Nicole Daedone's new book Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm is in bookstores this week, and while it does offer a prescription for improving your life through a 15-minute daily practice Daedone calls Orgasmic Meditation (OM), it's mostly about reconnecting with our bodies and our intuitive knowledge to rebuild our relationships by stripping away a lot of the extra baggage we've attached to our sex lives. Her focus is on orgasm itself, the extraordinary experience that should be at the center of our sexual activity -- and, Daedone argues, at the center of our lives -- and how to make the most of it by making a practice of it.
I first wrote about Daedone in 2009, after her One Taste Urban Retreat Centers and the practice of OM made headlines in a feature in The New York Times titled "The Pleasure Principle," and this week had the great pleasure of catching up with her for a lengthy chat about orgasm, female power and happiness, and some extended food metaphors about sexual starvation. Hungry? Read on.
Let's start with your decision to call the book Slow Sex, with its implicit reference to the Slow Food movement.
"Slow Sex" came about as a concept as I was struggling to describe the practice of Orgasmic Meditation in a way that would translate for a bigger mainstream audience. Then I remembered hearing this great story about Alice Waters, and how she wanted to learn to cook. She didn't want to eat empty calorie foods. She didn't want to eat at McDonald's -- she wanted the opposite of fast food. But the alternatives available to her at the time were all these fancy French cooking classes, you know, with really elaborate recipes. She just wanted to cook some vegetables, and for the focus to be on stripping away all the excess, and that was a concept I could relate to. I was feeling the same way about sexuality: I didn't want empty, fast sex but I wasn't happy with many of the alternatives. I didn't want to take on some exotic notion of sexuality where you have to take on another spirituality and call your genitals by other names and get all mystical about it, and I wasn't interested in these sex manuals where you go through dozens of positions and get tips about picking out expensive lingerie and whatnot. She called it "Slow Food," and the name "Slow Sex" came to me as I was trying to describe this parallel. Everything we think we know about sex is just piling on all this extra stuff, like extra unnecessary ingredients. I wanted to focus on orgasm itself, on the center of passion: There are no extra ingredients you can pile on that make it better than what it already inherently is.
Early on in the book you write that "frequent access to the pleasure of orgasm is the key to finding joy, nourishment, and sustainable happiness." That's a powerful assertion, and it leads to the central question of your book: How do you access that transformational power?
Well, to begin with, I've struggled a lot in terms of the definition of "orgasm" itself, because the definition is so big and at the same time it's key that it still be rooted in the body and in the genitals. I think -- especially, as women -- we err in either bypassing that aspect and focusing on some more cosmic notion of orgasm or, in the other extreme, we have it fully rooted in the physical and then we miss the depth and richness that's available in the experience. Spanning both of those extremes was my challenge. A friend of mine describes orgasm as being "allergic to language": There are certain experiences that are so deeply, viscerally experienced that you can point to them but you can't accurately describe them. There's always that tension of being so close but not quite there.
There's a concept running through your book of "turning the lights back on" and getting sexual desire out in the open as something we talk about and something we do something about, rather than trying to keep it all dark and mysterious.
When we talk about "how do you access that power?" the questions that have to come first are, "How do we even talk about it?" and "What exactly are we talking about?" My background is in semantics and I remember reading this passage by Rainer Maria Rilke: "Our inability to describe the extraordinary has our ability to experience it atrophied." We have these most profound experiences that we can't communicate to anybody! If you don't articulate them in language some way then they just seem to fall away, and then what you remember is the crappy stuff, because we have a lot of language for the crappy stuff, for disappointment. I'm extremely interested in giving language to extraordinary experience. So let's turn the lights on! Let's share these extraordinary experiences together, and then let's talk about them.
The prescriptions in your book aren't rocket science: Beyond the specific stroking techniques and Orgasmic Meditation routines you outline, it all basically boils down to "pay attention to each other and to yourself." And yet there's still a need to explain that to most people, and people still seem to have some barriers to experiencing these basic, essential things in their relationships.
