Part One: The Orgasm Cult

Summary

Behind the Bastards — Part One: The Orgasm Cult (May 21, 2026)

Host: Robert Evans (Cool Zone Media)
Guest Co-Host: Jamie Loftus
Producer/Contributor: Sophie

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Episode Overview

This episode launches a multipart deep dive into one of Silicon Valley’s strangest cults: the “Orgasm Cult,” led by Nicole Daedone. The gang traces how ancient myths, medical misconceptions, and the Bay Area’s New Age grifter scene cultivated this abusive, sex-centric group. Part One focuses on the history of female sexuality in Western thought, the medicalization of women’s desires, and Daedone’s backstory—setting the stage for the rise of the Orgasm Cult.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Setting the Scene: Sex Cults, Grifters, and Gender Roles

• The team expresses exhaustion from previous episodes on male predators, noting a morbid relief in finally profiling a female-led abusive cult.
• “You’re both going to get what you want today, because we are, Jamie, talking about a Silicon Valley cult led by a female grifter. And best of all, it’s an orgasm cult.” (Robert Evans, 01:31)
• Sophie jokes she's wearing a hat that says “Disappointment Awaits,” setting a tongue-in-cheek tone that runs through the episode.

The Cult’s Modus Operandi

• The cult, led by Nicole Daedone, revolves around the idea that partner-assisted female masturbation in group settings generates healing “energy.”
• Notably, the cult divorces these rituals from eroticism, dressing them up as self-improvement—endorsed by the Bulletproof Coffee Guy and hyped in tech circles.
• “This is not supposed to be erotic...by like the Silicon Valley stage of the grift, we’re treating this like you’re taking like a bulletproof coffee.” (Robert Evans, 03:59–04:22)

Ancient Attitudes Toward Female Sexuality

• The hosts frame the episode by exploring myths like Hera vs. Zeus arguing who enjoys sex more.
• The myth handed down an enduring idea: women are more pleasure-seeking and thus in need of control—a motif that reemerges in modern cults.
  • “The companion to the ancient Greek and Roman idea that women enjoy sex more than men is the ancient idea that women are sexually ravenous and insatiable…” (Robert Evans, 12:12–13:34)

Medieval and Early Modern Views: Attitudes Don't Progress

• Medieval Catholic writers like Constantine the African and Hildegard of Bingen wrote frankly about sex.
• Hildegard, a “horny nun” and early feminist, manipulated patriarchal power structures with cunning—feigning illness to get her way.
  • “Part of me wonders, was she seeing visions or did she realize that if she had visions and talked about them, she could manipulate her circumstances…” (Robert Evans, 19:16–19:42)
• Her writings describe female orgasm (albeit very clinically):
  • “When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain … communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man’s seed…” (Hildegard quoted by Evans, 25:42–26:21)
• Hildegard also classified types of men (fiery, windy, full of bile/incel prototypes); her “full of hate” men are likened to today’s manosphere/ incels.
  • “She’s talking about clavicular. … That could have been. She wrote that shit 800 years ago, man.” (Sophie and Jamie, 35:06–35:46)

The Medicalization of Women's Orgasms

• 17th–19th century Western medicine sometimes saw female orgasm as healthy but still functional (“cure” for hysteria).
• Victorian doctors prescribed “pelvic massage” (sometimes with crude vibrators) as therapy; by the 20th century, this evolved into the “orgasm as medical maintenance” industry.
  • “The vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about a hundred years.” (Robert Evans, 38:27–38:34)

Shifting Attitudes: The Modern Era and the Science of Pleasure

• Masters and Johnson and the sexual revolution moved discussion forward, but many myths and taboos persisted.
• Jamie highlights: even by 2015, drugs like Fibranscrin aimed to ‘fix’ female low desire—a problem created by cultural norms, not biology.
  • “We’d sooner drug someone than try to have an in-depth conversation with them.” (Jamie Loftus, 41:33–41:39)

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The Life and Origins of Nicole Daedone (Potential Cult Leader)

• Early Trauma: Nicole’s parents divorced early; she idolized her absent father, who was later revealed to be a convicted child molester—a trauma she recounted in shifting forms over her life.
  • “Her earliest memories are of her desperate desire to have more of a relationship with her father than she was gonna have.” (Robert Evans, 41:42–43:04)
• Teen & Early Adult Years: She dated across the gender spectrum, had a sugar daddy at 16, and cut off her father at 18.
• San Francisco 1990s: Caught up in the tech/party/New Age scene, she dabbled in drugs (meth, LSD), lived in warehouse communes, and was immersed in the evolving Bay Area counterculture.
  • “I also feel like Nicole, that I was very let down by higher education, which I’d been told it was fun and there were a lot of parties, but it was mostly just like high school part two.” (Robert Evans, 52:44–53:55)
• Sex Work & Psychological Manipulation: Nicole realized her power over wealthy, vulnerable men while working as a high-end escort.
  • “She realizes, like, she has this very important realization which is that like, oh, it doesn’t matter how rich they are or what title they have—like, men are dumb and I can control them.” (Robert Evans, 54:56–55:00)
• Pivots to Spiritualism: Traumatized by her father’s second conviction and his death, she sought to “unmoor herself from society,” living with theosophists and eventually aspiring to become a Buddhist nun—though her anxiety about celibacy led her to explore alternate sexual practices.

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The Evolution of “Orgasmic Meditation”: Influences and Predecessors

Introduction to Orgasm Practices

• Nicole was introduced to “deliberate orgasm”/“orgasmic meditation” by a man at a party; it is presented as a spiritually clarifying, nonsexual ritual involving clitoral stimulation.
  • “Take off your pants and lie down… I’m going to stroke you for 15 minutes. It seemed insane at first, she says, but she did as she was told. The experience was eye opening.’” (Robert Evans quoting Daedone, 60:07–60:55)

Historical Orgasm Cults in the Bay Area

• The practice reaches Nicole via a lineage starting with Victor Barranco’s 1968 Morehouse Commune (Lafayette, CA), which pushed “responsible hedonism” and clitoral-stimulation-as-salvation.
  • “We at Morehouse believe that every day is Sunday. We believe that we are on earth to have a good time, to devote our lives to pleasure.” (Morehouse lieutenant, 63:51)
• Morehouse offered classes (and later, “degrees”) in sexual technique, indoctrinating attendees—often calling newcomers “marks.”
  • “They’re open about, like, ‘we’re hustling you… But you’ll get something out of it, right?’” (Robert Evans, 65:00–65:18)
• Performative, public sexual rituals and an exploitative culture followed, but with the aesthetic veneer of liberation; “research” justified everything from enforced polyamory to quotas for sexual encounters.
  • “Residents were screened for STDs and forbidden from sex outside the group. Vic was criticized during his life, but the grift never exploded and some form of this community exists today.” (Robert Evans, 70:46–71:39)
• After lawsuits and bad press, ex-Morehouse members (like RJ Testerman) spun off into new groups—most notably, “The Welcomed Consensus,” which Nicole joined in 1997.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Ancient Greek Sex Myths:

  • “If the ancient Greeks were supposed to take a message or learn a lesson from this myth, it was that women were the lucky ones when it came to sex... giving rise to the need for men to control sexual interactions and the sexuality of women.” (Robert Evans, 13:12–13:34)

• On Hildegard’s Ingenuity:

  • “She wasn’t going to take that lying down. Except that’s exactly what happened—Hildegard was stricken ill by God, paralyzed… It was God’s unhappiness about the nuns not being allowed to move.” (Robert Evans, 22:05–22:25)

• On Sex Tech History:

  • “The vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about a hundred years. So that’s pretty cool.” (Robert Evans, 38:27–38:34)

• On Male-Focused Sex Grifts:

  • “It’s so silly that this is—it sounds like a man who realized he never made his wife come in their 30s. And then instead of just making her come was like, I have to start a business.” (Jamie Loftus, 63:51–64:09)

• On Fringe Commutes and Sexual Grifting:

