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Bridget Phetasy, Playboy’s advice columnist on sex and relationships, is here to talk about her controversial article about orgasmic meditation.
We talk about cults, praying on people’s sexual shame, boundaries, consent, and the importance of trusting those little feelings that tell you something isn’t right even if you desperately want to ignore them.
Read Bridget’s article over on Playboy to get the full scoop.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Bridget and I talk about:
- How Bridget heard about orgasmic meditation and what brought her to her experience, as well as what OMing is.
- The importance of acknowledging that certain practices can be helpful and empowering while also being run in problematic ways – like yoga or religion.
- What happened when Bridget got to the Intro to OM class.
- The danger of telling people you get out what you invest in and how privileged and potentially problematic that is.
- Forcing people to use certain language and naming their experience for them and how that’s the antithesis of what we need right now around sexuality.
- Why Bridget started thinking about OMing as a cult.
- Gloves during sex and what they mean to us – Bridget has a very different perspective than I do around using gloves to masturbate a vulva.
- Being skeptical of situations where people are selling things or forcing you to use certain words around sex and how easy it is to manipulate people.
- What happened to Bridget after this experience and what it triggered in her.</>
- The response to Bridget’s article from people who have been harmed by the orgasmic meditation community and business.
- Bridget’s past trauma around sexuality and healing and why we must trust our inner reactions to situations, those gut feelings, even if we desperately don’t want to trust them.
- Why it’s our job, as educators and journalists, to be the watch dogs that are looking out for potentially problematic and abusive situations and to call them out, even if it’s uncomfortable and challenging.
Resources discussed in this episode
Bridget mentions the clit cult article, which is this piece by Refinery29.
About Bridget Phetasy
When she’s not penning Playboy.com’s Sex & Dating Column or the Playboy Advisor, you can usually find Bridget interviewing people on her podcast Benched. Once she was dared to do stand-up comedy. It is now her primary reason for getting out of bed. In her free time Bridget wrangles two insane puppies and is working on her humorous self-help book, Seducing Men Is Like Hunting Cows.
You can follow Bridget on Twitter @bridgetphetasy and on Facebook, too. Her new podcast, Benched, is on Twitter, too, @benchedpodcast.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Well, I am recording this from Canada because this past week, we finally made the official move. I am now officially a permanent resident. I am surrounded by boxes in my new office and sound tired because I am. It’s been amazing to finally get here and to be unpacking after months and months of preparation and wondering and hoping. So yeah. I am now a West Coast person. I’m super excited about this episode this week. Hopefully all of you who are Patreon supporters popped over to patreon.com/sgrpodcast and listen to your extra juicy, extended version of my chat with Dylan, where she talked all about the orgies that she’s been a part of and her new epic sexual adventures; and including crossing off a DP scene from her fuck-it list. If you want to hear that and you’re not a Patreon supporter, you can support at any level to get access to that extra special extended edition.
Dawn Serra: Of course, I’m so grateful that once again, this episode is sponsored by Talkspace, which is an online therapy company that means therapy can be super affordable and confidential and convenient because you can do it anytime, anywhere from your phone, from your tablet, from your computer. You can do video or audio or just simply type into the chat which is great. If you’re working through something like sexual shame and facing someone in person seems like way too much, you can use Talkspace’s wonderful online feature to sign up or to learn more and to let Talkspace know that their support of the show is worth the investment. Make sure you go to talkspace.com/sgr for Sex Gets Real. You can use your $30 off your first month with coupon code SGR. So whether you’re working through relationship issues or sexual shame or you’re just really struggling right now and could use some support, and hell, all of us could use some support in one form or another. You can specifically ask for a kink-aware and a sex positive therapist, and they will find someone who is a great fit for you. So head to talkspace.com/sgr and use coupon code SGR to get $30 off your first month.
So this week’s episode is a really interesting one. I read an article on Playboy by their sex and relationship columnist Bridget Phetasy. She had gone to an Orgasmic Meditation Intro Course, a lot of people know that is OMing and she had a really, really interesting experience. Now, I haven’t talked too much about OMing on the show. I myself have not attended any of their classes. What I have done is talked to other people who have had a variety of experiences, and Bridget’s, I think, is really important for us to highlight. I’ve got a link to her fascinating article on playboy at sexgetsreal.com/ep164 for Episode 164.
Dawn Serra: I think that it’s really important for us to hold space for our multiple experiences. What I mean by that is, I know people who have used orgasmic meditation for tremendous growth. They have found validation in their pleasure. Specifically for folks with a vulva, they have realized that their pleasure is accessible and can be a part of the experience and in fact, that they’re allowed to ask for things that center their pleasure. But I’ve also talked to a number of other people who have had some pretty troubling experiences with OM – specifically the way that workshops are run and the way that the company who runs it handles things. That’s where Bridget’s story comes in.