They are basic, and they are essential and... yes! The book was really written as a guide for people to find their way back to their own native wisdom. There are things that we just know. Right? Like, intuitively, we know how to eat well, we know that exercise is good for us, we know not working too much and taking time to spend with our families and friends is good. We know what it is to have really great sex, and yet it is so difficult to get out of the momentum away from our bodies and our pleasure and intimacy and connection. This book is really a guide to how to get out of that momentum and back into that place of tapping into what you know. To use another food metaphor, I talk in the book about cooking without a recipe and learning to trust in your own intuition, learning to feel your way through. I watch so many couples who are terrified to step away from these recipes they've been using for how to have successful sexual relationships. They feel like they're going to flounder without the habits they've been using to prop up their sex lives! There's a period of discomfort before their natural intuition wakes up, but it always does wake up. And that's really why I do what I do. Your sexual intuition will wake up if you allow it to, but it may take some practice.
Throughout the book you refer to "sex practice," in the same sense that someone might say "yoga practice." It's about something more than just practicing a technique over and over to get it right. Can you define what you mean when you say "practice" and why it's important?
That's a great question! I've never been asked that question. I think the simplest answer I can give is to again speak of that momentum away from intimacy with our lives. It's really key to be deliberate in terms of designing experiences for yourself. Most of the women who come to me will take care of everyone else before they'll take care of themselves, sexually and otherwise, and then their giving begins to feel empty to them. They feel like they have to keep giving in order to get, and it always leads to burnout. You know how they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first when the plane is going down? If you haven't taken care of your own needs it's going to take away from everything else you try to do. When you cordon off time for yourself, you're freer to have deeper experiences. Set aside 15 minutes a day for the practice of Orgasmic Meditation and see what it does for your life.
Why 15 minutes?
I think it's important to give some structure to those experiences: If I am going to have totally unstructured sexual time, you know, lounge around and have sex all day, it can be a little bit daunting unless I'm on vacation to do just that. I'm preoccupied, thinking, "Am I going to make it back to do the laundry and take care of the things I have to take care of?" But if there's actually a deliberate amount of structured time set aside for my orgasm, and nothing but my own orgasm, then I can go as deep as I want to go and know that I'm going to come out and be able to return to my everyday life refreshed. For me that's the idea of "sex practice," that you have this experience and experience it to the fullest, and then after you have it you go back to your every day life. You make space in your life for it. For some reason, and I do not know why this is, but the things that are best for us are the most difficult to make time for. That's why we make and break all those New Year's resolutions! It's something about not remembering that those experiences that don't necessarily fall overtly into "achievement" or "production" or "success" are important to feed those things that do.
Having some intentionality but also providing it with a structure and not leaving those experiences open-ended can in some ways enclose the experience and allow you to experience it more fully because you're not constantly preoccupied with the meta picture of how it's happening.
Now you're speaking my language! That's exactly how it is. Like, I do yoga everyday and my yoga class is 90 minutes long. If my yoga teacher suddenly said, "Today we're just going to go as long as we want," I would be in such a state of panic. Giving it some structure helps you have a fuller experience. Sometimes you need to have some structure to be able to depend on and come back to, in order to let go. With Orgasmic Meditation, I can get out my head for 15 minutes and that's a manageable chunk of time. You can incrementally increase the length of time in your practice if you like, but 15 minutes of intense sexual experience that's all about your own orgasm? A lot of women may have never had that! I remember when I was first introduced to Orgasmic Meditation I held on to those 15 minutes for dear life. Being that open, and that vulnerable, and that exposed for that period of time was a lot. But as a practice it gives you a time frame that you can prepare yourself for and it's a way of making bite-sized chunks of time for yourself. In my experience if a woman takes on the practice for 15 minutes a day for 30 days, her entire life will be fundamentally shifted by it.
Can you describe the transformation that you see in these women and couples you work with?
What I see in so many women are the sexual or orgasmic signs of hunger. You know how, if you don't eat, you feel kind of cranky or irritable or extra sensitive or prone to crying? Women try all these compensatory things to try to cover up this basic sexual hunger we have, and it can doom their relationships. I know I tried shopping, I tried eating, I tried not eating, I tried all this self-help stuff. Well, the transformation I see when women begin to practice OM is that a lot of those things, those compensations that we've created for the fact that we don't have the nourishment we want in sex... those begin to fall away as I see a woman moving into a deeper and deeper sense of nourishment. There comes to be this basic sense of rightness and intuitive knowing because she's reconnected with her body. This fundamental brokenness that happens when we disconnect from our bodies, from our sex, begins to be repaired.