  • “Have a degree in him coming.” (Robert Evans, 69:18–69:22)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Orgasm Cult Overview and Grifter Satire: 01:24–02:39
• Ancient Greek Sex Myths & Gender Roles: 10:33–13:34
• Hildegard of Bingen: Subverting Patriarchy: 17:36–27:28
• First Known Description of Female Orgasm: 25:18–26:21
• Medieval and Modern Medicalization of Orgasms: 35:53–38:34
• Nicole Daedone’s Early Life and Trauma: 41:33–47:05
• Bay Area New Age/Sex Grifter Scene: 52:05–54:56
• Entry Into Sex Work & Realization of Manipulative Power: 54:56–55:00
• Introduction to Orgasmic Meditation: 60:07–60:55
• History of Morehouse & Deliberate Orgasm: 62:40–70:46
• Founding of “The Welcomed Consensus” (Predecessor to Daedone’s Cult): 71:44–72:17

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Tone, Language & Style

• The episode balances rigorous historic research with sharp, irreverent humor, gallows wit, and tongue-in-cheek asides about podcasting, grifting, and pop culture. Robert and Jamie intertwine personal anecdotes and broad cultural analysis, juxtaposing absurdist moments with deep insights:
  • “You could have told me that was in the cut last week. That’s nuts. Yep.” (Hildegard’s incel description, Jamie, 35:32)
  • “It’s weird ‘cause I’ve always been a pretty like sex positive guy. And by the end of like the research for this, I was like, stop fucking. Stop fucking. You people are doing it wrong. Stop.” (Robert Evans, 73:19–73:43)

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Summary Takeaways

Part One of the Orgasm Cult saga lays the intellectual and cultural groundwork for understanding how a self-help sex cult flourished amid the dregs of American sex education, gendered myths, New Age liberation talk, and Silicon Valley hustle culture. Nicole Daedone emerges as a deeply damaged, charismatic manipulator, and the Orgasm Cult itself is the latest incarnation of ancient problems repackaged as radical wellness.

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Stay tuned for Part Two, where the narrative moves deeper into Orgasmic Meditation's meteoric rise, Silicon Valley endorsement, exploitation, and abuse.

Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards. That's the podcast you're listening to, right? Right now. Worst people in all of history. We tell you all about them and you know all about them. This has been a rough year for a lot of us here at behind the Bastards. We talked about a lot of pedophiles, and I'm tired of talking about pedophiles. There are pedophiles in this episode, but they're not the primary focus of the episode. Jamie Loftus, how are you doing today? I'm sorry for saying pedophiles right before introducing you. That didn't wind up working well.

[Jamie Loftus]

And today we're talking to the biggest one of them all. We landed the white whale.

[Robert Evans]

I just was like, oh, I wanted to go right into the title, but then I hadn't introduced you and I was like, I should introduce Jamie before the title. But I also. Part of me was like, should I introduce the title and then bring in Jaime? I don't know. I did it the wrong way. I'm sure about that.

[Sophie]

One complaint at the start here, Robert, why are you not wearing a hat?

[Robert Evans]

I don't like hats.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's true. Where's your statement hat?

[Robert Evans]

I don't have a statement hat. But, Jamie, you are wearing a Theranos hat right now, which I am.

[Jamie Loftus]

A well worn one.

[Robert Evans]

A well worn one, yeah. Theranos. Has this been around the block?

[Jamie Loftus]

Rustic.

[Robert Evans]

Looks like fucking Liz Holmes. Sweat through that thing. While she was waiting to hear, she was actually indicted.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. I actually contributed to her bail fund and she mailed this to me.

[Sophie]

Iconic. Um, I'm wearing a hat that fit. Looks very appropriate for today's episode. It says, disappointment awaits.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. You're both going to get what you want today, because we are, Jamie, talking about a Silicon Valley cult led by a female grifter. And best of all, it's an orgasm cult. It's an orgasm cult, everybody. Beautiful times.

[Jamie Loftus]

And then the crowd bursts into applause. They're like, you muscled through six more.

[Robert Evans]

We did it.

[Jamie Loftus]

Pedophiles. To get to the orgasm cult. We did it, folks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, thank God. It's like washing your face in a stream. Only actually, this is very abusive and a lot of people get hurt.

[Sophie]

Well, it is behind the bastards, buddy. Disappointment awaits.

[Robert Evans]

But we get to laugh at, like, Silicon Valley starter fucking shit getting mixed in with, like, traditional cult abuse techniques. It's very fun and we love to

[Jamie Loftus]

see women in a leadership role, Zach.

[Robert Evans]

A woman who is really, really hurting and taking advantage of a lot of Men in a way that does even the scales on this show somewhat. Like if you're just sort of interesting, it starts the process. She goes through a lot of guys

[Sophie]

after Spectre and Savile. Thank you, by the way.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, Savile abused a lot of boys too, Sophie.

[Sophie]

That's fair. But I want to hear about a woman.

[Robert Evans]

Let's hear it. Yes. So we are going to call.

[Jamie Loftus]

Who is this person?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, I'm going to guess there's a good chance you haven't heard her name. She's Nicole Dodone. Like D, A, E, D, O, N,

[Sophie]

E. How many times is the word clitoris in the script? I see it in the.

[Robert Evans]

A lot, Sophie.

[Jamie Loftus]

I see it in the parallel. Can we get a control F on this?

[Sophie]

Yeah, I just got really excited.

[Robert Evans]

I avoided it, but I used a couple of synonyms. So here's the thing.

[Sophie]

12 times. How many times is vagina in the script? Only six.

[Jamie Loftus]

Only six.

[Sophie]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

The cult is based around this lady comes up with a. Has an idea that, like, if you get a bunch of women in a room and you have a partner masturbate them in a room sometimes with hundreds of people watching, it creates this sort of like magical energy effect that has a bunch of health benefits.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's like an operating theater approach to Cummings. Yes.

[Robert Evans]

That's exactly what they do. That's exactly the heart of the grift, Jamie.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, okay, I'm listening, I'm listening.

[Robert Evans]

It's gonna be really fun. So what's also really fun about this is that this practice, getting all these people in a room, I mean, sometimes it was one person at a time, but masturbating people in public, totally detached from sex. Right. Number one, it is only vaginas and clitoris is being like, manipulated. Right? Like, that's the. This is not like a multi organ kind of deal. And number two, this is not supposed to be erotic. By the end of it, by like the Silicon Valley stage of the grift, we're treating this like you're taking like a bulletproof coffee. And by the way, the bulletproof coffee guys endorsed this business. So. So many beautiful crossovers.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, God. Yeah. Anytime you have a Silicon Valley grift, you have some incredible side players. There's always a great series of Tim Ferriss shows up.

[Robert Evans]

It's awesome.

[Jamie Loftus]

Really?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. We get Tim Ferriss, we don't get a Navy seal. I was bummed about that, Jamie. I was hoping one of those Navy seals who sells like energy bars would be in this picture, but no. Tragically not.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, this is. Okay, so the. It's sex, but it's not sex. So it's more than sex.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's way worse than sex. And it's not supposed to be sexy by the end. This does start with a bunch of dudes in like the 70s who it very much is about sex for. But before we get to the dudes in the 70s, we're gonna have to have a little talk because it's very relevant about the patterns that these. This group that's supposed to be kind of like breaking the mold and making this, like, women centric and not abusive fall into. We're gonna have to talk about the history of the female orgasm in popular awareness and medical conception. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

There was a part of me that thought you were going to say, we have to talk about the clitoris. Where is it? How do we find it?

[Robert Evans]

What is it?

[Jamie Loftus]

Just all be on the same page.

[Robert Evans]

Got like a laser pointer cut.

[Jamie Loftus]

So it's like right there, just mining.

[Robert Evans]

You got no excuse.

[Jamie Loftus]

So let's talk about it, ladies.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think I. My sex ed was so bad. Growing up in Texas, I'm fairly certain I learned about the clitoris from the south park movie. Like, I think that was my first encounter with it when I was like nine or ten, something like that.

[Sophie]

My son said I took it over summer school and they just showed us multiple horrific birthing scenes.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, great. Yeah, we did see one of those.

