she mailed this to me. I'm wearing a hat that fiddles very appropriate for today's episode. It says disappointment awaits. Yeah, yeah. You're both going to get. it what you want today because we are, Jamie, talking about a Silicon Valley Colt led by a female grifter. And best of all, it's an orgasm cult. It's an orgasm cult, everybody. Beautiful times.

And then the crowd burst into applause. They're like, you muscled through six weeks of pedophiles to get to the orgasm cult. We did it, folks. Yeah, yeah. Oh, thank God. It's like washing your face in a stream only actually this is very abusive and a lot of people get hurt. Well, it is behind the bastards, buddy. Disappointment awaits. But we get to laugh at like Silicon Valley starter fucking shit getting mixed in

with like traditional cult abuse techniques. It's very fun. And we love to see women in a leadership role. Exactly. A woman who is really hurting and taking advantage of a lot of men in a way that does even the scales on this show somewhat.

Like if you're just sort of, it starts the process. After she goes through a lot of guys. After Specter and Saville, thank you. Yeah, I mean, Saville abused a lot of boys too, Sophie. That's fair. But I want to hear about a woman. Let's hear it. Yes.

So we're going to talk. Yeah, who is this person? Yeah, I'm going to guess there's a good chance you haven't heard her name. She's Nicole Dodon, like, like D-A-E-D-O-N-E. How many times is the word clitoris in the script? A lot, Sophie. It's impossible. Can we get a control of on this?

Yeah, I just got really excited. I avoided it, but I used a couple of synonyms. So here's the thing. Twelve times. How many times is vagina in the script? Only six. Only six. The cult is based around this lady comes up with a, it has an idea that like,

if you get a bunch of women in a room and you have a partner masturbate them in a room, sometimes with hundreds of people watching, it creates this sort of like magical energy effect that has a bunch of health benefits. It's like an operating theater approach to coming? Yeah, that's exactly what they do. That's exactly the heart of the grift, Jamie. Okay, okay, I'm listening. It's going to be really fun.

So what's also really fun about this is that this practice, getting all these people in a room, I mean, sometimes it was one person at a time, but masturbating people in public totally detached from sex, right? Number one, it is only vaginas and clitoris is being like manipulated, right? Like, that's the, this is not like a multi-organ kind of deal. And number two, this is not supposed to be erotic by the end of it, by like the Silicon Valley stage of the grift. We're treating this like you're taking. like a bulletproof coffee. And by the way, the bulletproof coffee guys endorsed this business. So many beautiful crossovers. Oh, God. Yeah. Anytime you have a Silicon Valley Grift, you have some incredible side players.

There's always a great series of videos. I can't wait. I can't wait. It's awesome. Really? Yeah, we get Tim Ferriss. We don't get a Navy SEAL. I was bummed about that, Jamie. I was hoping one of those Navy SEALs who sells like energy bars would be in this picture. But no, tragically not. Oh, this is, okay, so it's sex, but it's not sex. So it's more than sex. Yeah, it's way worse than sex and it's not supposed to be sexy. By the end, this does start with a bunch of dudes in like the 70s who it very much is about sex for.

But before we get to the dudes in the 70s, we're going to have to have a little talk because it's very relevant about the patterns that these, this group that's supposed to be kind of like breaking the mold and making this like women centric and not abuse. fall into. We're going to have to talk about the history of the female orgasm in popular awareness and medical conception, right? Okay. There was a part of me that thought you were going to say, we have to talk about the clitoris. Where is it? How do we find it? And let's all be on the same page. Got like a laser pointer cut. So it's like right there. Just mining information. So let's talk about it, ladies. Yeah. I think I, my sex ed was so bad growing up in Texas. I'm fairly certain I learned about

the clitoris from the satirets. South Park movie. Like, I think that was my first encounter with it when I was like nine or 10, something like that. My son said I took it over summer school and they just showed us multiple horrific birthing scenes. Oh, yeah, we did see one of those. Just one because it was Texas. Not one, not two, maybe four. God. Well, at least they put in the hours. I didn't, I saw one birth video, but no, I didn't even get like period information. And it was like a running joke in my town how the fact that they did not invest in sex ed, but I went to this massive high school where there was a daycare at the high school. And you just have to think one perhaps led to the other.

I remember, I don't think they even told us orgasms at all existed. They told us that like, you know, how the active intercourse happens physically and that it. it feels good. And I don't even think, I think they were supposed to tell us about like semen, but I think the gym coach that was giving the lesson was way too awkward. So he just kind of breezed right past it. We didn't hear anything about that. It's a part of the great American tradition to be full of visceral fear and think you're dying the first time you come. Yeah. It's important. Yeah, it's really crucial stuff. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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Hey guys, it's us. The Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast?

Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it. But, you know, tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen.

where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day

and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

uh, you only got in the, Because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open.

Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged, one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman.

Multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So for as long as there have been people, we've understood that sex at least could potentially be very enjoyable for both participants, right? Like, people have been aware that it can be fun, even if they've hated the idea of that. But there's also been this understanding that people with penises and people with vaginas experience these pleasures somewhat differently.

At first, so far as I can tell, I don't think there was a lot of controversy about this idea. In ancient Greek mythology, Hera and Zeus are said to have argued over whether or not men enjoy. sex more than women. And Zeus, who is a prolific rapist, argued that women seem to take more pleasure in the act. And Hera was like, yeah, I'm not surprised you said that. But then she was like, obviously guys enjoy it more. That's why you're doing all the shit you're doing, Zeus. The wide-stage Tyresius was brought in to give like an answer to kind of adjudicate this. And he was like, women feel nine or ten times as much pleasure as men. So he agreed with Zeus and Hera did some really mean things to him. She did not like that.

Gotta be honest, didn't know Zeus Slander was on the calendar for today. Oh, Zeus Slander is always on the calendar. I love it. Slander is absolutely always on the calendar. And we do talk about him like he is a guy that was just a dude. Yeah. Like we met him at a Cinebond. My only compliment to Zeus is that story about when Zeus birthed somebody from his forehead like a pimple.

And that's how I think I got Anderson. Yeah, yeah. Ethel, there you go. Yeah. I like the one where he turned. turns into like a swan to have sex with a swan because he just sees a swan that's so hot, but he's like, I can't do this as a guy. Like, I got to be a swan.