Bridget went to an intro class and had a very unique experience that I want all have us to think about from a grander scale of when people are selling you on one type of answer to solve all your problems on very expensive solutions that are going to “change your life”, that we need to be really skeptical. The reason for that is that human experience, specifically sexual experience, is incredibly varied. We must be creating spaces where lots of different types of language and experiences are accepted and welcomed, where all different kinds of bodies and traumas are held gently. There is danger in creating a monetized business solution that is very, very well marketed to people who insist that their experiences are not their experiences, and who try to reframe them to fit within a very narrow framework and paradigm. So I invite you to listen to this chat with Bridget. Towards the end, it does get pretty emotional and intense, Bridget talks about some trauma that she experienced.
Dawn Serra: Also, I just want to mention that throughout this episode, the phrases “crazy” and “insane”, get used a lot to stress how bizarre and unusual, and stressful the circumstances were. Since you know, if you’ve been a longtime listener, that I am doing my best to name ableist language, I just want to name that so that if those words bother you, you can prepare yourself a little bit. But I look forward to hearing what you think about this. I think that it’s a small part of a much larger story, but I think it’s a very important part. And I want all of us to be much more aware and educated, and schooled in seeing places where problematic behavior is happening.
So a little bit about Bridget – When she’s not penning playboy.com sex and dating column or the Playboy advisor, you can usually find Bridget interviewing people on her podcast Benched. Once she was dared to do stand up comedy, it is now her primary reason for getting out of bed in her free time. Bridget wrangles to insane puppies and it’s working on her humorous self-help book, Seducing Men is like Hunting Cows. So here is my chat with Bridget and all about orgasmic meditation
Dawn Serra: Welcome to the show, Bridgette. I’m so excited to have you here.
Bridget Phetasy: Thank you for having me. I’m honored.
Dawn Serra: Yay. So how I got connected with you was you write for Playboy, you’re their sex and relationship advice columnist, so of course, I will have a link to your column on sexgetsreal.com/ep164 for this episode because I want everyone to go check it out. But you wrote a piece called The Cost of Healing: What Everyone Ignores about Orgasmic Meditation. I’m sure lots of listeners are familiar with OMing, the founder of OM wrote a book called Slow Sex, that I’m sure a lot of people have also read and there’s a mixture of experiences. But for people who aren’t familiar, how was it introduced to you?
Bridget Phetasy: I had never heard of it, which is hilarious being that I’m a hippie and also in the sex and relationship world, although I constantly am hearing about things that I’ve never heard about before. So I guess it’s not that weird, but the woman who recruited me to go to one of their da intro classes – she saw me on Holly Michaels Show. It’s on Playboy – they’re on Playboy radio. They’re big proponents of a swinger life. They’re amazing. They had me on their show, and I think she saw it. Then she reached out to me on Facebook and said, “Oh, hey. We’re in the same industry. I’d love to have you come check this out.” I knew nothing about it. Then I signed up and ran it by my editor, who was like, “We did this three years ago, Bridget.” I was like, “Listen to what I discovered!” He’s like, “Yeah, we covered that three years ago.” “I’m glad you’re our expert.” I’m sorry if there’re dogs barking, I have two dogs. They’re very defensive of the house. But he was like, “I’d love to get your take on it.” He would probably live to regret that, I say in the article because it took me two weeks to get my mind around it.
So the intake person called me and she was asking me all these questions if I’d ever heard of OM, and she made it sound like, “You’re going to take your pants off and some stranger is going to OM you.” Which is basically strokes – she made it sound like I was going to get stroked. For those two or three people who don’t know what it is, the OM practice is a practice where one person is the recipient and one person is a strokee, and they very specifically stroke a very specific part of your clip for about 15 minutes. And there’s a whole mess and a whole everything that goes along with it. Lots of terminology. Lots of made up words. So I was like, “Oh, what did I get myself into?” Because I thought it was just meditation. I was like, “Oh, I just thought it was some form of mental masturbating,” which is what I consider all meditation. I didn’t realize this was actually like– I don’t know, I just don’t know how this one slipped through the cracks.
Bridget Phetasy: So I brought my friend with me, she’s also a journalist. I just wanted somebody to go have the experience with and so she came along. We went down, it was a Saturday in downtown LA. So that’s how I heard about it., but I didn’t have a chance to read every single blog online nor did I even realize that so many had been written until after the fact because it was also last minute. Which is actually a good thing, I think.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, that way you were probably like, “I’ll see what happens.” Instead of having all of these influences.
Bridget Phetasy: Exactly. I think I might have – if I had had more time to prep and to look into it, I’m not sure that I would have just been so wide eyed, like a newborn baby in the world. I was like, “What is this? What’s going on?” Like on an acid trip.