[Sophie]

Just one, not one, not two, maybe four.

[Jamie Loftus]

God. Well, at least they put in the hours. I didn't. I saw one birth video, but no, I didn't even get like period information. And it was like a running joke in my town how the fact that they did not invest in sex ed. But I went to this massive high school where there was a daycare at the high school. And you just have to think one perhaps led to the endings, might connect it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I remember. I don't think they even told us orgasms at all existed. They told us that, like, you know, how the act of intercourse happens physically and that it feels good. And I don't even think. I think they were supposed to tell us about, like, semen. But I think the gym coach that was giving the lesson was way too awkward, so he just kind of breezed right past it. We didn't hear anything about that.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's a part of the great American tradition to be full of visceral fear and think you're dying the first time you come.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's important. Yeah, it's really crucial stuff. This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Sophie]

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[Robert Evans]

So for as long as there have been people, we've understood that sex at least could potentially be very enjoyable for both participants. Right. Like that people have been aware that it can be fun, even if they've hated the idea of that. But there's also been this understanding that people with penises and people with vaginas experience these pleasures so somewhat differently at first. So far as I can tell, I don't think there was a lot of controversy about this idea. In ancient Greek mythology, Hera and Zeus are said to have argued over whether or not men enjoyed sex more than women. And Zeus, who is a prolific rapist, argued that women seem to take more pleasure in the act. And Hera was like, yeah, I'm not surprised you said that. But then she was like, obviously guys enjoy it more. That's why you're doing all the shit you're doing. Zeus, the wide sage Tiresias was brought in to give like, an answer to kind of adjudicate this. And he was like, women feel nine or ten times as much pleasure as men. So he agreed with Zeus. And Hera did some really mean things to him. She did not like that.

[Sophie]

Gotta be honest, didn't know Zeus slander was on the calendar for today.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, Zeus slander's always on the calendar.

[Jamie Loftus]

Love it. Slander is absolutely always on the calendar. And. And we do talk about him like he is a guy that was just a dude.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like, we met him at a Cinnabon.

[Sophie]

My only compliment to Zeus is that story about when Zeus birthed somebody from his forehead like a pimple. And that's how I think I got Anderson.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I like the one where he turns into like a swan to have sex with a swan. Because he just sees a swan that's so hot, but he's like, I can't do this as a guy. Like, I gotta be a swan, right?

[Sophie]

First of all, swans not nice. Second of all, no, beautiful.

[Robert Evans]

Sure. That's what Zeus said. So because. Because the United States is a culture that was heavily influenced by puritanism and generations in which women were shamed and ostracized for even sexual contact that they had no choice in, it's easy to see that like, oh, the Greeks were like, way more sex positive than like their Western descendants were thousands of years later. Right? That, like, well, that seems like at least a more sex positive view, even though that's still kind of messed up. And there are some ways in which that's true. But. Assistant professor of classics and editor for the journal Eidolon, Tara Mulder makes an important point about what this myth was really saying. And this is relevant to everything that winds up happening in the Silicon Valley days of this fucking sex cult. If the ancient Greeks were supposed to take a message or learn a lesson from this myth, it was that women were the lucky ones when it came to sex. Women could be assumed to always want sex and when they got it, to enjoy it substantially more than men, giving rise to the need for men to control sexual interactions and the sexuality of women. The companion to the ancient Greek and Roman idea that women enjoy sex more than men is the ancient idea that women are sexually ravenous and insatiable. Their sexual appetites couldn't be trusted and had to be reined in by male guards, guardians. So that's going to actually be relevant to every, every modern day orgasm cult. All of which are again wrapped in like, this is all about the women. And all of us are going to wind up recreating that like ancient Greek and Roman shit. Like it's crazy how it's. Nothing changes.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, okay, so we already have. This is maybe a record for you, Robert, of like, we can't talk about this before we talk about ancient Greek mythology and we gotta. I fully believe it. I fully believe it. So is this. I'm guessing this is like, oh, this is actually about like women and women's pleasure.

[Robert Evans]

Yep.

[Jamie Loftus]

And women are obsessed with being controlled and need to be controlled. And that's actually hot and liberating.

[Robert Evans]

It's. It's a little more complicated and honestly dumb than that, Jamie. But I don't want to spoil how dumb it is.

[Jamie Loftus]

My sex cult is going to be better. This is, this is instructive.

[Robert Evans]

This is critical to understand before you start a sex cult. And there's a couple more things that we need to understand before we get into this, because there's a lot of patterns the Greeks set up that we just never get free of here in the west, at least. So the sage Ovid advised his readers that women had a nasty tendency to say no when they meant yes. Like, he's kind of the first guy in the Western canon to be like, a no's not a no, brah. Like, that's. That's Ovid, right? Like, he's that kind of guy. And this is endemic all over ancient culture, just as it is like today. Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, weighed in on the pleasure debate and essentially agreed with Tiresias. And through his descendants, medieval Europe inherited the belief that female pleasure aided in conception. The term orgasm didn't exist, but they knew what one was, and they thought it made pregnancy more likely that, like, if she enjoys it, you're likely to conceive a child. That was, like, a widespread understanding in medieval Europe, which breaks a pretty important misconception about medieval life, right? That, like, they were frightened and ignorant of sex because they weren't nearly as ignorant as a lot of people who would come later, for one thing. And everyone lives in the same room. So you, like, know where kids come from, right? Like, there's no missing that.

[Jamie Loftus]

You see them being created constantly.

[Robert Evans]

You're. You're aware of how things work. There's no, like, telling. There's no getting kids to, like, think that sex is not normal. Like, if you're growing up in that environment. Several Catholic scholars, in fact, discussed prostitution positively. There's. There was an idea around, like, Catholic theology in this time that, like, you kind of need prostitutes for society to work, that if they don't exist, things go crazy. Like, that was, like, a fairly widespread idea among some circles, and there were even monks and nuns who published work that was explicitly about sex. One example was Constantine The African, a 12th century figure who wrote a book about sex on sexual intercourse. He was actually translating the work of a Muslim scholar, as is often the case with stuff like this. Ibn Al Jazer. But he filed that guy's name off of the paper for obvious reasons. He was just like, I'm just gonna cut this right off, put this out under my name.

[Jamie Loftus]

This is my fuck book. Don't worry about it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, this is my book about sex. Don't. Don't think about it. Per a blog called Constantinus Africanus by Monica H. Green, it opens very clearly stating that sexual Function was established by the Creator himself to ensure the propagation of all species. For if animals disliked intercourse, all the species of animals would certainly have perished. Pretty hard to argue with. Many of the same frank attitudes towards sexuality can be found in others of Constantine's works. In fact, we find in later manuscripts of the Constantinian corpus a short work on the potential harms and benefits of sexual intercourse called, again, the Liber Minor Dikoitu, the Little Book of Intercourse. That's. That's all kind of fun, right?

[Jamie Loftus]

That is fun.

[Robert Evans]

That's all interesting.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. Okay. People are so, like, wattpad goes way back. Everyone's always been writing their horny little things.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah. Forever.

[Jamie Loftus]

Especially Ovid is, like, spouting the game.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The first pickup artist, he's like, no,

[Jamie Loftus]

no, they love it, dude. They love it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Huge fans. So Jazzer wrote about sex, but he wrote about it purely from the male standpoint. And to the extent that Constantine was interested in gathering research about sexual or stealing research about sexual pleasure, it was only stuff from the male perspective. But they weren't the only intellectuals weighing in on the subject at the same time. You're gonna love this lady. Both of you are. She's awesome. One of my sources for these episodes is the History of Women Medium page by Mary DeVry. And she wrote a really good article on a contemporary of Constantine's, a 12th century Benedictine nun named Hildegard of Bingen.

[Sophie]

I'm already sold. I'm like, there's a lot of my buzzwords today. Is the nun fucking cool?

[Jamie Loftus]

We've got a horny nun.