First of all, swans, not nice. Second of all, beautiful. Sure, that's what Zeus said. Because the United States is a culture that was heavily influenced by Puritanism, generations in which women were shamed and ostracized for even sexual contact that they had no choice in, it's easy to see that like, oh, the Greeks were like way more sex positive than like their Western descendants were thousands of years later, right? That like, well, that seems like at least a more sex positive view, even though that's still

kind of messed up. And there are some ways in which that's true. But assistant professor of classics, an editor for the journal Idleon, Tara Mulder, makes an important point about what this myth was really saying. And this is relevant to everything that winds up happening in the Silicon Valley days of this fucking sex cult. If the ancient Greeks were supposed to take a message or learn a lesson from this myth, it was that women were the lucky ones when it came to sex.

Women could be assumed to always want sex, and when they got it to enjoy it substantially more than men, giving rise to the need for men to control sexual interactions and the sexuality of women. The companion to the ancient Greek and Roman idea that women enjoy sex more than men is the ancient idea that women are sexually ravenous and insatiable. Their sexual appetites couldn't be trusted

and had to be reined in by male guardians. So that's going to actually be relevant to every modern day, orgasm cold, all of which you're getting wrapped and like, this is all about the women, And all of us are going to wind up recreating that, like, ancient Greek and Roman shit. Like, it's crazy how it's, nothing changes. Okay. Okay.

So we already have, this is maybe a record for you, Robert, of like, we can't talk about this before we talk about ancient Greek mythology. And we got to. I fully believe it. I fully believe it. So is this, I'm guessing this is like, oh, this is actually about like women and women's pleasure. Yep. And women are obsessed with being. controlled and need to be controlled. And that's actually hot and liberating. It's a little more

complicated and honestly dumb than that, Jamie. But I don't want to spoil how dumb it is. My sex cult is going to be better. This is instructive. This is critical to understand before you start a sex cult. And there's a couple more things that we need to understand before we get into this. Because there's a lot of patterns, the Greek set up that we just never get free of here in the West at least. So the sage Ovid advised his readers. that women had a nasty tendency to say no when they meant yes. Like, he's kind of the first guy in the Western canon to be like, a no's not a no, bro. Like, that's Ovid, right?

Like, he's that kind of guy. And this is endemic all over ancient culture, just as it is like today. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, weighed in on the pleasure debate and essentially agreed with Tyresius. And through his descendants, medieval Europe inherited the belief that female pleasure aided in conception. The term orgasm didn't exist. But they knew what one was, and they thought it made pregnancy more likely, that, like, if she enjoys it, you're likely to conceive a child.

That was, like, a widespread understanding in medieval Europe, which breaks a pretty important misconception about medieval life, right? That, like, they were frightened and ignorant of sex because they weren't nearly as ignorant as a lot of people who would come later. For one thing, everyone lives in the same room. So you, like, know where kids come from, right? Like, there's no missin that. You see them being created constantly. Yeah, you're aware how things work. There's no like telling, there's no getting kids to, like, think that sex is not normal, like, if you're growing up in that environment.

Several Catholic scholars, in fact, discussed prostitution positively. There was an idea around, like, Catholic theology in this time that, like, you kind of need prostitutes for society to work that if they don't exist, things go crazy. Like, that was, like, a fairly widespread idea among some circles. And there were even monks and nuns who published work that was explicitly about sex. One example was Constantine the African, a 12th century figure who wrote a book about sex, de Coytu, on sexual intercourse. He was actually translating the work of a Muslim scholar, as is often the case with stuff like this, Ibn al-Jazer.

But he filed that guy's name off of the paper for obvious reasons. She was just like, I'm just going to cut this right off. It's my fuckbook. This is my fuck book. Don't worry about it. This is my book about sex. Don't think about it. Per a blog called Constantinus Africanus by Monica H. Green, it opens very clearly stating that sexual function was established by the creator himself to ensure the propagation of all species.

For if animals disliked intercourse, all the species of animals would certainly have perished. Pretty hard to argue with. Many of the same frank attitudes towards sexuality can be found in others of Constantine's works. In fact, we find in later manuscripts of the Constantinian corpus a short work on the potential harms and benefits of sexual intercourse, called again the Liber Minor de Coitouetou, the Little Book of Intercourse. That's all kind of fun, right? That is fun. That's all interesting.

Yeah. Okay. So like Wattpad goes way back. Everyone's always been writing their horny little things. Oh yeah. Forever. Also, Ovid is like spouting the game.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the first pickup artist. He's like, no, no. They love it, dude. They love it. Yeah. Huge fans.

So Jazzer wrote the about sex, but he wrote about it purely from the male standpoint, and to the extent that Constantine was interested in gathering research about sexual or stealing research about sexual pleasure, it was only stuff from the male perspective. But they weren't the only intellectuals weighing in on the subject at the same time. You're going to love this lady to both of you are. She's awesome. One of my sources for these episodes is the History of Women Medium Page by Mary DeVry, and she wrote a really good article on a contemporary of Constantine's, a 12th century Benedictine Nunn, named Hildegard of Bingen.

I'm already sold. I'm like, I'm locked in. She's so cool. She's so cool. Is the nun fucking cool? We've got a horny nun? She's a horny nun, but more than that, she's,

every now and then you like read about someone in history and they're from long enough ago that you don't get a ton of granular detail, but you can just tell like, oh, you were smart as fuck. Like, you were a genius. And that's Hildegard. So she. She comes into life. She's born into a rich family, but that doesn't mean she has any choice or agency in her life.

It actually means the opposite, right? Because during this time, her family's very religious. And at this period of time, if you're super religious, it's normal to tie the tenth of what you have to the church. And that's not just money in this age. That means like if you have 10 kids, you're given one of them to the priesthood or to be a monk or to be a nun. Right? Like that's a normal idea. I didn't know that extended to flesh.

That's not. For the very religious, right? I'm not going to say every family's doing that. but a number of them are. That's why there's so many people in the church, right? Yeah. You can get to 10. Yeah.

We get the 10. We'll give one to God. And her parents were also, may have been motivated. She started seeing visions at age three. So that may have been part of why they're like, well, she should probably be in the church. I don't know if I want to deal with this. So I don't know what was going on there. And I actually don't know.

Part of me wonders, was she seeing visions or did she realize that if she had visions and talked about them, she could manipulate her circumstances to improve them. And I kind of think that may have been what's going on because the visions are always very conveniently articulated to get her what she wants. My interpretation of her story is that the latter is more likely. But yeah, I'm an atheist in a scalaug, and I like to see like a clever underdog find a way to win in a religion that's stacked against them. Like, I think that's fun. That feels like so, you know, that's like the history of women in religion is like, oh, actually a guy we made up told me.