Have there been any big surprises you've encountered as you've been doing this work over the last decade?
Men have no idea how much women want to have sex and want to experience closeness and, ultimately, orgasm. And women have no idea how desparately men want to please them. For whatever reason we've had it completely backwards on both counts, to our own mutual detriment. Thankfully, Orgasmic Meditation can help with that disconnect.
The phrase "Orgasmic Meditation" is interesting to me. We tend to think of "orgasmic" and "meditation" as two very different conditions.
The space in between is extraordinarily meaningful to me. To my mind most deep practices are a matter of maintaining a certain kind of dynamic tension. Yoga, for example, is about maintaing this dynamic tension between, on the one hand being relaxed and focusing on your breath, and on the other hand having all of your muscles, every fiber of your body awake and alive. We often associate orgasm as being on one side of the spectrum and meditation on the other: One is heedless and the other has discipline. But the beauty to me of orgasmic meditation is that it opens up all the gradients that are in between. I genuinely believe that there will come a day when you'll hear "orgasm" and "meditation" in the same sentence without whispering "orgasm," because OM is an extremely profound gateway to the same location that you end up in with those other practices, by which I mean a certain kind of concentration. And I'm not just talking about yoga or meditation: It's the same kind of concentration that a master chess player gets to, or an Olympic athlete, that place where they become one with the activity. I had never heard of that being available in the arena of sexuality before I got involved in this, but that's really what grounds Orgasmic Meditation.
I first heard of One Taste, "Slow Sex," and Orgasmic Meditation in 2009, when the New York Times article came out. What was the response to that exposure like? I remember people at the time talking about this new "orgasm cult." Obviously that's not the intention or the direction that you're taking, and I like the balance you strike in your book that this isn't some totally spiritual thing, nor is it some totally carnal and physical thing.
It can be incredibly daunting to try to speak to a larger audience! When the New York Times article came out I felt like all my nerve endings were being touched by everyone who read that article, because here I was introducing something that I hold very dear, that has drastically changed my own life, to people who of course would not understand it because they have never heard of anything like it. It's a fine line to walk, and I understand the skepticism people have. I was an academic, and I would have been so skeptical if I'd heard about something like this, but it just so happens that I ended up trying it before I'd really heard anybody talk about it, and the experience was so real that my rational mind couldn't argue with it. Still, it was devastating to hear some of the incredulous response to that article: It's quite a thing to have people come back and reduce your life's work to one word: "Diddling"! But it was also empowering to realize I could absorb that criticism and keep educating. Right now we're just opening the door and I know people are going to look at it like it's weird. In the 1950s, the things people said about yoga were instructive: It was written about like, "these turbaned men are taking advantage of our women." Well, now it's considered to be platform-agnostic: Anyone can write about yoga because it's so socially acceptable. That's what I hold onto: Some day Orgasmic Meditation will be as normal and socially acceptable as yoga is today, because people will realize just how much it can improve their lives.
We do live in a culture, in the United States in particular, where there's a pretty strong contrast between people's interest in sexuality and these puritanical strains that hold us back from exploring it. But I think you're right that there's also a craving for getting back to basics and stripping away excess in our lives to focus on what's important to us. Sex strikes me as a perfectly good place to start.
There does seem to be this underlying ethos in all these different arenas, whether it's Brian Eno creating music or Alice Waters making food, and that thing that we're craving is simplicity, really getting back to what we know. Good sex isn't like brain surgery or something. I think we make a mistake if we're trying to have sex and we're trying to look at the book with the 14 different positions, and we've got our lingerie on and our candles lit in here and... eh, it gets so complicated that you can't actually do it. Let's get back to a place where we're like, "I love you and I want to get close." What's really important is how good we feel together, where that is really what we're showcasing and embodying, rather than all that other crap.
For more on Nicole Daedone, Slow Sex, Orgasmic Meditation, One Taste, and The Turned On Women's Movement, visit NicoleDaedone.com and OneTaste.us
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