Dawn Serra: So I have one friend who actually was part of an OMing group for about three years, and she had a wonderfully positive experience with them and made really good friends. So part of what I want to acknowledge for everyone listening is that there are people out there who have done OMing and had really transformative experiences and tapped into pleasure, and parts of their bodies that they didn’t know they could. But on the same time, I have talked to a number of people who have had some pretty traumatic experiences as a result of OM. Interestingly enough, Sunny Megatron who has a showtime show called Sex with Sunny Megatron and her husband, Ken, who’s the producer, they have an entire show around sex. They’ve done clown sex and doll sex and balloon sex, and they’ve gone and talked to all these people who have all these different things. They are very public about the fact that of all of the people they’ve gone and talked to, and experienced with, their OM experience was the most unsettling.
Bridget Phetasy: Really?
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Bridget Phetasy: Interesting. One of the things that’s been brought to my attention, my article got posted in a message board that has all these OM survivors. I’m not sure if we can say the company name or not on here, but the people on the message board – some of them emailed me and they were trying to make it clear that there’s a difference between OM and that company that is selling OM. And I still haven’t really figured out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Because in my research, it seems like the technique, although it did exist before the founder wrote a book about it and started her little cult community up in the Bay Area, that it was basically passed down through what was known to be a cult. So, I don’t know, I hadn’t heard of it anywhere else outside and I could be mistaken, but it seems like in terms of monetizing it, that specific company that I wrote about does the – they’re leading the charge. Everyone I know who OMs or has been, is in the OM practice, that’s where they first heard of it.
I still haven’t really figured out how to differentiate but some people have made it clear that I shouldn’t judge the OMing because of the organization. It’s like, separate the practice from the messenger. So it sounds like a lot of people have found a lot of good in the practice. It’s like anything, even yoga. You have these people who are messed up personalities and that can taint your experience of the practice.
Dawn Serra: Yes. I think there’s something really beautiful in a practice that centers female pleasure – a space that’s notoriously neglected when we talk about sex, that we know that – to speak very heteronormativity – that men assume that their orgasm is a given and that an orgasm with a woman is a nice to have. So to have a practice that actually is all about non-reciprocal pleasure for someone with a clitoris, I think, is a pretty wonderful thing. I can see people really needing that – that permission of like, “I don’t have to perform with you, I can just receive this touch and this pleasure.” For me, I think that’s a wonderful thing. I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about what happened when you actually got to that class and what you started to not feel very good for you as it unfolded.
Bridget Phetasy: I mean, you just brought up so many things in my brain. I don’t even know how to… We went in and right away, it was just a weird vibe. I don’t know, there’s usually not a word to describe those kind of – whatever the other 90% of my brain that I’m not aware of is picking up on body language. What is it – 90% of all communication is nonverbal, some crazy number. The way they were dressed seemed overtly sexual and that in a weird kind of alluring way. Then when we went in, there was a very clear power structure, which is always unnerving to me and something that I’m already a little bit hesitant about when there’s – when there are clearly people who are kind of scurrying around. I don’t know. It’s a weird vibe, too, because it’s not any different than if you were on a set of a movie and there are PAs running around and the directors. But there is something weirdly different about it. There’s this weird bowing of the head. It wasn’t physical. It felt like that submissive obedience or something. So that kind of struck me right away. And then I don’t like windowless rooms. I don’t like them. They creep me out. And it was a soundstage. So it was a windowless space and it had been raining non-stop. It was the first beautiful sunny day we had had. So when I left, I was just so angry that I wasted a whole day inside.
So that kind of kicked it off and we hello, and I sat down and then they got right into it. They brought out a little platform. They sat down and got everybody to share why they were there. That was weird too. Because the whole tone of – somebody would be like, “I’m here because I was molested” or “I’m an incest survivor.” They’re like, “Oh, nice, gorgeous share. Next.” They’re trying to get through 75 people of why they’re there and people would be confessing these soul-bearing horrific traumas they experienced. It felt very minimizing, and then move on to the next person.
Dawn Serra: Just a quick aside, don’t forget that there are going to be some things later in this episode that could potentially be really triggering, especially if you’ve experienced certain kinds of trauma. So 1.) take care of yourself around that, and 2.) if you don’t already have support, Talkspace is this episode’s sponsor, and they are an online therapy company that matches you with a therapist that is experienced and licensed, and based on exactly what you are looking for. It’s as little as $32 a week and with our coupon code you get $30 off your first month. So if you find that you are in a place where you could really use some support processing some trauma, processing something that has really been troubling you or a place where you feel stuck, go to talkspace.com/sgr for Sex Gets Real and use coupon code SGR to get that $30 off. Back to Bridget and her story.