So you actually, it's like the only, it's like when I am trying to get someone to listen to me and I just respond from a separate email and be like, hi, I'm Kevin, Jamie's representative. Kevin is such a great fake guy name. Yeah, Kevin's a perfect fake guy name. Kevin could be a guy. He's a great negotiator, Kevin. If you ever get an email from Kevin, look out. You're about to get low-balt. You're going to get fucking.

Yeah. So I, anyway, so she gets put up in this. I mean, it's a nunnery that's attached to a benedicting monastery. I don't know if Benedicting nun is actually the proper term, but she's like a nun and the nunnery is attached as Benedictine monastery. And she's put under the care of an anchoress named Judda. And an anchoress, that whole thing means that like Jada is supposed to be anchored to a place. She and her nuns are not ever supposed to leave the monastery.

Like the world can come to them, but they're not supposed to go out, right? And, you know, Hildegar. As opposed to like, are there, I guess like the some nuns are loose? Yeah, yeah, well, they're able to move around, be in the world. They can move to different nunneries or different new churches or sure. Like, because, you know, the church starts a new church. You've got to be able to send some nuns over. It's got to be one that's not anchored to a place, right?

I'm not an expert on this. This is just what the reading says. It seems, that makes sense. I know I've heard of anchorists before. Your anchor nuns or your loose nuns. Yeah, your anchor nuns and your loose nuns, your pocket nuns, so to speak. And by the time Hildegarde's a young adult, Juddhas died. and it says a lot about how good Hildegard is at the social game that Hildegard gets made anchores when she dies.

Like Jutta passes the title onto her, so she's in charge now, and she does not like this deal. She does not want to be stuck in one place. As Mary De Vry writes, she wasn't happy being attached to a monastery and asked for permission for the nuns to move away and start their own place. No, absolutely not, said the abbot. Hildegard wasn't having that, so she went over his head to the archbishop. Sure, whatever was his reply. But the abbot was not thrilled with the end run or losing this community of women handily attached to his monastery, or the challenge to his authority or some other reason

we can only speculate about. He didn't let the women leave. You could say Hildegard wasn't going to take that lying down, except that's exactly what happened. Hildegard was stricken ill by God, paralyzed, and unable to get up. It was God's unhappiness about the nuns not being allowed to move. Hildegard told the habit. I love her. Fucking awesome. She's so cool. I just like, love her. I was like, oh. Uh-huh. Hey, you know this guy you telling me exists and talks to us? He's talking to us. He's me right now. And oh!

I can't move. I can't move. If I'm not a loose nun, sorry. Right. Oh, that's genius. It's so cool. She's awesome.

So the nuns, I get to leave and they set off to find the name Hildegard back. It's a banger. Hildegard whips. Yeah. I love it. She goes off. Sorry. She finds.

When you're talking about a cool nun, that just really just gets me going. She's rad. I'm really coming alive right now. She's only just begun. So she gets to leave with somebody. her other nuns and they get to found a new nunnery or whatever you call them, you know. And along the way, while they're doing this journey, Hildegard decides that God had made her sick.

And she's like around 40 when that happens because he wanted her to do something that she hadn't been doing. He'd been giving her visions all these years, totally. She'd been having it, but she just had kept him to yourself, herself. She never, like, told him to anybody until now. But they'd always been there. And she writes this. Though I saw and heard these things, I refused to write for a long time through doubt and

bad opinion and the diversity of human words, not with stubborn. but in the exercise of humility until lay low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness. And I spoke and wrote these things, not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God, I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again, I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, cry out, therefore, and write thus. Basically, God's saying, you need to go out into the world and write books. And Hildegard's like, that's what God wants me to do. Sorry, God wants me to pivot.

God wants me to pivot pivoting the books I love this it's the same religious narrative we hear but it's like only being used to liberate her specifically it's so cool

yeah it's cool in a sense of like but the same thing happens in like the FLDS where like a new guy's like I'm a prophet now the big guy told me I need 75 wives

not cool do it, unfortunately. This is, this is that, that strategy being used in the right way. In the very coolest of way. So Hilgarde reaches out to the Pope and she's like, this is what God said. She's like, she sends what I just read basically to the Pope. And the Pope is like, hell yeah, God wants you to write. Like, here's some fucking money.

Why don't you pick out a team of like helpers and they'll like transcribe and write out and like publish, you know, all of all of your visions from God and books. And so she starts putting out books that are supposedly inspired. My God, I don't, I don't know. I didn't look that up. This isn't a story about a man, Sophie. Anytime there's like a pope that does like a slight, a slight cool thing, I'm like noted. I should have looked into the Pope.

You're right. Pope W is few and far between. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Especially in this period. 12th century. Yes what I'm saying. She publishes a bunch of books and one of them is called Kase at Kurei.

And it contains what is generally agreed to be, the oldest description of a woman having an orgasm written by a woman, right? And is this told by her, or is this God telling her what an orgasm might feel like? She says it's God. Because she couldn't know, obviously. God, she hasn't experienced one. God's like, you're a nun, so this is so like, I'm just going to let you in. You're missing out on something crazy.

It is fucked up if you think about it that way. I love it. It's like God is taunting her. Yeah, yeah, he's being a real dick here. So here's how Hildegarde writes about the orgasm she definitely never experienced. When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with its sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the omission of the man's seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that the hement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it. And soon the woman's sexual organs contract and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close in the same way a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist.

So, you know, very Catholic, you know, very 12th century. Okay. Okay. I honestly, I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed. I wanted something, I wanted something sexier. Something sexier. She's a nun.

She's simply a nun. Yes, but if she was alive now, she would have loved that song Pussy Palace by Louie Allen. She would have been huge about that one. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, describing being horny for a. guy as a result of a brain fever is kind of potent. It's super funny. Yeah.

Kind of relatable. Hildegard lives a great life. The church center, she gets to do all the things she'd always dreamed about. The church censor on four long speaking tours where she like travels around like Europe and gets to talk about her work to learned audiences of learned men. She's super widely respected. Her books are fairly widely distributed. And in addition to that bit about the orgasm, she also wrote out descriptions of the four kinds of men. And this doesn't really directly impact our episode, but I couldn't read these

and not include them because some of them are pretty spot on today. Wait, what do men be like? What do men be like, Hildegra? Yeah, what do men be like? So you got to know first, her writing on this is somewhat influenced by the Greek belief that the body is governed by four humors, earth, wind, air, and fire, as well as something called bile, right? That, like, the mix of these, the ratio of them determines and like alters behavior and mood and personality. They miss that nation in last year. Yeah.