[Robert Evans]

She's a horny nun. But more than that, she's. Every now and then you read about someone in history and they're from long enough good that you don't get a ton of granular detail, but you can just tell, like, oh, you were smart as fuck. Like, you were a genius. And that Hildegard. So she. She comes into life. She's born into a rich family, but she had. That doesn't mean she has any choice or agency in her life. It actually means the opposite. Right. Because during this time, her family's very religious. And at this period of time, if you're super religious, it's normal to tie the 10th of what you have to the Church. And that's not just money in this age. That means, like, if you have 10 kids, you're given one of them to the priesthood or to be a monk or to be a nun. Right. Like, that's a normal.

[Jamie Loftus]

I know that extended to flesh.

[Robert Evans]

That's for the very religious right. I'm not going to say every family's doing that, but a number of them are. That's why there's so many people in the church, right?

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, if you can get to 10.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, we get the 10, we'll give one to God. And her parents were also may have been motivated. She started seeing visions at age 3. So that may have been part of why they're like, well, she should probably be in the church. I don't know if I want to deal with this. So I don't know what was going on there. And I actually don't know. Part of me wonders, was she seeing visions or did she realize that if she had visions and talked about them, she could manipulate her circumstances to improve them? And I kind of think that may have been what's going on because the visions are always very conveniently articulated to get her what she wants. Once my interpretation of her story is that the latter is more likely. But yeah, I'm an atheist in a scalawag and I like to see like a clever underdog find a way to win in a religion that's stacked against them. Like, I think that's fun.

[Jamie Loftus]

That feels like. So you know, that's like the history of women in religion is like, oh, actually a made up told me so you actually, it's like the only. It's like when I am trying to get someone to listen to me and I just respond in like from a separate email and be like, hi, I'm Kevin, Jamie's representative.

[Sophie]

Kevin is such a great fake guy name.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Kevin's a perfect fake guy name.

[Sophie]

Kevin could be a guy.

[Jamie Loftus]

He's a great negotiator. Kevin. If you ever get an email from Kevin, look out, you're about to get mobile.

[Robert Evans]

You're gonna get. Yeah. So I, I, Anyway, so she gets put up in this. I mean, it's a nunnery that's attached to a Benedictine monastery. I don't know if Benedictine nun is actually the proper term, but she's like a nun and the nunnery is attached to this Benedictine monastery and she's put under the care of an anchoress named Jutta. And an anchor is that that whole thing means that like Jutta is supposed to be anchored to a place. She and her nuns are not ever supposed to leave the monastery. Like the world can come to them, but they're not supposed to go out. Right. And you know, as opposed to like

[Jamie Loftus]

there are there, I guess, like the. Some nuns are loose.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Well, they're able to move around, be in the world. They can move to different nunneries or different churches or. Sure. Like, because, you know, the church starts a new church, you gotta be able to send some nuns over. It's gotta be one that's not anchored to a place. Right. I'm not an expert on this. This is just what the reading says and it seems that makes sense. I know, I've heard of anchoresses before.

[Jamie Loftus]

Your anchor nuns or your loose nuns.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, your anchor nuns and your loose nuns. Your pocket nuns, so to speak. And by the time Hildegard's a young adult, Juddha's died. And it says a lot about how good Hildegard is at the social game that Hildegard gets made anchorous when she dies. Like, Jutta passes the title onto her. So she's in char and she does not like this deal. She does not want to be stuck in one place. As Mary DeVry writes, she wasn't happy being attached to a monastery and asked for permission for the nuns to move away and start their own place. No, absolutely not, said the abbot. Hildegard wasn't having that. So she went over his head to the archbishop. Sure, whatever was his reply. But the abbot was not thrilled with the end run or losing this community of women handily attached to his monastery or the challenge to his authority, or some other reason we can only speculate about. He didn't let the women leave. You could say Hildegard wasn't going to take that lying down. Except that's exactly what happened. Hildegard was stricken ill by God, paralyzed and unable to get up. It was God's unhappiness about the nuns not being allowed to move.

[Jamie Loftus]

Hildegard told the abbot, I love her.

[Robert Evans]

Fucking awesome. She's so cool.

[Sophie]

I was like, love her.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh,

[Robert Evans]

hey, you know this guy you're telling me exists and talks to us. He's talking to me right now and,

[Jamie Loftus]

oh, I can't come to work if I'm not a loose nun. Sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, that's genius.

[Robert Evans]

It's so cool. She's awesome. So the nuns get to leave the name Hildegard back.

[Sophie]

It's a banger.

[Robert Evans]

Hildegard whips. Yeah, I love. She goes.

[Sophie]

Sorry.

[Robert Evans]

She finds.

[Sophie]

When you're talking about a cool nun, that just really, just gets me going.

[Jamie Loftus]

She's rad, really coming alive right now.

[Robert Evans]

She's only just begun. So she, she gets to leave with some of her other nuns and they get to found a new nunnery or whatever you call Them, you know, and along the way, while they're. They're doing this journey, Hildegard decides that God had made her sick. And she's, like, around 40 when that happens, because he wanted her to do something that she hadn't been doing. He'd been giving her visions all these years. Totally. She'd been having. But she just had kept him to yourself herself. She never, like, told him to anybody until now, but they'd always been there. And she writes this. Though I saw and heard these things, I refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words. Not with stubbornness, but in the exercise of humility until laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness, and I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God. I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again, I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, cry out, therefore, and write. Thus, Basically, God's saying, you need to go out into the world and write books. And Hildegard's like, that's what God wants me to do. And she reaches.

[Jamie Loftus]

God wants me to pivot.

[Robert Evans]

God wants me to pivot. Pivoting the books.

[Sophie]

I love this.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's the same, like, religious narrative we hear, but it's, like, only being used to liberate her specifically.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, it's really cool.

[Sophie]

Yeah, it's cool in the sense of, like. But the same thing happens in, like, the flds, where, like, a new guy's like, yeah, I'm a prophet now. The big guy told me I need 75 wives.

[Robert Evans]

It worked.

[Jamie Loftus]

Unfortunately, this is that strategy being used

[Robert Evans]

in the right way, in the very coolest of ways. So Hildegard reaches out to the Pope, and she's like, this is what God said. She sends what I just read basically to the Pope. And the Pope is like, hell, yeah. God wants you to write, like, here's some fucking money. Why don't you pick out a team of helpers, and they'll transcribe and write out and publish all of your visions from God in books. And so she starts putting out books that are supposedly inspired by God. I don't. I don't know. I didn't look that up. This isn't a story about a man.

[Sophie]

Anytime there's, like, a pope that does, like, a slight. A slight cool thing, I'm like, noted.

[Robert Evans]

I should have looked into the Pope. You're right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Pope W Is few and far Between.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Especially in this period, 12th century.

[Sophie]

That's what I'm saying.

[Robert Evans]

She publishes a bunch of books, and one of them is called Cause Et Curae. And it contains what is generally agreed to be the oldest description of a woman having an orgasm. Written by a woman. Right.

[Jamie Loftus]

Is this told by her, or is this God telling her what an orgasm might feel like?

[Robert Evans]

She says it's God because she couldn't know, obviously, God. She hasn't experienced what God's like.

[Jamie Loftus]

You're a nun, so this is so like, I'm just gonna let you in.

[Robert Evans]

You're missing out on something crazy. It is fucked up if you think about it that way.

[Sophie]

I love it.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's like God is taunting her.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah. He's being a real dick here. So here's how Hildegard writes about the orgasm she definitely never experienced. When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man's seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it. And soon the woman's sexual organs contract and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close in the same way a strong man can hold something enclosed in his fist. So, okay, you know, very Catholic, you know, very 12th century, but okay.

[Sophie]

I.

[Jamie Loftus]

Honestly, I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed. I wanted something. I wanted something sexier.

[Robert Evans]

Something sexier. She's a nun. She's simply a nun.

[Sophie]

Yes, but if she was alive now, she would have loved that song, Pussy palace by Lily.

[Robert Evans]

She would have been huge about that one.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, and the.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I mean, describing being horny for a guy as a result of a brain fever is kind of potent.

[Robert Evans]

It's super funny.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Kind of relatable. I think.