Bridget Phetasy: Even before they started the sharing, everybody who is just chattering while they were waiting for them to sit down and get everyone going, there’s a DJ– The tone was just so weird to me. I couldn’t really get my mind around it. It was like, “Is this a party? Am I in a strip club?” I don’t know, I felt like I was in San Francisco, one of those places that’s like a… There’s a bar in San Francisco and it’s half Indian restaurant half Irish. There’s all these crazy confusing paradoxical things happening. It’s hard. You’re like, “What’s the tone here? What’s the theme?” Which is fine for a bar, not so okay in an intimate, vagina setting.
Dawn Serra: I think it makes people vulnerable.
Bridget Phetasy: Yeah, it preys on vulnerable. I mean, there is something – I don’t know. It’s not like they’re volunteering their efforts. It preys on that desire. It’s such a basic human desire to have a better quality of life or to feel like they belong, or to fill some kind of hole. So I was definitely – I’ve been in different things. I hate whenever I hear, “You get what you invest in something.” I do agree there’s some truth to that. But I get a lot of things out of organizations that are donation only and free. So that line of thinking always trips a little bit of a warning for me, because it’s like what classic con-man say.
Dawn Serra: Absolutely.
Bridget Phetasy: So that was how it started. When people were sharing and they were minimizing, I didn’t like that. It just felt, I don’t know. I didn’t share something that revealing and so I couldn’t imagine how that would feel. And it felt long, and then they gave their testimonials. I was listening to them but they I guess, they weren’t that engaging because they felt so rehearsed. I was like, I said it in the article. People have called me out on that too. They’re like “You weren’t listening to their testimonials, you didn’t hear how life changing they were.” I heard how life changing they were. But it’s also their job to sit up there and tell us that these things changed their life. It’s not like some random person on the street who’s telling me this. This is someone who’s getting paid to tell me that their life was changed by this – that’s literally what their job is. It did have that infomercial vibe, the testimonials, where it’s like, “I use this mop in my kitchen and my floors have never been cleaner.”
I was thinking how easy it is to start a cult, basically. I was like, here we’ve taken such a basic– I was thinking about Bikram yoga and how he took – just ripped out a sequence of poses that had been there forever and added heat and branded it. I was thinking about, even something like soulcycle where it’s like, “Now we’re going to take cycling and add some push ups and music.” It’s all marketing. It’s all marketing. I think that was the reverie I was going – the rabbit hole I went down while they were giving their testimonials was like, “Wow, what a great marketing scheme this is.” Then they did the demo right before lunch and that was weird.
Bridget Phetasy: I mean, progressively as the day went on, I was getting more and more agitated. Because then they did the demo. I was off to the left so I couldn’t really see. I wasn’t right in front. They brought out a massage table and put it on the little platform.Then they had the couple get up there and he stroked her for 15 minutes. While they did that, they wanted everybody to start calling out what they were feeling in their body. So the sensations that were coming up. It was weird the way everyone’s calling it out, because the people who were in the back – the volunteer who had been to six or seven of these, they started it off. They would say it almost very robotically, “Heat in my balls.” It was so, so weird.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Bridget Phetasy: So I started losing it. I couldn’t even look. I was looking down. I felt like a child in church. I was flashback to Catholic school and my best friend and I would be in church and something would happen. I would have to contain my laughter and it was painful. It was like I was holding my breath, trying to breathe, breathing through the laughter. I’m a comic, too, and a writer. So it’s hard for me sometimes to fully immerse myself in any experience, let alone an experience that has this weird element of ridiculousness to it.
I don’t want to take away from anyone who is in the experience, because if someone is getting something out of it and finding God and profound stillness, I don’t want to interrupt that with my hysterical laughter. So I just sat there and tried to keep it together for 15 minutes – the longest 15 minutes of my life. Then it was lunch, and we stayed for lunch, which was also more testimonials. That was where they were trying to sell you on the bigger – becoming OM certified. So basically you can teach.
Bridget Phetasy: My friend, she stayed and I looked at her and I was like, “How much is it?” She’s like, “14.” I’m like, “1400?” She’s like, “Thousand.” I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? Get out of here. That is insane. To do this? No, that’s so much money. Go become a nurse or something.” I mean, that’s so much money to me. Maybe I’m crazy, but that is a lot of money to spend. So we stayed for that and they asked me why I wasn’t participating. They really asked, “Bridget, we noticed you’re awfully quiet during the demonstration. Why didn’t you call out any of your sensations?” I was honest. I’m like, “Honestly, I was just trying not to laugh. I was trying not to laugh.” They were like, “Oh, that’s a totally normal response. A lot of people– ” Even the way they talk to me. I’m not exaggerating, this is the way they spoke, “That’s a totally normal response and a lot of people have it. That’s just you not being able to embrace the orgasm. It’s very powerful and charged, and I don’t think you’re fully able to take it on.” I was like, “Okay, lady, whatever.” I sat there because I am curious, and as a journalist, I’m so always going to be polite. But there was a part of me that was like, “Don’t tell me I’m crazy because I’m in a crazy situation.”