Yeah. They didn't have the bile nation. So the first kind of the first kind of men, Hildegard said, are all fire. As soon as they get sight of a woman, hear of one or simply fancy one in thought, their blood is burning with a blaze. Their eyes are kept fixed on the object of their love like arrows as soon as they catch sight of it. And these men are terrible people to be in relationships with because all they can do is fuck. less, they're balanced by wind, which cools down their fiery genitals and lets them have

honorable and fruitful relationships with women. And the second type of man is a man who is a man of fire and of wind, and quote, the eyes of such men can meet squarely with those of the women, much in contrast to those other men's eyes that were fixed on them like arrows. Which is really interesting, like, thing to note is like, can a guy just like see you as a person? It's kind of what she's saying here, I think. Right.

Like she's just describing a man who could be a friend possibly. It is also sounding like vaguely kind of astrological the way that she's categorizing them. Yeah. For sure, for sure. And yeah, she also includes an incised description of toxic men who she describes as being full of bile. The bile men. It's really fun. They are incapable of having a genuine loving relationship with any being.

Through that they become bitter, avaricious and full of foolishness and abundant peasant. passion in intercourse with women, they know no moderation and act like donkeys. Definitely she never had sex. Definitely she never had sex. Her ex was fuming when he read that. That was, oh, I do appreciate it. That is like a very, like, subtle but important distinction of, like, a man who is just, like, wildly horny and a man who is both horny and really into. mind games that are like ruinous.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's the bile man. Let's retire fuck boy and bring back you're full of bile. Yeah. Yeah. You're full of bile. That's, we got to do that.

Yeah. You know who's not full of bile though, Robert. That's right. That's right, Sophie. I was just about to do it myself. Yeah, but I did it first. You did it first. You did it first.

And the sponsors of our podcast have no bile at all. Honey. Bileless. Get where we're awarded just for shopping with Simon Plus. Don't miss Memorial Day sales at Simon Premium Outlets and Mills. You can get points at scores of stores, access to exclusive offers, and exciting surprises. You've got an extra day off, so make it pay off, with the best deals from brands you love all in one place.

It's a summer kickoff thing. Join today at Simonplus.com. Rewards program terms apply. See Simonplus.com for details. Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world around them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart.

And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, new?

Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts. We're starting a trend.

But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we were thinking I'm originally calling it. one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers was...

This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, people could call in and say, Hey Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad,

Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen.

We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group.

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, uh, you only got in because you. Your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. And we're back. They might have had some bile at them. I don't know. Who knows what you people listen to? Who the fuck knows who our sponsors are?

Not me. Yeah. And so here's my favorite thing. And this is something Mary DeVry points out in her article on this, is that Hildegard might be the first writer to describe incels in the 12th century. It's fucking amazing. Wait, is this the fourth kind of guy? This is, she kind of branches out from that to discuss the different ways different kinds of men respond to celibacy. So she lays out the kinds of men.

And she talks about, here's how they respond to, like, she says, she says, she says, she says, like not having sex. And one of these types of men is obviously a gay guy, but she does not understand that. So she's like, some men are fine with it. And it's like, well, you're missing a piece of the story, Hildegarde. That's fine. But she writes here about men who stay celibate, not out of religious obligation, but because they hate women. Quote, they neither receive any love from their fellow men, nor have any inclination

to a social life of their own, all the more since they exhaust themselves with continuous figments of their imagination. Then when they meet people, they are already full of hate, malevolence, and the wrong attitude so they can't enjoy company anymore. It's amazing how spot on that shit is. She's talking about clavicular. That's the 12th century. That could have been written this year.

Man, we always think that like this jet, like whatever generation has really reached the final stage of misogyny and like being socially horrible. Nope. Hildegard described the manosphere all the way back then. You could have told me that was in the cut last week. That's nuts. Yep. That's fucking crazy.

Now, unfortunately, this is where we got to leave our friend Hildegard. Who's awesome and never did anything wrong, but we are not the show our friend Margaret Kiljoy does. So we're not going to talk about Hildegard anymore. Margaret dropped the Hildegard episode. Please. Margaret, I love you. Just as this episode is going to be kind of downhill after Hildegard, the way women's sexuality was discussed in like medical literature in the Western world went kind of downhill after Hildegard, unfortunately. There's one bright spot in the word 1660, the word orgasm gets coined for the first time.

There's a doctor named Nathaniel Hymour who used the term to describe what happens during a pelvic massage. even that early medical professionals were experimenting with the idea that orgasms could treat certain women's diseases. And, you know, this is just like anything to do with like the vagina is women's in this era. Like that that's just the way like all of the writing is in this period of time, right? Sounds like a fucking Red Bull commercial. It sounds like they're just saying, endorphins give you wings. Yeah. I mean, that's basically the idea.

Yeah. Through the 1800s in Western Europe and elsewhere, including the United States, States, it became more and more common to diagnose women with hysteria. This meant that they're not happy with, like, wearing restrictive clothing and hiding from society and, like, never seeing anybody until they're married. Not being allowed to read or vote. Not being allowed to read. Go to school.

Vote. Having to have 11 children. Oh, these broads, when are they going to? It is interesting, because, like, this hysteria stuff is so well-worn, but it's, like, even framing it as, like, a cure of, like, an orgasm for. or a ciswoman has to be productive in some way? Yeah, got to get, got to make some shit happen. Yeah.

Cannot, to this day, cannot just be for fun. No, absolutely not. No. So doctors in the Victorian era did eventually hit upon the orgasm as a cure for hysteria. And some of the first electronic medical devices were invented to aid them. These are the first vibrators, right? And before these first gadgets, doctors had to use their hands to do this job. In 1891, Dirix invented a steam-powered manipulator.

That's like the earliest vibrator. It was so loud you could not talk. The steampunk vibrator is so... A steampunk vibrator. It's like a horny thing executed in the least sexy way possible. Yeah, there's actually, there's a sex store in San Francisco, good vibrations, that is a part of this story because this cult winds up briefly involved there that has a vibrator museum. You can see a lot of these old vibrators if you go there. I was like, were the Victorian vibrators also in inextricably had 40 settings that you have to click through every single.

one to turn it off. Cool. Absolutely. So that's a feature not a buck. Cool. So the vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about 100 years. That's pretty cool.

I think that's priorities. That's priorities. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey conducted his first major sexual survey and people started talking about orgasms of all types in manners much more familiar to the modern sentiment. Men and women's sexual desire gradually became a more approachable topic of discussion. The APA continued to diagnose hysteria and prescribe orgasms as a treatment until 1952, but things changed rapidly after this point. In the 1960s, Masters and Johnson started conducting groundbreaking studies on why women orgasmed.

