One Taste - Press

Press

SF Weekly published two features on Onetaste, the first in 2007 titled "Sex and Sensuality," which focused on "the practice of orgasmic meditation, one stroke at a time," and a shorter piece in 2009 entitled "The Slow-Sex Movement Picking up Speed". In 2008, the Canadian daily newspaper the Toronto Star included a OneTaste instructor in a survey of teachers offering "a connection between sex and soul."

In March 2009, The New York Times featured OneTaste on the front page of its "Style" section. The article describes the organization as "the latest stop on this sexual underground, weaving together strands of radical individual freedom, Eastern spirituality and feminism." An Indiana University sociology professor who has studied San Francisco’s sexual subcultures, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, is quoted as saying “The notion of a San Francisco sex commune focused on female orgasm is part of a long and rich history of women being public and empowered about their sexuality.”

The article also notes, "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 cult like powers over her followers... Much of the community’s tone revolves around Ms. Daedone, a woman of considerable charm, although detractors regard her as a master manipulator." The article mentions two former members by name, Elana Auerbach and her husband Bill Press, who it quotes as having left to pursue a life that was "heart-focused rather than genital-focused". This was corrected in a letter to the editor, where Elana and Bill say they left One Taste because they found it a "manipulative, unhealthy and disempowering" environment. In the New York Times interview, Ms. Daedone insists she does not aspire to guru status, while acknowledging that "there’s a high potential for this to be a cult."

The New York Times article led to several blog and opinion columns. Salon.com ran an essay that referenced the Times piece and discussed the merits of women joining a community dedicated to female orgasm, concluding that "within a mainstream sexual culture defined almost exclusively by dudely desires" that it might be healthy. That same month, William Safire entitled his column on language "Orgasmic," and traced the gradual shift of the word's meaning "from the clinical 'climactic' to the metaphoric 'joyful.'" As his primary example of this shift, he cited the fact that his own paper had "two weeks ago reported at length on 'orgasmic meditation' in San Francisco."

Orgasmic meditation, slow sex and OneTaste were later covered by the New York Post, EnlightenNext, the Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, Time, Nicole Daedone's TEDx. and ABC News Nightline. In November 2012 an article advertising OneTaste sessions in the UK was published in Metro.