I didn’t like that they were trying to make me feel like – they could have been like, “Yeah, it is a little different at first, the first time you see it. Isn’t it kind of funny?” or whatever. But just trying to normalize it like that. I was like, “You’re denying my own experience. I don’t like that. Especially in a place where I’m supposed to feel like you take my experience into consideration, but that blanket, like, “Oh, this is your fault.” I didn’t like that at all. Even before the demo, I was trying to go to the bathroom ‘cause I’ve been drinking tea all morning, and they wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. And that was a big red flag. They’re like,” Oh, no, that’s just because you’re nervous.” That’s what they told me. I’m like, “I’m not fucking nervous about seeing someone get an orgasm.” I’ve seen people have orgasms before. I’m not a virgin and I watch a lot of porn, and I’ve been to sex parties. This isn’t my first rodeo.” I don’t know. That was when it shifted from me being like, “Oh, this is a little weird,” to “I don’t like this. I don’t like any of it.”
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I know some of the stuff that really stood out for me as I was reading your article was 1.) that not allowing you to pee and trying to tell you what was going on. Also exactly what you’re saying about you saying, I’m trying not to laugh, and then them telling you what that means. For me, as a sex educator, my job is to help people actually figure out what it is that they’re feeling and then let that be true. It sounds like what they’re trying to do is actually control people’s experiences. The other thing that I really found disconcerting is that they told people like you have to call it the pussy or the cock.
Bridget Phetasy: Yeah, that was weird and I don’t know if that’s changed or not. It was never ever explained to me why. I guess it was – there’s some reason for why it was called that. Then when I was talking to – some people who emailed me, I asked them what the deal with that was, and they said, “Oh, no, the language has changed now.” So those people must not have been updated. Because I kept looking at my friend – Pussy has become, whether we like it or not, a pretty charged word because of the politics that were surrounding it. So even hearing and even using that term, when it’s supposed to be clinical– That was the other thing that I couldn’t really figure out where it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to take this orgasm to another place where it’s beyond the orgasm 2.0, where it’s beyond…” whatever, the end result based orgasm – the climax based orgasm. And to a place where you’re just in the orgasm state.
So I couldn’t really figure out if it was sexual. Then there’s this whole clinical aspect of it, and the rubber gloves and then all of– Again, it was too many competing – just seeing rubber gloves and hearing someone say, “Now touch the pussy.” It’s so fucking weird to me because that those two things have such different connotations in your brain from birth – from a young, when you see rubber gloves, you’re like, “Oh, clinical, doctor,” at least I do. Then hearing it juxtapose with the word pussy and cock. It was so – I don’t know. It made me feel really uncomfortable. I felt like I was watching someone get violated because of that juxtaposition, because I automatically think, doctor when I see someone with gloves near a vagina. The only time anyone’s ever had gloves near my vagina has been when my GYNO’s going in.
Dawn Serra: I used gloves for sex all the time.
Bridget Phetasy: Do you?
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Bridget Phetasy: I’m sure that a lot of people do.I’m sure that that’s very common.
Dawn Serra: But I totally get what you’re saying in that, when I think you’re doing– Because I’ve been to hand sex demos before, where people are teaching you hand techniques for sex with a vulva or sex with a penis. I think one of the big things is for educators saying, “This is the language I’m going to use, but use the language that feels good for you.” Because for a lot of people saying cock feels terrifying and/or it feels gross. So giving people the chance to use the language.
One of the things I’ve seen done really well is, “This might turn you on a little bit, and that’s super okay. You also might feel awkward, and that’s also super okay, this is kind of a weird situation, but we’re just going to do our best and if you have questions, let me know.” And what I’m hearing is this like, “We’re the authority and we’re trying to have this very serious thing,” but at the same time, not allowing people to have their reactions and use their words and actually explain their experiences. So then you get this weird like, “Is it sexy or is it not? Am I allowed to feel the way that I feel?”
Dawn Serra: To me, I think what’s so shocking is to then when you’re uncomfortable and you’ve shared a trauma, and you’ve just seen someone have an orgasm which may be the very first time you’ve ever really seen that in a public space and so you’re feeling vulnerable – to then have people saying, “Hey, if you take this weekend course, it’s only $500” or “If you want to do our retreat, it’s only $4,000.” Which are the actual prices, right? I mean, it feels to me very, very questionable if you’ve got people in heightened states or triggered states or disassociated states and now you’re trying to sell them things.