As Sarah Mansell writes, they discovered that women could have multiple orgasms from both vaginal or clitoral stimulation and also realized it took women about 10 or 20 minutes of sex play to reach orgasm compared to just four minutes for men. In the decades since, we've learned a lot more about the vagina and the clitoris. which is the only organ that exists solely for pleasure. But we've learned even more about the physiological benefits of orgasms. About 60% of people with migraines experience a reduction or into symptoms after one. And there's a bunch of other stuff about, like, it has an impact on you, right? Including just like, you know, if you have a penis in terms of like your eugenital health,

doing it regularly reduces the odds of certain diseases. There's a bunch of that that we understand that. So I just want to make sure I'd be clear. After the eight, nine years of this podcast existing, we're, we are kind of. And saying clearly, coming is good. Coming is good. Coming is great. Coming is good.

There's never been an anti-coming podcast. Okay. Okay. This is just usually you don't want to think about coming when you're hearing about Hitler podcast. Like that's more why we don't talk about it on the show. Coming is medically good. Yes. Coming is medically good outside of the context that people usually come in behind the bastards.

Consensual coming is good. Yeah. Yeah. So this actually gets to another really important point about orgasm and sexual desire that we've come to understand more fully in the modern age. In 2015, sex educator Emily Nagoski published an op-ed in the New York Times during Fallout over the failure of the FDA to approve Fibrandskrin, I think is the name, which is a drug that was supposed to increase female desire. That's like the description of what the drug does. I think it's basically a drug that increases like vaginal lubrication, I think is kind of the idea. And Nogoski had an issue with this.

She wrote that the biggest problem with the drug and with the FDA's consideration of it is that its backers are attempting to treat something that isn't a disease. Her argument was that modern research suggests there are multiple perfectly normal forms of sexual desire. Some people experience more spontaneous sexual desire, which is like somebody with a dick getting hard, right? Like, that's what generally society sees is male sexual desire. That's not the only thing that spontaneous sexual desire is. But it's the kind of thing you can treat with a pill sometimes, right? Like that, or at least you can imitate it with a pill. A lot of people are way more into and feel way more responsive sexual desire.

And you can't just drug someone into that because it's responsive to a situation and a relationship, right? Yeah. I think we would sooner drug someone than try to have an interesting conversation with that. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. And that's kind of Nogoski's point.

She writes, I can't count the number of women I've talked to who assume that because the desire is responsive rather than spondy. They have low desire, that their ability to enjoy sex with their partner is meaningless if they don't also feel a persistent urge for it. In short, that they are broken because their desire isn't what it's supposed to be. So the road for Masters and Johnson to what I just read you has not been a smoother and even one. Once people started to accept that sexual desire was normal and even good for both men and women, our culture experienced a sexual awakening that took on many forms, a lot of them problematic, right? Some of which you get is like the free lug movement of the 60s and the 70s and, of course, the backlash to that movement too. Now, our subject for these episodes, Nicole Dodone, was born on August 24, 1964, right in the smack in the middle of this massive period of evolution and how we talk about and understand sex.

She had a difficult upbringing. Her father Joseph separated from her mother Beverly when Nicole was like seven. And her earliest memories are of her desperate desire to have more of a relationship with her father than she was going to have. In the book Empire of Orgasm, Ellen Hewitt writes, he only visited sporadically and Nicole adored him. When he was away, she stood for hours under a street lamp on her house's cul-de-sac trying to summon him. She invented bargains with the universe, certain that if she sang out loud the songs of Al Green, her dad's favorites, and crossed the street with her eyes shut, spun three times to the left. Her dad's car would roll into view from around the latest street. And that's bleak. Yeah.

That's heartbreaking. And also, how many, I'd be really curious, how many young girls were regularly singing weirdly romantic songs to their dad? it's a right of passage in a way. Yeah. Honestly, that fucked me up a little bit just because weirdly enough to Cole and I, there's a lot of points where we have like very similar beats in our lives. Like I was very adjacent to this community and some of these coldest. I'm sure it was at the same parties as some of them just because of the places my life took me

and the communities I was in. But when I was like six, my dad had to leave us for like two years. Like we were in Oklahoma on the family farm and we had no money and he got a job in New York City and he lived on his friend's couch and he mailed us back money. And I did the same thing. Like I can remember doing the same thing. Like being like, if I do this and this, he won't leave again, right? Like, it's a very normal little kid thing to do.

It's a very sad story. My dad came back. Hers never did because it turns. And it's good, well, it's good that he didn't because Joseph was a creep and a pedophile. In 1976, he was arrested and charged with child molestation. Sorry, 41 minutes? 41 minutes. Forty one.

Pettifile free. That's a new record. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's buying the bastions. This is the new shirt. 41 minutes, pedophile free in 2026. Most aren't so lucky.

Not going to sell that shirt, but I see. before. Yeah, Sophie does not like shirts that have pedophile on them. I don't understand it. I just don't want to sell anything. Thank you. Yeah, well. So he gets arrested in 76 and charged with child molestation, including oral copulation with a child under 14.

We don't know who that was, but Nicole would have been around nine at the time. And much later, she would tell a lot of, people, like when she's a young adult, she tells people that her dad did sexually assault her when she was a child. We don't know more than that. She's going to change that story dramatically several times. She comes up with a different version of it for every major period of her life. And I just have no more to say than that, right? I also don't know was her abuse connected to what her dad got arrested for, or was it something nobody ever knew until she was an adult? Whatever the case, as a little kid, she acts out in some weird but understandable ways.

She has a thing for like, she likes biting knees. Like she will obsessively try to bite the back of women's knees. She's like crawling around and like bite her like aunt or whatever in the back of the knees. It's like a thing she's obsessed with, right? And, you know, she gets yelled at. I liked Pokemon cards, but okay. It's weird. It's a little weird.

I mean, she does have like an OCD kind of like that ritualizing. Yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Compotions. she says it feels like there's an animal inside her trying to get out, right? Like that's how she would later describe it. As Nicole grew up, she seems to have had fairly minimal oversight from her mother and a deep hunger for self-exploration and discovery. She dated boys and girls, and she had a sugar daddy at age 16.

That's all we get about that. But she's not very heavily watched, right? Years later, when she led an organization, often described as a cult, she was described in the UK times as having grown up, quote, a natural leader who says she didn't want to be followed. But that's not really accurate. And it leaves out a pretty important detail, which is that when Nicole turned 18, she cut off her father, right, who is now at a jail completely. She has no more contact with him after this point.

