March 17, 2009--Morning Practice

For millennia men have been brilliant at figuring out ingenious ways to get their rocks off. From the establishment of patriarchical religions that feature inventive ways of keeping women in their place to encouraging multiple sex partners—wives and concubines—to, in contemporary times, the refinement of the sex business so that it now features Internet porn and “gentlemen’s clubs” where, for a generous gratuity, you can get your lap dance after watching your poll dance.

But in a world of gender inequality, women have, as in so many other fields, encountered a sexual glass ceiling. So maybe it is good to learn that they now have the One Taste Urban Retreat Center to go to receive their daily orgasm.

I am using language here as carefully as I can, without any intended disrespect, because at One Taste in either San Francisco (where of course it was founded) or in New York (where there is a now a franchise) women who are in residence receive their daily orgasm from the men who also live there.

There is no hanky-panky going on at One Taste, no sexual relations (to quote Bill Clinton’s carefully crafted legal definition). Rather, according to the not-so-staid New York Times, every morning before everyone trots off to work the following occurs:

At 7 a.m. each day, 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.

(See article linked below—sorry, only very discreet photos included.)

At One Taste this is called “morning practice” and the couples “research partners.”

Couldn’t they have come up with better ways to describe this? These euphemisms sound so boring and clinical. “Orgasmic meditation? Come on. And maybe they should call “morning practice” something like “circle jerk.” But, then again, that’s what we guys call our equivalent, though for the most part we have to service ourselves. What self-respecting woman would ever want to participate in something so gross?

But I am fascinated by the male “research partners.” Knowing men as I unfortunately do, what self-respecting male would sign up for this unremunerated task? In fact, it appears that they have to pay a fee to live in the One Taste loft. (By the way, what’s with the “One Taste” name itself? Sounds to me more like a fringy Bay Area health-food restaurant.) What dastardly acts have these men committed that they feel the need to expiate their guilt in this self-sacrificing way?

The again, maybe I’m being too cynical. Perhaps they are just good guys who recognize how exploited women have traditionally been. Or that they are the vanguard of the next version of the post-gender New Male. This I can get with.

One final thing, though, that I can’t get. Tantalizingly, just mentioned in the Times piece, with no details whatsoever, is a report about what is going on at the satellite New York City One Taste Center. There, one of the instructors (they need instructors for this?) reports that most of her “clients” are married Orthodox Jewish couples from Brooklyn.

Now, I’m from Brooklyn, and I am Jewish. So I know Brooklyn and I know the Hassidim who live there; and nobody, not even the New York Times, will ever convince me that those women with their long dresses and sheitels are going to lie on the floor half naked while some guy from the Village gets them OMing. No way. At least while their husbands are around.