Bridget Phetasy: Yeah. Which is exactly when they tried to sell everybody on that, “If you act today…” where it was after the demo, where they had explained the room was going to be supercharged, and they’re like, “If you’re excited about this…” They didn’t even try to hide that. It was like, “Go run back that right now with your credit card.” I don’t know. I guess it’s because I was thinking about what you’re saying – it’s like yeah, I’ve actually used gloves during sex, too, but they were black. So maybe it was– I don’t know maybe it was just standard white doctor gloves that threw me to like, “Oh yeah, I have you use gloves but they’ve always been sexy and black.”
Dawn Serra: Black or purple.
Bridget Phetasy: Yeah, I don’t know. Even the way they put them on creeps me out. I was like, “Everything about this is so…” I know that a lot of my experience, all of it, it’s been filtered through my own experiences and my own view of the world and whatever filters there are that I’m going to project on to that experience. But it did feel like there wasn’t… When you’re taking a situation like that and then you’re trying to assign feelings that they want you to have, it feels very manipulative. So suddenly I’m being manipulated. My experience is being manipulated so that I can fit their version of what this experience is so that I need them, or I want them or they’re trying to figure out how to trigger my interests or whatever. The more that I’ve learned from people who have been on the inside, that’s absolutely what they’re doing. They don’t even try and hide the fact. And when they’re training them that they should – they’re using all that information that you give when you’re talking about why you’re there, when they do the intake to basically find your desire points and figure out how to squeeze as much money as they can out of you.
One guy emailed me and told me that he was at one session where a guy stood up and the founder was there. He said, “I’m here despite the fact that my wife is divorcing me and my teenage girls aren’t talking to me because I’m spending all their college money and their inheritance on OM, and I’m still here.” And she gave him a huge applause and everyone in the room supported that. It doesn’t seem like a healthy… If you took that in any situation, say that he was a gambling addict, nobody would be clapping. Spending your children’s college inheritance on anything is usually a red flag that you’ve gotten in some kind of rabbit hole that you should probably find your way out of
Dawn Serra: Yeah. There was actually a piece that I read, maybe two or three years ago, by a woman who– I believe it was Boston, but I know for sure it was in the northeast, who had gone to a couple of OM sessions. This is back when – even in the introduction, everyone got OMed. So you show up for your first time and you take your pants off, and you have someone manipulate your clit. For some people, that’s rad. For other people, it’s not. So she had gone a couple of times and decided, “Maybe this will be cool for me.” But she showed up at this one session and she didn’t have a partner. So she was just going to go and see if anybody felt like a good fit, and if not, then she was going to either observe or leave. There was a gentleman there who kept saying, “Hey, I’d really like to be your partner.” And she got this really terrible feeling from him so she turned him down. The organizers actually came to her and said, “He’s paid a lot of money to be here and you don’t actually have a partner. So you really need to consider having him as a partner.” She said, “No, I really don’t feel comfortable with that.” And they continued to pressure her and said, “If you’re not going to let him be your partner, then you’re gonna have to leave.”
Bridget Phetasy: Whoa.
Dawn Serra: So she ended up leaving and talking to some other people who had similar experiences, where they were pressured to allow men they didn’t know to touch them, because the men had paid their $500 and OM had to deliver a clitoris. So that was when I really started paying attention to – To me, I see nothing wrong at all with public sex or with having a stranger touch you or from doing pleasure, but when it gets into a place where there’s expectations and people aren’t honoring your boundaries and setting really clear rules around protecting the people making themselves most vulnerable. And making these promises and then reading your account, and hearing from other people – it’s just red flag after red flag after red flag.
Before we hopped on the call, I think one of the things you said that was so profound was, we need to pay attention when we start getting those feelings in our gut, around any kind of leader: be it a yoga leader or an OM leader or a kink leader – that maybe something isn’t feeling good and yet we talk ourselves out of it. We let people convince us that it’s okay, and then we find ourselves in really terrible situations that are potentially really traumatic. I know you talked about in the article how you left and you actually were really fucked up for a couple of days because you were so triggered.
Bridget Phetasy: I don’t even know if I’m still quite – I feel like it kind of set so many things in motion, but it’s good because I have a lot of support and a great therapist and all these things. When I left and started reading – so I had my experience and then I wrote down everything that I felt just in my experience, and then started reading every article that had been written about it. And I started feeling crazy. I was like, “Am I crazy? Why am I the only person that…” I think I’d read one before I went in. I think it was the big one that somebody did and it was actually really good, because it seemed pretty neutral. It was the clique cult one. I started doubting my own experience because they had been doubting it. Then as I read all these other pieces, I was like, “Why?” I would have thought that I would have gone online and it would have been one thing after another. People being like, “This is crazy.”