She starts telling people, like, whenever she gets to know someone that, like, yeah, my dad did this to me when I was a kid. And this is like a story that she tells a lot. She's like processing it, right? She goes to college, a couple of different colleges, but they don't work out. So she finally winds up back in the Bay Area attending San Francisco State University. The Guardian says she graduated, but Hewitt, her biographer, denies this. Either way, Nicole spent her 20s in the Bay during the early 1990s, which was both dealing and reeling from the AIDS crisis still and also experiencing the birth of the Silicon Valley tech set, right?

A lot of things are happening at once. And also Burning Man starting in the early 90s. And that is actually a really relevant part of the show is of these episodes. It's in the back. It's in the background of a lot of things here. Like a lot of people, a lot of people in this story meet at or like, even if they don't meet there, they get into like experimenting with alternate, you know, medicine and all that stuff because they like take mushrooms at Burning Man. Like that's a really common story for the men in this tale, but like particularly. Every time I talk shit about Burning Man, I get like, it turns out someone beloved in the room is like it changed my life.

And then I have to backpedal in an embarrassing way, even though I meant it. I mean, like, I went to the, like, the small ones in Texas. Definitely had a huge impact on me. But I never wanted to go to the big one because there's fucking cops there. Yeah. Like, I don't want to create my own little city in the woods to take drugs in if there's police officers. That sounds awful. Remember that time they got stuck, mudded in and all that shit?

I know. That's fine. I got, we had a flood one year that nearly killed a bunch of people. It was fucking crazy. Somebody die. That part's just fun. People die. It's, yeah.

Yeah. I think it's like my inner like New Englander, but when I see pictures of Bernie man, I'm like, get a job. Like, what are you doing out there? Not having a job. That's, taking a lot of drugs. Or in this case, I'm assuming taking a break from your job in Silicon Valley. Taking a break from my job. I mean, we're like everyone I knew there.

Like half the people I took drugs with are like fucking ER doctors and shit. Like a lot of. A lot of people with jobs were like, I have a very high-stress job and I need a week to take drugs with my friends. Otherwise, I'm going to go crazy. I have to wear some really bad outfits this week to blow off some steam. Yeah. I'm going to dress ridiculously. Good Lord.

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Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we can. interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.

Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hey, it's us to Jonas Brothers and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news? Huge news. We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how did we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember.

I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Oh, we were thinking, I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band. Before Jonas Brothers was... This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, for people could call in and say, hey Jonas,

and then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah.

Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion?

We're open. Since you guys are middle. age, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. So, Nicole in her early 20 starts experimenting with drugs, namely methamphetamine, which she would take by drop it. She's a parachute.

She puts it in, like, tissue paper and eats it, like, which is a crazy way to do meth. in particular, but you do you, honey, I guess. She experiments with psychedelics, too. She's taken a lot of acid, and she's partying with people who are, like, involved in the first internet boom. And also, like, and this is Burning Man before, by the way, it was, like, a famous thing that the tech set attended. This is when there's, like, guns.

Like, people are bringing a full-on machine guns, and it's, like, largely insane libertarians and wizards. So it's a slightly different period of time. What a weird, yeah, like transitional time in the, I feel like I don't hear about it very often. You hear it like before or after. The bay used to be a lot cooler and a lot, yes, less governed by all of the people who are billionaires live here.

Like it was always weird and maniacs lived there, but they were often very cool maniacs who gradually got priced out of the bay. So again, I had a very similar like 18 to 22 year old time. Like I'm going to a lot of parties and doing drugs with people in weird places. And I also feel like. Nicole, that I was very let down by higher education, which I'd been told it was fun and there were a lot of parties, but it was mostly just like high school part two. Nicole's also let down by working in retail and food service jobs, which, you know, same. Like, it sucks. You're a young adult.

You're realizing this shit is not as fun as you thought it was. But periodically, you have, you know, these encounters and parties with people where you're like spending like two days on acid and time stops existing. And you're like, boy, I wish I could just escape regular life. I feel like there's got to be a way to do that. And some of us write for the internet to get that. And some of us do what Nicole does. She didn't need to start an orgasm empire. She could have just started a podcast. That's right. She could have started writing for Cracked magazine. You know, there were a lot of options. Yes. Yes. Liberated many lost souls. Crack.com. So the big. difference

between like kind of where our paths to verge here is that Nicole starts like she decides that the kind of work that's going to take me

out of this like rat race that I hated first is like sex work right and she's a highly paid escort apparently there's some evidence for that she's fairly successful

and she realizes she feels really powerful because all of these men with a lot of money who have been much more career successful than her aren't just paying her but they're often like

crying in front of her and like breaking down and so she realizes like she has this very important realization which is that like oh it doesn't matter how like rich they are or like how what what title they have like men are dumb and I can control them right like that's the thing she learns that's a new that's an important day it's an important lesson I mean I mean that's a very common thing I have I have several friends who are sex workers and that is a very very common thread that men often just like don't know how to go to a therapist and so

they go and seek out therapy from a sex worker. Yeah. And there's a lot of crying. Yeah. Yeah. No, I had a friend who was an escort. And one of her regular clients was this, like, big Russian mob dude who would come in, like, twice a year and didn't even want to have sex, would just lay on top of her and cry for, like, four hours.

And, like, that was what this guy was willing to pay for. Yeah. Just like, okay. That implies some dark things about your day job. But like, you do you, man. No follow-up questions. No follow-up questions for me. So she's doing this for a couple of years.

And Hewitt writes, with each client, she practiced her cold reading, trying to deduce what the man secretly wanted. She quickly learned that her sexual insights held significant economic value. So by the time she's 27, you know, this is kind of where she's at. And she gets a call from her mom that her dad is sick and dying in a prison hospital. Good. She had not been in contact. So she didn't know.

he'd gone back to prison. But her mom tells her like, yeah, he's back in prison. And that's how Nicole learns that her dad had been arrested for child molestation again, this time for abusing two preteen girls, including his 12-year-old granddaughter who was living with him. Nicole, this hits very hard. She's shocked by this development. She travels to visit her dad. And as he dies, she tells him that she forgives him.

And again, we know this because she tells the story a lot. I don't know. Again, I actually don't know how true it is, but this is like an important, when she becomes a guru, this is a story she will repeat a lot in the early years of being a guru, right? And the way she tells it, his death kind of convinces her to fully unmoor herself from mainstream society. So like many of us did, she moved into a warehouse, while hers was in San Francisco, where a group of theosophists live and operated a sort of magical commune and largely took a lot of LSD, right? Many of us have had experiences like this. It's a perfectly fine way to deal with things.