[Robert Evans]

Hildegard lives a great life. The Church sends her. She gets to do all the things she'd always dreamed about. The Church sends her on four long speaking tours where she travels around Europe and gets to talk about her work to learned audiences of learned men. She's super widely respected. Her books are fairly widely distributed. And in addition to that bit about the orgasm, she also wrote out descriptions of the four kinds of men. And this doesn't really directly impact our episode, but I couldn't read these and not include them because some of them are pretty spot on today.

[Jamie Loftus]

Wait, what? What do men be like? What do men be like? Hildegarden?

[Dovato Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What do men be like? So you gotta know first. Her writing on this is somewhat influenced by the Greek belief that the body is governed by four humors, earth, wind, air, and fire, as well as something called bile. Right. That, like, the mix of these, the ratio of them, determines and, like, alters behavior and mood and personality.

[Jamie Loftus]

They missed that nation in Last Airbender.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They didn't have the bile nation. So the first kind of. The first kind of men, Hildegard said, are all fire. As soon as they get sight of a woman, hear of one, or simply fancy one in thought, their blood is burning with a blaze. Their eyes are kept fixed on the object of their love like arrows as soon as they catch sight of it. And these men are terrible people to be in relationships with because all they can do is fuck unless they're balanced by wind, which cools down their fiery genitals and lets them have honorable and fruitful relationships with women. And the second type of man is a man who is a man of fire and of wind and quote, the eyes of such men can meet squarely with those of the women, much in contrast to those other men's eyes that were fixed on them like arrows, which is really interesting. Like, thing to note is like, can a guy just, like, see you as a person? Is kind of what she's saying here, I think.

[Jamie Loftus]

Right. This is like, she's just describing a man who could be a friend, Right? Possibly. It is also sounding, like, vaguely kind of astrological the way that she's categorizing them.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, for sure. For sure. She's. And yeah, she. She also includes an incisive description of toxic men who she describes as being full of bile. Men, It's. It's really fun. They are incapable of having a genuine loving relationship with any being. Through that, they become bitter, avaricious, and full of foolishness and abundant passion in intercourse with women they know no moderation, and act like donkeys. Definitely she never had sex. Definitely she never had sex.

[Jamie Loftus]

This. Her ex was fuming when he read that. That was. Oh, I do appreciate that.

[Robert Evans]

Is.

[Jamie Loftus]

That is, like, a very, like, subtle but important distinction of, like, a man who is just, like, wildly horny and a man who is both horny and really into mind games that are, like, ruinous.

[Sophie]

Yeah, yeah, let's let the bile retire, fuck boy, and bring back. You're full of bile.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, you're full of bile. That's. That's. We got to do that.

[Sophie]

Yeah, you know who's not full of bile, though?

[Robert Evans]

Robert. That's right. That's right, Sophie. I was just about to do it myself.

[Sophie]

Yeah, but I did it first.

[Robert Evans]

You did it first. You did it first. And the sponsors of our podcast have no bile at all, honey.

[Sophie]

Bile.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

And we're back. They might have had bio in him. I don't know.

[Jamie Loftus]

We don't know.

[Robert Evans]

Who knows what you people listen to?

[Sophie]

Who the fuck knows who our sponsors are? Not me.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, and so here's my favorite thing, and this is something Mary DeVry points out in her article on this is that Hildegard might be the first writer to describe incels in the 12th century. It's fucking amazing because she's the fourth kind of guy. This is she kind of branches out from that to discuss the different ways different kinds of men respond to celibacy. So she lays out the kinds of men and she talks about. Here's how they respond to like, not having sex. And one of these types of men is obviously a gay guy, but she does not understand that. So she's like, some men are fine with it. And it's like, well, yeah, you're missing a piece of the story, Hildegard, but that's fine. But she writes here about men who stay celibate, not out of religious obligation, but because they hate women. Quote, they neither receive any love from their fellow men, nor have any inclination to a social life of their own. All the more since they exhaust themselves with continuous figments of their imagination. Then when they meet people, they are already full of hate, malevolence, and the wrong attitude. So they can't enjoy company anymore. It's amazing how spot on that shit is.

[Sophie]

She's talking about clavicular.

[Robert Evans]

That's the 12th century.

[Jamie Loftus]

That could have been. She wrote that shit 800 years ago, man. We always think that, like this, like whatever generation has really reached the final stage of misogyny and like being socially horrible. But nope.

[Sophie]

Hildegard described the manosphere all the way back then.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, you could have told me that was in the cut last week. That's nuts. Yep.

[Robert Evans]

That's fucking crazy. Now, unfortunately, this is where we gotta leave our friend Hildegard, who's awesome but never did anything wrong. But we are not the show our friend Margaret Killjoy does. So we're not gonna talk about Hildegard anymore.

[Jamie Loftus]

Margaret, drop the Hildegard episode, please.

[Sophie]

Margaret, I love you.

[Robert Evans]

Just as this episode's gonna be kind of downhill after Hildegard, the way women's sexuality was discussed in like, medical literature in the western world went kind of downhill after Hildegard. Unfortunately, there's one bright spot in the word 1660. The word orgasm gets coined for the first time. There's a doctor named Nathaniel Highmore who used to the term to describe what happens during a pelvic massage. Even that early medical professionals were experimenting with the idea that orgasms could treat certain women's diseases. And you know, this is. This is just like any. Anything to do with like, the vagina is women's in this era, like that. That's just the way like all of the writing is in this period of time. Right.

[Sophie]

Sounds like a fucking Red Bull commercial. It sounds like they're just saying endorphins give you wings.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I mean, that's basically the Idea.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Through the 1800s, in Western Europe and elsewhere, including the United States, it became more and more common to diagnose women with hysteria. This meant that they're like, they're not happy with like, wearing restrictive clothing and hiding from society and like never seeing anybody until they're married and they're like, not being allowed to read, go to school, vote, having to have 11 children.

[Jamie Loftus]

These, these broads, when are they gonna. I. It is interesting because like this hysteria stuff is so well worn, but it's like even framing it as like a cure of like, like an orgasm for a CIS woman has to be productive in some way.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta, gotta get, gotta make some shit happen. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Can, to this day, cannot just be for fun.

[Robert Evans]

No, absolutely not. So doctors in the Victorian era did eventually hit upon the orgasm as a cure for hysteria. And some of the first electronic medical devices were invented to aid them. These are the first vibrators. Right. And before these first gadgets, doctors had to use their hands to do this job. In 1891, Durex invented a steam powered manipulator. That's like the earliest vibrator. It was so loud you could not talk.

[Jamie Loftus]

The steampunk vibrator is so.

[Robert Evans]

Steampunk vibrator? Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's like a horny thing executed in the least sexy way possible.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. There's actually, there's a sex store in San Francisco, Good Vibrations, that is a part of this story because this cult winds up briefly involved there that has a vibrator museum. You can see a lot of these old vibrators if you go there, like

[Jamie Loftus]

where the Victorian vibrators also inextricably had 40 settings that you have to click through every single one to turn it off. Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Absolutely.

[Jamie Loftus]

So that's a feature, not a.

[Robert Evans]

That goes back. Yeah.

[Sophie]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

So the vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about a hundred years. So that's pretty cool.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think that's priorities.

[Robert Evans]

That's priorities. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey conducted his first major sexual survey. And people started talking about orgasms of all types. In manners. Much more familiar to the modern sentiment, men and women's sexual desire gradually became a more approachable topic of discussion. The APA continued to diagnose hysteria and prescribe orgasms as a treatment until 1952. But things changed rapidly after this point. In the 1960s, Masters and Johnson started conducting groundbreaking studies on why women orgasmed. As Sarah Mansell writes, they discovered that women could have multiple orgasms from both vaginal or clitoral stimulation, and also realized it took women about 10 or 20 minutes of sex play to reach orgasm, compared to just four minutes for men. In the decade since, we've learned a lot more about the vagina and the clitoris, which is the only organ that exists solely for pleasure. But we've learned even more about the physiological benefits of orgasms. About 60% of people with migraines experience a reduction or into symptoms after one. And there's a bunch of other stuff about, like, it has an impact on you. Right. Including just like, you know, if you have a penis in terms of, like, your urogenital health, doing it regularly reduces the odds of certain diseases. There's a bunch of that that we understand.