I mean, I’ve had emails from therapists up in the Bay Area thanking me. One therapist wrote to me and she said she’s been trying to get journalists to write it for seven years – an investigative report into the house up there and the whole or community that exists around it; and that journalists would start and their editors would almost always abandon it because the founder’s so litigious. And that’s a big red flag. When you can’t even investigate something that’s not good.
Bridget Phetasy: I did have my own personal trauma come up that I didn’t even realize. I mean, I’m 38 years old. I’ve been through a lot. I’ve done a lot of work. Only now, I would say in the past two years, a large part of the reason for that probably is due to the fact that I actually have been sober for over three years. So a lot of stuff that I was medicating is now coming up. But I would also say that I’m only just now beginning to understand trauma, and how it affects your body and life forever. I think I thought that you could just get over it and understanding that you have to really integrate it, and that things in your life are going to bring it up again in a different way that you might not have expected. Then it’s time for another evaluation or reintegration. That’s kind of what happened where it was a situation from when I was 19, and it was a man who is very close to me.
At a time when I was very vulnerable, I was 19, and I was just out of rehab for a heroin addiction. He sold me on this idea of sexual spirituality. It was very insidious. I was so desperate. I was so desperate for anything because I felt so lost. I didn’t have anything. I have been completely emptied out by my addiction. I lost everything: I lost my family, I’ve been kicked out of school, I’ve been fired from my very first job. I was a straight A student. I had no idea how I got to that point, and didn’t really think things could get worse until they did. Then he came along and was somebody who had been in my life for a while because of the nature of his relationship to my mother. He’s my stepdad. He came in and I was like, “Oh, this man who’s been a little bit crazy my whole life is acting like a father figure, finally, and somebody who’s supportive of me and believes in me.” It was like the boiling frog – just little things like, “You need to get comfortable laying with me.”
Bridget Phetasy: It was that same thing of that feeling like something’s not right but I didn’t want something that to be right. I wanted it to be not what I felt like it was, because that alternative version of the… the reality was too hard for me to even get my mind around at that age. And that’s why I think I felt so much rage when I left the intro class because I did see young people in there. The mama bear in me makes me want to cry right now, it just came out. I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me with that?” Because if I was that nineteen year old girl and had found something like that, I probably would have bought it hook, line, and sinker. There is not any doubt in my mind because I was so impressionable and so desperately wanting – just so vulnerable.
It brought up all of that shit, all of it. All of it came up, the feelings of like, “Is this my fault?”, doubting my own experience, “Is this real?” Then also feeling abandoned by people who were supposed to protect me. So all of it came up. So obviously, just talking about it. Right now, I’m actually more upset again, for the fact that people do this and exploit people, and on top of exploiting their spirit, they exploit them for money too. I don’t know. I cannot think of a single example of when you start taking sex and spirituality and money, and mish mash them all together, and have that be a good thing. Yeah, I’m sure one exists, maybe, but I can’t think of any time when you take those three things– The waters get so murky and there’s already so much shame around spirituality and sexuality. Then there’s already so much shame around people and their financial relationship.I feel like money and sex, that’s fine. That seems to be like a straight business transaction. Even money and spirituality, but for some reason, when you take the three of them, it gets real, real muddy real fast.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I agree. I do think there are some people out there who do it well. But I think that it takes constant vigilance. I also think that it takes people who are deeply trauma-informed, and who have people on their team who are deeply trauma-informed because you cannot have people saying, “I was molested.” “I’m an incest survivor.” “I’m a rape survivor.” “I’m a multiple rape survivor.” “I was raised in a place where my sexuality is a deep source of shame and not have that received with genuine care and genuine support, and to have it like ‘Thanks for sharing. Let’s move on.’” That’s a dangerous, dangerous place to be.
I mean, thank you so much for sharing yourself and your story with us in this because I think you’re so right. The listeners know I’m a multiple rape survivor and so I’ve talked about that at length on the show.
Bridget Phetasy: “Oh, and I’ve been raped.” For some reason this brought up that spiritual, that weird slippery…
Dawn Serra: Yeah, anybody who’s in a leadership position, who is then requesting access to your body or who is creating rules around how you experience your body, and then you’re right, you start adding money on top of that – that is a very, very, very fine line and a tight edge to walk ethically.
Bridget Phetasy: It’s not ethical. I don’t think it is. I mean, I think most people get in trouble for it at some point when they’re trying to walk that line. Because it runs into – you hear about all these Ashrams where there are these cult leaders who have such a huge personality and they’re taken advantage of– I mean, Ashrams are a hotbed of people who are lost in the world. It’s so disconcerting to me that it’s so supported by people that are trustworthy. So many people look up to Tim Ferriss, for example.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I think the takeaway that I want for listeners in sharing your experiences is you’re allowed to love masturbating, and you’re allowed to love the technique of OMing if it’s worked for you, and you’re allowed to share your body with others, and you’re allowed to pay for sex, and you’re allowed to have all of these things. But we need to hold people accountable who are taking advantage and being manipulative. We also need to create safe spaces where when we’re feeling like something’s not quite right, it’s okay to actually bringing that up, right? Whether it’s someone who’s running a kink workshop, or someone who’s organizing a play party, or someone who has a multimillion dollar business doing something like OMing. We really need to care for ourselves in those spaces, because it’s so easy to have boundaries, pushed to be manipulated and coerced. Because there’s so much power at play that can be invisible, especially to people who are new to it.