Who among us? Who among us? It is interesting hearing that, like, she was developing cold reading, too, because it just, like, you hear so many points where she could have, like, you're like, she could have been a fake medium. She could have done all sorts of shit. Yeah. She's got so many skills.

Yeah. Yeah, she's got so many skills. And now she's living with wizards in a warehouse and taking acid every day. Now, this may not have been as fun because she would later. And again, she's always saying this, is she's like giving parables to her followers to portray a message. So who knows what's true. But a story she would later relate while lecturing her followers is that she moves into this

with like a girlfriend of hers at the time. And her girlfriend is like very abusive and is basically plying her with drugs until she would burn out. And then she would hand her off to someone else to recover and then take Nicole back and feed her more drugs. And, you know, Nicole would say, quote, until I was insane, looking for Jesus in the streets, adding up all the numbers on every house I passed, right? That, like, this is a very abusive relationship,

and this woman, like, uses psychedelics to kind of, like, shatter Nicole's psyche. You know, make sure you know someone for a while before you start taking drugs with them, kids. If you're going to take drugs with a romantic partner, don't take ecstasy on the first date. That'll fuck you up way more than acid. Well, boy, what you don't need when you're starting a relationship

is a massive oxytocin dump artificially induced. And let me guess, All the men calling themselves wizard she lived with weren't helpful. I don't think they helped. I don't think the wizards help. No fucking kidding. The wizard theosophist didn't help. Fucking help.

Oh, man. So in Nicole's case, it led her to remain dropped out of society once she leaves the warehouse. She's around 30 now. And she decides, I'm going to become a Buddhist nun at a Zen monastery. Like Hildegard, kind of. There is kind of this madlib's approach to her life that I appreciate. It's very Bay Area in the 90s. Yeah.

I feel like my equivalent of it is like when you find out your like Los Angeles therapist was in three episodes of SVU 20 years ago. Yeah. You're like, right, this is the pivot. This was coming. When you live up in the mountains of Northern California and the 20 teens and everyone over 40 that you know in the cannabis, business had previously lived in a warehouse in San Francisco where they taken drugs with wizards. It's circle. Anyway, so Nicole found aspects of the nun life appealing, but she was also really anxious about

the fact that she was going to have to give up sex. So she decides like, well, before I do this, I'm going to just go wild for like a week and have a week of just like crazy sex before I become a nun and don't have anymore, right? So that's her plan. A Buddhist Rumspringer. A Buddhist Rumspring. In a 2025 article for the New York Times, Kareem Reamy describes what happened next.

She met a man at a party. There is a practice you might want to try. Nicole recalls him telling her before they headed down to his place, a yoga ashram. Take off your pants and lie down, he told her. I'm going to take my clothes off. I'm going to stroke you for 15 minutes. It seemed insane at first, she says. But she did as she was told.

The experience was eye-opening, she says. I was walking home at night and just felt so clear. And first off, that's interesting. Like it really says a lot about kind of where her life has led her that this guy says this. And she's like, yeah, sure, I'll give it a shot. That said, I've also done stuff like that because I met a stranger at a party. So I get it.

Who am I mean, I feel like it's really luck of the draw of what kind of parties you have access to. What kind of parties you have access to? And who offers to take you back to what Ashram? Yeah. And like that man could have been very scary. Very scary. Apparently he wasn't. I mean, it's some light yoga culting, you know? Yeah.

I think the worst that ever happened to me at a party of that nature was that I briefly pretended to be really into WWE. You just never know. Yeah, I lived at a house in Houston with some very strange people for like a week and a half as a result of something like that. It didn't last. Thank God. Long party. That ended badly. No week and a half.

Buddy. So, yeah, in other accounts that she's given of this encounter, Nicole emphasizes that before this guy got her started, he just like looked at her genitals and described them to her and told her that they were beautiful and she like cried, realizing that no one had ever said anything like that to her before. And this has become, like, will become an important part of like the, her theory on orgasmic meditation, which she's going to invent based on all of this later on, right? This is like one of the steps that you have to go through in this, which makes. being in a room full of like 20 people doing this really strange. So she finds this guy again. Turns out he's a dude named Irwan Davin, right? And he's a student of a practice called deliberate orgasm. And the idea had come from a Bay Area commune started in 1968, the Moorhouse community, which had been founded by a guy named Victor Barranco, or Vic, who was himself a product of the free love and the self-improvement movement.

He was also a used to pliant salesman. Ha ha. Okay. His name is big. Context is great here. That's fine. Just like a neighborhood rumor. Like you won't have any idea who you've just bought a wrench from.

Yeah. Where his hands have been? So when I was writing these episodes, I was planning for this to just be a quick two episodes. I think it's got to be at least three because I had to go into the whole history of the different orgasm cults that have existed in the Bay Area. Solely in California. Well, they spread. But they start and cancel. California. You damn sure about that. Obviously. Yeah. So here's how Ellen Hewitt describes Vick's

journey. Vic claimed to have learned the meditative clitoral stroking technique deliberate orgasm in his 30s from a self-proclaimed witch when he and his wife were seeking help with their sex life. The actual origin of the practice is hard to pin down, but Vic realized the value of the idea quickly. In 1968, he started a commune in Lafayette, California. He picked the name Morehouse because it was a place dedicated to living with Moore. Here's how one of Vicks lieutenants put it. We at Moorhouse believe that every day is Sunday. We believe that we are on earth to have a good time.

To devote our lives to pleasure, we call it responsible hedonism. I can't. This is, it's so silly. It's so silly that this is, it sounds like a man who realized he never made his wife come in their 30s. And then instead of just making her come was like, I have to start a business. Gotta bring a witchy to this.

There's money in this. Baby, baby, did you know you could do that? And she's like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I did. You could have done it at any time. Yeah, married man in his 30 discovers orgasms and decides there's money. Monetizing women's orgasms. It's really funny.

Let's go Vic. Vic. Oh, man. Okay. So this is all occurring as part of an explosion of intentional and utopian communities around the time. And of those, Moro House is not among the most toxic. This is like on the low end of bad for what things you might call cults in this period of time, although it's still pretty bad. It's bad and it's also corny.

It's corny. Colts always are and religion always is, folks. And that doesn't mean it can't be an important part of your life. part of becoming a real adult is an understanding that to be happy, you have to do embarrassing things, right? Like that's it, folks. Sorry, you can't be cool once you're no longer like 19. Yeah. Give up.