[Jamie Loftus]

So I just want to make sure I'm being clear after that. Eight, nine years of this podcast existing, we are coming and saying clearly, coming is good. Coming is good.

[Robert Evans]

Coming is great. Coming is never been an anti cumming podcast.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay, okay.

[Robert Evans]

This is just. Usually you don't want to think about cumming when you're hearing about Hitler podcast. Like, that's more why we don't talk about it on the show.

[Jamie Loftus]

Cumming is medically good.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, cumming is medically good. Outside of the context that people usually come in behind the bastards.

[Sophie]

Consensual coming is good.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So this actually gets to another really important point about orgasm and sexual desire that we've come to understand more fully in the modern age. In 2015, sex educator Emily Nagoski published an op ed in the New York Times during fallout over the failure of the FDA to approve Fibranscrin, I think is the name, which is a drug that was supposed to increase female desire. That's like the description of what the drug does. I think it's basically a drug that increases, like, vaginal lubrication, I think is kind of the idea. And Nagoski had an issue with this. She wrote that the biggest problem with the drug and with the FDA's consideration of it is that its backers are attempting to treat something that isn't a disease. Her argument was that modern research suggests there are multiple perfectly normal forms of sexual desire. Some people experience more spontaneous sexual desire, which is like somebody with a dick getting hard. Right. Like, that's what generally society sees as male sexual desire. That's not the only thing that male sexual. That spontaneous sexual desire is. But it's the kind of thing you can treat with a pill sometimes. Right? Like that. Or at least you can imitate it with a pill a lot of people are way more into and feel way more responsive sexual desire. And you can't just drug someone into that because it's responsive to a situation and a relationship. Right. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think we'd sooner drug someone than try to have an interesting in conversation with them.

[Robert Evans]

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

And that's. That's kind of Nagoski's point. She writes, I can't count the number of women I've talked to who assume that because their desire is responsive rather than spontaneous, they have low desire, that their ability to enjoy sex with their partner is meaningless if they don't also feel a persistent urge for it. In short, that they are broken because their desire isn't what it's supposed to be. So the road from Masters and Johnson to what I just read you has not been a smoother and even one. Once people started to accept that sexual desire was normal and even good for both men and women, our culture experienced a sexual awakening that took on many forms. A lot of them problematic. Right. Some of what you get is like the free love movement of the 60s and the 70s, and of course, the backlash to that movement, too. Now, our subject for these episodes, Nicole Dodone was born on August 24, 1964, right in the smack in the middle of this massive period of evolution and how we talk about and understand sexual. She had a difficult upbringing. Her father, Joseph, separated from her mother, Beverly, when Nicole was, like, 7. And her earliest memories are of her desperate desire to have more of a relationship with her father than she was gonna have. In the book Empire of Orgasm, Ellen Hewitt writes, he only visited sporadically, and Nicole adored him. When he was away, she stood for hours under a street lamp on her house's cul de sac, trying to stummon him. She invented bargains with the universe, certain that if she sang out loud the songs of Al Green, her dad's favorite, and crossed the street with her eyes shut, spun three times to the left, her dad's car would roll into view from around the latest street. And that's bleak.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, that's heartbreaking. And also, how many. I'd be really curious how many young girls were regularly singing weirdly romantic songs to their dad? It's a rite of zero.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, in a way. Yeah. Honestly, that fucked me up a little bit, just because, weirdly enough, Nicole and I, there's a lot of points where we have, like, very similar beats in our lives. Like, I was very adjacent to this community and some of these cultists. I'm sure it was at the same parties as Some of them just because of the places my life took me and the communities I was in. But when I was, like, six, my dad had to leave us for, like, two years. Like, we were in Oklahoma on the family farm. We had no money. And he got a job in New York City, and he lived on his friend's couch, and he mailed us back money. And I did the same thing. Like, I can remember doing the same thing. Like, being like, if I do this and this, he won't leave again. Right. Like, it's a very normal little kid thing to do. It's very sad story. My dad came back. Hers never did because it turns and it's good. Well, it's good that he didn't because Joseph was a creep and a pedophile. In 1976, he was arrested and charged with child molestation.

[Jamie Loftus]

Sorry. 41 minutes.

[Robert Evans]

41 minutes.

[Sophie]

41 minutes.

[Robert Evans]

That's seven on mine. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's behind the bastion. It's a new shirt. 41 minutes pedophile free in 20, 26.

[Jamie Loftus]

Most aren't so lucky.

[Sophie]

Not gonna sell that shirt, but I. I see.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So he does not like shirts that have pedophile on them. I don't understand.

[Sophie]

I don't want to sell anything. Thank you.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Well, so he gets arrested in 76 and charged with child molestation, including oral copulation with a child under 14. We don't know who that was, but Nicole would have been around nine at the time. And much later, she would tell a lot of people. Like, when she's a young adult, she tells people that her dad did sexually assault her when she was a child. We don't know more than that. She's going to change that story dramatically. Several times. She comes up with a different version of it for every major period of her life. And I just have no more to say than that. Right. I also don't know, was her abuse connected to what her dad got arrested for, or was it something nobody ever knew until she was an adult? Whatever the case, as a little kid, she acts out in some weird but understandable ways. She has a thing for, like, she likes biting knees. Like, she will obsessively try to bite the back of women's knees. She's, like, crawling around and, like, bite her, like, aunt or whatever in the back of the knees. It's like, a thing she's obsessed with. Right. And, you know, she gets yelled at.

[Sophie]

I liked Pokemon cards, but okay.

[Robert Evans]

It's weird. It's a little weird. And her.

[Jamie Loftus]

She does have, like, an ocd, kind of like ritualizing.

[Sophie]

Yeah, sure, sure, sure.

[Robert Evans]

Compulsions. She says it feels like there's an animal inside her trying to get out. Right. Like that's. That's how she would later describe it. As Nicole grew up, she seems to have had fairly minimal oversight from her mother and a deep hunger for self exploration and discovery. She dated boys and girls and she had a sugar daddy at age 16. That's all we get about that. But she's. She's not very heavily watched. Right. Years later, when she led an organization often described as a cult, she was described in the UK Times as having grown up, quote, a natural leader who says she didn't want to be followed by. But that's not really accurate, and it leaves out a pretty important detail, which is that When Nicole turned 18, she cut off her father, right. Who is now out of jail completely. She has no more contact with him after this point. She starts telling people, like, whenever she gets to know someone that, like, yeah, my dad did this to me when I was a kid. And this is like a story that she. She tells a lot as she's like, processing it, right. She goes to college, a couple of different colleges, but they don't work out. So she finally winds up back in the Bay Area attending San Francisco State University. The Guardian says she gr, but Hewitt, her biographer, denies this. Either way, Nicole spent her 20s in the bay during the early 1990s, which was both dealing and reeling from the AIDS crisis still, and also experiencing the birth of the Silicon Valley tech set. Right. A lot of things are happening at once. And also Burning man starting in the early 90s, and that is actually a really relevant part of the show.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's like these episodes of unfortunate.

[Robert Evans]

It's in the background of a lot of things here. A lot of people in this story meet at. Or even if they don't meet there, they get into experimenting with alternate medicine and all that stuff because they take mushrooms at Burning Man. That's a really common story for the men in this tale particularly.

[Jamie Loftus]

Every time I talk shit about Burning Man, I get it. Turns out someone beloved in the room is like, it changed my life. And then I have to backpedal in an embarrassing way, even though I meant it.

[Robert Evans]

I mean, like, I went to the. Like the small ones in Texas definitely had a huge impact on me, but I never wanted to go to the big one because there's fucking cops there.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Like, I don't want to create my own little city in the woods to take drugs in if there's police officers. That sounds awful.

[Sophie]

Remember that time they got stuck, mudded in and all that shit?

[Robert Evans]

I know, that's fine. I got. We all. We did. We had a flood one year that nearly killed a bunch of people. It was fucking crazy. That part's just fun.