The first time you go to a workshop, you don’t realize there’s power dynamics in the room, but that expert at the front of the room has a tremendous amount of power. It’s easy to to be influenced by that. So having conversations like this, I think, is important just because if it helps to raise that awareness just a little bit so that we can ask some questions and trust that gut feeling – because to me, it’s better to go into a situation and have that like, “Something about this isn’t feeling good,” and to just leave. Then decide, “Maybe I should give it another try,” rather than, “I should tough it out because someone said it was great.” And it ends up being terrible.
Bridget Phetasy: Yeah, and traumatic. Because that’s the thing about trauma is that when it does come up, you can actually re-traumatize yourself. If you’ve had non-verbal sexual assault, incest survivors, if you are non-verbal at that stage, you don’t even know what’s going to trigger your trauma. It’s buried so deeply in your body, that if you don’t have people who know, it would be so easy and especially in a situation like that to trigger something in you that you didn’t even know is there. And if you don’t have someone who’s trained in helping you with basically PTSD, which is what will come up – ground your feet, where’s your butt touching the chair, name five things that are blue in the room – get you back into yourself. If you don’t have people who are trained in that, it can be so massively dangerous.
The emails that I’ve received and all– I can’t even tell you. The stuff that I’ve gotten since that, I was so scared to write it because I did feel isolated and alone, and I didn’t want to call out other journalists. I felt very isolated, in my opinion. But now that I’ve received all of these emails from people and the stories that they tell me, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad because they don’t feel so alone, because they didn’t feel represented either in their experience. Just hearing a lot of the stories of people being triggered – one person said, even if you stop one person from going into that without some other perspective on it, then you’ve done a good job. It did.
Bridget Phetasy: I think our responsibility as, in particular sex, educators to be highly – and as you are a rape survivor as I am – to be highly sensitive to the trauma that many, many, many, many other people have experience in their life. Like you said, when they’re going into these, I kind of think it’s like our job. We need to be the watchdogs and the people who are keeping other people who we might feel– We need to be the mama bears that are looking out and saying, “No, you can’t take these young, impressionable men and women and mess with their minds,” because essentially, that’s really what it is.
Dawn Serra: I would love for people to be able to stay in touch with you. I’m, of course, going to link to your article on Playboy about orgasmic meditation, if folks want to go to sexgetsreal.com/ep164. You have a huge piece on herpes coming out for Playboy soon. You also just wrote a piece on blacking out for Vice, and so I’ll have links for those too. Could you share with people how they can stay in touch and see what you’re picking up, and what you’re writing about?
Bridget Phetasy: I’m Bridget Phetasy fennessy on Facebook on that page. I live on Twitter. I mean Twitter is like my home. If any of the social medias are my home base, I would say find me on Twitter @BridgetPhetasy – that’s the easiest place to find me. I don’t really Instagram because I’m old – now I’m just kidding. I just never got into it. I don’t know, I can only deal with one social media, I think. But they can find me on Twitter is the best way to find me. My podcast Benched Podcast – I’m very excited about it, it’s pretty new. We’ve only done 30 episodes, but people seem to really love it. We have a very loyal fan base already, and that’s @benchedpodcast. They can find me – I mean, it’s Bridget Phetasy all across the board and if they want to email me, they can just email me. It’s in my Twitter bio, it’s phetasycomedy@gmail. I’m easy to find.
Dawn Serra: Awesome. Yeah, I will have links to all of those places, including your podcast, which is you and a comedian friend of yours talking about dating and relationships and having relationship experts on, and how shit-tastic and weird navigating dating is these days.
Bridget Phetasy: It gets vulnerable. Everyone leaves and they’re like, “Why did that feel like therapy?” It does get a little group therapy like, but it’s fun. It’s a fun wild ride.
Dawn Serra: Well, I hope everyone goes to check it out. Of course, head to sexgetsreal.com/ep164 for this episode to check out the articles on all of Bridget’s links. If you have thoughts or questions about what we just discussed, you have confessions of your own, or questions for future episodes – you can write to me using the contact form there. I love hearing from you.
Thank you so much, Bridget for being here and sharing your story with us. It was powerful and important. To all the listeners, thank you so much for joining us this week I will talk to you on the next episode. Bye.
Bridget Phetasy: Bye.