www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html
Enlarge This Image Noah Berger for The New York Times INNER BLISS At One Taste Urban Retreat Center, a resident practices orgasmic meditation (partner not shown).
Oprah Winfrey discusses living your best life in the bedroom, a coed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm hovers at the extremes. The founder of the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, Nicole Daedone, sees herself as leading "the slow-sex movement," one that places a near-exclusive emphasis on women's pleasure -- in which love, romance and even flirtation are not required. "In our culture, admitting our bodies matter is almost an admission of failure," said Ms Daedone, 41, who can quote the poet Mary Oliver and speak wryly on the intricacies of women's anatomy with equal aplomb. "I don't think women will really experience freedom until they own their sexuality." A core of 38 men and women -- their average age the late 20s -- live full time in the retreat center, a shabby-chic loft building in the South of Market district.
meditation and lead workshops in communication for outside groups as large as 60. But the heart of the group's activity, listed cryptically on its Web site's calendar as "morning practice," is closed to all but the residents. At 7 am each day, as the rest of America is eating Cheerios or trying to face gridlock without hyperventilating, about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation -- "OMing," for short. The couples, who may or may not be romantically involved, call one another "research partners." A commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating "the orgasm that exists between them," in the words of one resident, may sound like the ultimate California satire. But the Bay Area has a lively and venerable history of seekers constructing lives around sexual adventure.
The search for personal transformation, including through sex, led to the oceanside hot tubs at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, cradle of the human potential movement, and in the 1960s, communes flourished in the city, many espousing free love. One Taste is but the latest stop on this sexual underground, weaving together strands of radical individual freedom, Eastern spirituality and feminism.
Indiana University, who has studied San Francisco's sexual subcultures. As with many a commune before it, the leader of One Taste, Ms Daedone, is a polarizing personality, whom admirers venerate as a sex diva, although some former members say she has cultlike powers over her followers. They say she sometimes strongly suggested who should pair off with whom romantically. "There was always a pushing of peoples' boundaries," said Judy Silber, who lived at One Taste for three and a half years and left last fall. "We all knew it was a hardcore place, and we came to play hard." The group has drawn scant attention during its four and a half years -- perhaps because it is just the sort of community San Franciscans expect in their backyard -- although there was a brief sensation when The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the group's naked (nonsexual) yoga classes. Some are in life transitions, among them a baby-faced 50-year-old Silicon Valley engineer, a recently divorced man, who said that the practice of manually fixing his attention on a tiny spot of a woman's body improves his concentration at work. Most residents are young questers, seeking to fill an inner void and become empowered through Ms Daedone's blend of female-centric spirituality and sexuality. One, Beth Crittenden, 33, grew up in conservative Virginia tobacco country, a place, she said, where the fundamentals of the female anatomy were never discussed and masturbation was unmentionable. "I'd never done anything even in the dead of night," she said. She stumbled onto the center's Folsom Street building, with its comfy overstuffed sofas, and enrolled in a women's self-pleasure course because her relationships with men, as she put it, "kept running into a cement wall."
Next Page This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: March 22, 2009 An article last Sunday about the One Taste Urban Retreat Center, a San Francisco commune devoted to the female orgasm, misstated the surname of a former resident. Because of an editing error, the article also misstated the commune's location in one reference. As the article correctly noted, it is on Folsom Street, not Fulton Street.
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