So Morehouse sells introductory courses. And these are all called the courses they sell, like if you sign up and pay, it's called the Mark Group. And people are told they're called marks. You're being told that. They're jokingly saying, like, you are marks. and we are like hustling you, right? Like, that's very open. And they're open about them.

Like, we're hustling you, but you'll get something out of it, right? Like, we'll get your money and you'll learn how to have more better sex, right? So that's the way they're kind of advertising themselves. KQED, there's an article in, sorry, I found an article on KQED News's website. Quote, one notorious Morehouse event was a public demonstration in 1976 of what the group claimed was a woman having a three-hour orgasm. And Barranco took advantage of California's loose post-exam. secondary education standards to turn the Lafayette commune into more university, which offered PhDs in the humanities and sensuality and conducted what the organization said was sexual research.

In 1992, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the courses cost as much as $16,800. Oh, my God. So this is that KQED article came out after like some lawsuits around this group. And there's a lot of negative reporting that hits like come like the 80s and 90s and stuff. Broncos over the years sues several newspapers for libel. Those lawsuits all fail, but they make public some fascinating details about how the group works during discovery. Like that, their more universities advanced sexuality class conducted research on, quote,

engorgement lubrication, seminal secretion, and that one purpose of the class was to make friends with another crotch. So they're also gross and corny. It's starting to sound like a disgusting prison experiment. It is. It is pretty gross. Like, they're pretty gross about the wording. But also, they're hitting, like, a bomb in a culture of, like, men who don't know that you can, like, actually please your partner.

But, like, that's something that sex can have. So the fact that a guy is being like, no, actually, in a very clinical setting, you can just learn how to, like, manipulate a clitoris, right? Like, you could just take that class. And there are dudes who are willing to pay money for that. It's a business, right? in part because people can't talk about sex and they can't be educated about it really in this period of time very well. Right. So there's a hunger for this kind of thing.

And, you know, what's going on kind of within the cult's internal messaging is that the increasing scientific consensus on sex and pleasure is being twisted to argue kind of the same thing the Greeks had argued, right? This is set up as very, we're trying to, you know, make men better and make you all have better sex and make sure women have a better time. But a big part of the scientific theories they come up with about sex and orgasms is that women don't just enjoy sex more than men. They're insatiable. And so there's nothing wrong with treating them like sexual beings whether or not they want that. Right. It's the same conclusion. Right.

2000 something years later. It's pretty wild when you lay it out like that. Yeah. And now they're like printing money doing it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they buy a big commune. Very curious. about who's who's teaching these classes and what the gender split is there.

It's so true because it's like that on its face, you know, maybe there's elements to it that are positive and like are speaking to like how puritanical the U.S. was and is about sex and wanting, you know, their partners to have pleasure. But there is this element of like the profit, like profiting off of it is one thing. And it's also just like, it just feels like a stealing of narrative, too, of like, not only do I want to be able to like manipulate a clitoris and make someone come. I want to be able to like brag about it and have a graduate degree in it. Have a degree in and coming? So yucky and just feels like still asserting yourself the, you know.

I'm imagining like a fucking 70s dude with a huge must. stash in like a bed, but behind it is like it's like the wall of a doctor's office with his degrees in sex. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, Vick's whole thing was in fact aping, some really lazy interpretations of like feminism and like kind of modern sex science and twisting those to his own ends. For one, he agreed that women shouldn't be expected to wear makeup or shave their body hair.

So he banned them from doing those things when they lived in the Morehouse Colt compound. Oh, so close, Vic. So close. Yeah, yeah. Well, he traveled his properties, usually in a golf cart because he hated walking. He was weighted on by men and women, and the women were made to wear French maid uniforms. This service was called mating. When asked why he did this, he answered, sexual liberation.

People had very different experiences with the Moor houses. Again, most folks are not joining the cult. They're taking some classes, right? But there are people who, like, live there. And over the years, they build separate Moor houses, right? We're like, they're all over the country and they're selling courses, and people are living. living there and having like compulsory sex, right? Because they're kind of told you have to constantly be having sex.

There's like quotas and stuff. And Vic keeps a strict in and outlist of his followers. And he'll encourage them to exchange sex with each other in order to improve their standings. How quickly does this like escalate? Ten years or so, I think. Something like that. You know, I mean, it lasts longer than that. But it's over like the first decade.

I think that like all this is slotting into place. As Hewitt writes, people were assigned job shifts as. technicians and their only duty was to fill a certain weekly quota of tricks or sexual service encounters. The technicians would look within the community for customers to have sex with that day and they would take payment using the group's internal paper currency. Residents were screened for STDs and forbidden from sex outside the group. Vic was criticized during his life, but the grift never exploded and some form of this community exists today. As one former teacher later said, the institute is a good scam. We call ourselves hustlers and other people marks. Victor

hustles their asses and their souls. He takes their duty. Do defeat himself, but he sees to it that they win too, right? Now, whether or not that's true, it's something different people have very different takes on. I wouldn't say certainly not everyone is winning. Not everybody. No. But the Morehouse Institute is mostly relevant to our story, because if you know, like in 1992, that's when they have, like the Morhouse Institute has one of their big legal spats and they get a bunch of bad press. And one of Vic's students, a guy named R.J. Testerman, leaves the group to found his own orgasm cult, the welcomed consensus, which our friend Nicole is going to join in 19, I think 97, in the late 90s.

Okay. So. The welcomed consensus. What an upsetting name. I don't like that at all. I don't like it, honey. I don't like that at all. Yeah, if you have any problems, it's actually answered by the name of the organization.

Yeah, that's right. Go back to the sign. Just tapping the sign. Yeah, tapping the sign. Jamie, you got anything to plug? Before we write out for a day, before we get back to orgasm cults? Before, yeah, before we cool off. You can listen to the Bechtel cast.

We're having our 10-year anniversary soon, which is nuts. You can listen to We, the N-House. I have a book that will be available for presale sometime in the summer. I'll let you know. Check Instagram, Jamie Chris Superstar. Rock on. Yep. All right, everybody. This has been the episode.

We'll be back with more of us having to say uncomfortable phrases to read in a broadcast, like Clistorial Stimulation, that nobody wants to sit and read off a script. That's not anybody's ideal day. I don't know. I think we all had a nice time. Part one is always the fun one. Part one is the fun. Because I've always been a pretty, like, sex positive guy. And by the end of, like, the research for this, I was like, stop fucking.

You people are doing it wrong. Stop. And stop doing drugs. You're doing that wrong, too. Get a job. All right, we're done. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website,

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