[Sophie]

People die.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think it's like my inner like New Englander. But when I see pictures of Burning Man, I'm like, get a job. Like, what are you doing out there

[Robert Evans]

not having a job and taking a lot of drugs?

[Jamie Loftus]

Or in this case, I'm assuming taking a break from your job in Silicon Valley.

[Robert Evans]

Taking a break from my job. I mean, we were like everyone I knew there. Like half the people I took drugs with were like fucking ER doctors and shit. Like a lot of, A lot of people with jobs where, like, I have a very high stress job and I need a week to take drugs with my friends. Otherwise I'm going to go crazy.

[Jamie Loftus]

I'm going to wear some really bad outfits this week to blow off some steam.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm gonna dress ridiculously.

[Sophie]

Good Lord.

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So Nicole, in her early 20s, starts experimenting with drugs, namely methamphetamine, which she would take by dropping. She's a parachuter. She puts it in like tissue paper and eats it like which is a crazy way to do meth in particular. But you do you honey. I guess she experiments with psychedelics too. She's taken a lot of acid and she's partying with people who are like involved in the first Internet boom and also like and this is Burning Man. Before by the way, it was like a famous Thing that the tech set attended this is when there's like guns, like people are bringing full on machine guns and it's like largely insane libertarians and wizards. What a weird. So it's a slightly different period of time.

[Jamie Loftus]

What a weird. Yeah, like transitional time in the bay. I feel like, I don't know hear about it very often. Well, the bay used to be before or after.

[Robert Evans]

The bay used to be a lot cooler and a lot less governed by all of the people who are billionaires live here. Like it was always weird and maniacs lived there, but they were often very cool maniacs who gradually got priced out of the bay. So again, I had a very similar, like 18 to 22 year old Ty. Like I'm going to a lot of parties and doing drugs with people in weird places. And I also feel like Nicole, that I was very let down by higher education, which I'd been told it was fun and there were a lot of parties, but it was mostly just like high school part two. Nicole's also let down by working in retail and food service jobs, which, you know, same. Like it sucks. You're a young adult, you're realizing this shit is not as fun as you thought it was. But periodically you have these encounters and parties with people where you're like spending like two days on acid and time stops existing and you're like, boy, I wish I could just escape regular life. I feel like there's gotta be a way to do that. And some of us write for the Internet to get that and some of us do what Nicole does.

[Jamie Loftus]

She could. She didn't need to start an orgasm empire. She could have just started a podcast.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. She could have started writing for Cracked magazine. You know, there were a lot of options.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yes, yes. Liberated many, many lost souls. Crack dot com.

[Robert Evans]

So the big difference between like kind of where our paths diverge here is that Nicole starts like she decides that the kind of work that's gonna take me out of this like rat race that I hate at first is like sex work. Right. And she's a highly paid escort. Apparently there's some evidence for that. She's fairly successful. And she realizes she feels really powerful because all of these men with a lot of money who have been much more career successful than her aren't just paying her, but they're often like crying in front of her and like breaking down. And so she realizes, like, she has this very important realization which is that like, oh, it doesn't matter how like rich they are or like, how what Title they have like, men are dumb and I can control them. Right. Like, that's the thing she learns.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's an important day.

[Robert Evans]

It's an important lesson.

[Sophie]

I mean, that's a very common thing. I have several friends who, who are sex workers and that is a very, very common thread that men often just like don't know how to go to a therapist and so they go and seek out therapy from, from a sex worker.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

And there's a lot of crying.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, no, I had a, I had a friend who was an escort and one of her regular clients was this like big Russian mob dude who would come in like twice a year and didn't even want to have sex, would just lay on top of her and cry for like four hours. And like that was, that was what this guy was willing to pay for. Just like, okay, that implies some dark things about your day job.

[Jamie Loftus]

But like, you need to do it. No follow up questions.

[Robert Evans]

No follow up questions.

[Jamie Loftus]

Help.

[Robert Evans]

This help. So she's, she's, she's doing this for a couple of years. And Hewitt writes with each client. She practiced her cold reading, trying to deduce what the man secretly wanted. She quickly learned that her sexual insights held significant economic value. You. So by the time she's 27, you know, this is kind of where she's at. And she gets a call from her mom that her dad is sick and dying in a prison hospital. She had not been in contact, so she didn't know he'd gone back to prison. But her mom tells you, tells her like, yeah, he's back in prison. And that's how Nicole learns that her dad had been arrested for child molestation again, this time for abusing two pre teen girls, including his 12 year old granddaughter who was living with him. Nicole, this hits very hard. She's shocked by this development. She travels to visit her dad and as he dies, she tells him that she forgives him. And again, we know this because she tells the story a lot. I don't know. Again, I actually don't know how true it is, but this is like an important. When she becomes a guru, this is a story she will repeat a lot in the early years of being a guru. Right. And the way she tells it, his death kind of convinces her to fully unmoor herself from mainstream society. So like many of us did, she moved into a warehouse while hers was in San Francisco, where a group of theosophists live and operated a sort of magical commune and largely took a lot of lsd. Right. Many of us have had experiences like this. That's a perfectly fine way to deal with things.

[Jamie Loftus]

Who among us? It is interesting hearing that, like, she was developing cold reading, too, because it just, like, you hear so many points where she could have, like, you're like,

[Pets Best Ad Voice]

she could have been.

[Jamie Loftus]

Been a fake medium. She could have done all sorts of things.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, so many other jobs.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, she's got so many skills.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, she's got so many skills. And now she's living with wizards in a warehouse and taking acid every day. Now, this may not have been as fun because she would later. And again, she's always saying this as she's like, giving parables to her followers to portray a message, so who knows what's true? But a story she would later relate while lecturing her followers is that she moves into this with, like, a girlfriend of hers at the time. And her girlfriend is, like, very abusive and is basically plying her with drugs until she would burn out, and then she would hand her off to someone else to recover and then take Nicole back and feed her more drugs. And, you know, Nicole would say, quote, until I was insane looking for Jesus in the streets, adding up all the numbers on every house I passed, right? That, like, this. This is a very abusive relationship. And this woman, like, uses psychedelics to kind of, like, shatter Nicole's psyche, you know, make sure you known someone for a while before you start taking drugs with them. Kids, if you're going to take drugs with a. With a romantic partner, don't take ecstasy on the first date. That'll fuck you up way more than acid. Well, boy, what you don't need when you're starting a relationship is a massive oxytocin dump, artificially induced.

[Jamie Loftus]

And let me guess, all the men calling themselves wizards she lived with weren't helpful.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think they helped. I don't think the wizards helped.

[Jamie Loftus]

No fucking kidding. The wizard theosophist didn't help? Fucking hell.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. So in Nicole's case, it led her to remain dropped out of society once she leaves the warehouse. She's around 30 now, and she decides, I'm gonna become a Buddhist nun at a Zen monastery. Like Hildegard kinda.

[Jamie Loftus]

There is kind of this mad libs approach to her life that I appreciate.

[Robert Evans]

It's very Bay area in the 90s.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. I feel like my equivalent of it is when you find out your Los Angeles Therapist was in three episodes of SVU 20 years ago, you're like, right, this is the pivot.

[Robert Evans]

This was coming when you live up in the Mountains of Northern California in the 2000 teens. And everyone over 40 that, you know in the cannabis business had previously lived in a warehouse in San Francisco where they'd taken drugs with wizards or they were cartel. Anyway, so Nicole found aspects of the nun life appealing, but she was also really anxious about the fact that she was gonna have to give up sex. So she decides, like, well, before I do this, I'm gonna just go wild for, like, a week and have a week of just, like, crazy sex before I become a nun and don't have anymore. Right. So that's her plan.

[Jamie Loftus]

A Buddhist rumspringer.

[Robert Evans]

A Buddhist rumsp. In a 2025 article for the New York Times, Karine Ramey describes what happened next. She met a man at a party. There is a practice you might want to try. Nicole recalls him telling her before they headed down to his place, a yoga ashram. Take off your pants and lie down, he told her. I'm going to take my clothes off. I'm going to stroke you for 15 minutes. It seemed insane at first, she says, but she did as she was told. The experience was eye opening, she says. I was walking home at night and just felt so clear. And first off, that's interesting. It really says a lot about kind of where her life has led her that this guy says this, and she's like, yeah, sure, I'll give it a shot. That said, I've also done stuff like that because I met a stranger at a party, so I get it.

[Jamie Loftus]

Who am I? I feel like it's really luck of the draw of what kind of parties you have access to, what kind of

[Robert Evans]

parties you have access to, and who offers to take you back to what ashramp. Right.

[Sophie]

Yeah. And, like, that man could have been very scary.

[Robert Evans]

Very scary. Apparently, he wasn't.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah, I mean, it's. It's some light yoga culting, you know?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jamie Loftus]

I think the worst that ever happened to me at a party of that nature was that I briefly pretended to be really into wwe. You just never know.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I lived at a house in Houston with some very strange people for like, a week and a half as a result of something like that. It didn't last, thank God. That ended badly.

[Sophie]

A week and a half, buddy.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah. In other accounts that she's given of this encounter, Nicole emphasizes that before this guy got her started, he just, like, looked at her genitals and described them to her and told her that they were beautiful. And she, like, cried, realizing that no one had ever said anything like that to her before. And this has become like. Will become an important part of like the. The. The. Her theory on orgasmic meditation, which she's going to invent based on all of this later on. Right. This is like one of the steps that you have to go through in this, which makes being in a room full of like 20 people doing this really strange. So she finds this guy again. It turns out he's a dude named Erwan Davin. Right. And he's a student of a practice called deliberate orgasm. And the idea had come from a Bay Area commune started in 1968. The Morehouse community, which had been found a guy named Victor Barranco, or Vic, who was himself a product of the free love and the self improvement movement. He was also a used appliance salesman.

[Jamie Loftus]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

His name is Vic.

[Sophie]

Context is great here.

[Jamie Loftus]

That's fun. This is just like a neighborhood rumor. Like you won't have any idea who you've just bought a wrench from.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Where his hands have been. So when I was writing these episodes, I was planning for this to just be a quick two episodes. I think it's gotta be at least three because I had to go into the whole history of the different orgasm cults that have existed in the Bay Area is solely in California. Well, they spread, but they start in California. You damn sure about that? Yeah. So here's how Ellen Hewitt describes Vic's journey. Vic claimed to have learned the meditative clitoral stroking technique deliberate orgasm in his 30s from a self proclaimed witch when he and his wife were seeking help with their sex life. The actual origin of the practice is hard to pin down, but Vick realized the value of the idea quickly. In 1968, he started a commune in Lafayette, California. He picked the name Morehouse because it was the place dedicated to living with more. Here's how one of Vick's lieutenants put. We at Morehouse believe that every day is Sunday. We believe that we are on earth to have a good time, to devote our lives to pleasure. We call it responsible hedonism.

[Jamie Loftus]

I can't. This is. It's so silly. It's so silly that this is it sounds like a man who realized he never made his wife come in their 30s. And then instead of just making her come was like, I have to start a business.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta bring a witch into this. Like, there's money in this.

[Jamie Loftus]

Baby. Baby, did you know you could do that? And she's like.

[Robert Evans]

Like, yeah, yeah, Vic.

[Jamie Loftus]

You could have done it at any time.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Married man in his 30s discovers orgasms and Decides there's money monetizing women's orgasms.

[Jamie Loftus]

Go, let's go, Vic. Let's go, Vic.

[Robert Evans]

Vic. Oh man. Okay, so this is all occurring as part of an explosion of intentional and utopian communities around the time. And of those, Morrow House is not among the most toxic. This is like on the low end of bad for what things you might call in this period of time. Although it's still pretty bad.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's bad. And it's also corny.

[Pets Best Ad Voice]

Corny.

[Jamie Loftus]

Which makes it worse.

[Robert Evans]

Cults always are and religion always is, folks. And that doesn't mean it can't be an important part of your life. Part of becoming a real adult is an understanding that to be happy you have to do embarrassing things, right? Like that's it folks. Sorry you can't be cool once you're no longer like 19. So give up. So Morehouse sells introductory courses. And these are all called the courses they sell. Like if you sign up and pay, it's called the Mark group. And people are told they're called marks. You're being told that they're jokingly saying you are marks and we are hustling you. Right. That's very open. And they're open about them like we're hustling you. But you'll get something out of it, Right? Like we'll get your money and you'll learn how to have more, better sex. Right, Right. So that's, that's the way they're kind of advertising themselves. Kqed. There's an article in. Sorry, I found an article on KQED News's website. Quote, one notorious Morehouse event was a public demonstration in 1976 of what the group claimed was a woman having a three hour orgasm. And Barranco took advantage of California's loose post secondary education standards to turn the Lafayette commune into More University, which offered PhDs in the humanities and sensuality and conducted what the organization said was sexual research. In 1992, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that the courses cost as much as $16,800.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh my God.

[Robert Evans]

So this is that KQED article came out after like some lawsuits around this, this, this group. And there's a lot of negative reporting that hits like, come like the 80s and 90s and stuff. Barranco over the years sues several newspapers for libel. Those lawsuits all fail, but they make Public Safety some fascinating details about how the group works during discovery. Like that their Moore University's advanced Sexuality class conducted research on engorgement, lubrication, seminal secretion, and that one Purpose of the class was to make friends with another crotch. So they're also gross and corny.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's starting to sound like a disgusting prison experiment.

[Robert Evans]

It is, it is. It's pretty gross. Like, they're pretty gross about the wording, but also they're hitting like a bomb in a culture of, like, men who have. Don't know that you can, like, actually please your partner. That like, like that's something that sex can have. So the fact that a guy is being like, no, actually in a very clinical setting, you can just learn how to like, manipulate a clitoris. Right. Like, you could just take that class and there are dudes who are willing to pay money for that. It's a. It's a business. Right. And part because people can't talk about sex and they can't be educated about it really, in this period of time. Very well. So there's a. There's a hunger for this kind of thing. And you know, what's going on kind of within the cult's internal messaging is that the increasing scientific consensus on sex and pleasure is being twisted to argue kind of the same thing the Greeks had argued. Right. This is set up as very. We're trying to, you know, make men better and make you all have better sex and make sure women have a better time. But a big part of the scientific theories they come up with about sex and orgasms is that women don't just enjoy sex more than men. They're insatiable. And so there's nothing wrong with treating them like sexual beings, whether or not they want that. Right. It's the same conclusion 2000 something years later. It's pretty wild when you lay it out like that.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. And now they're like printing money doing it.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, yeah, yeah. They buy a big commune.

[Jamie Loftus]

Very curious about who's. Who's teaching these classes and what the gender split is there. It's. It's so true because it's like that on its face. You know, maybe there's elements to it that are positive and like, are speaking to, like, how puritanical the US was and is about sex and wanting, you know, their partners to have pleasure. But there is this element of like, like the profit. Like profiting off of it is. Is one thing. And it's also just like. It just feels like a stealing of narrative too, of like, not only do I want to be able to like, manipulate a clitoris and, and make. Make someone come, I want to be able to like, brag about it and have a graduate degree in it.

[Robert Evans]

Have a degree in him coming so

[Jamie Loftus]

yucky and just feels like still asserting yourself. The.

[Robert Evans]

You know, I'm imagining, like, a fucking 70s dude with a huge mustache and, like, a bed, but behind it is, like. It's like the wall of a doctor's office with his degrees in sex.

[Jamie Loftus]

Exactly, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So, yeah, Vic's whole thing was, in fact, aping some really lazy interpretations of, like, feminism and, like, kind of modern sex science and twisting those to his own end. For one. He agreed that women shouldn't be expected to wear makeup or shave their body hair. So he banned them from doing those things when they lived in the Morehouse cult compound.

[Jamie Loftus]

Oh, so thick. So close.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. While he traveled his properties, usually in a golf cart because he hated walking, he was waited on by men and women, and the women were made to wear French maid uniforms. This service was called Mating. When asked why he did this, he answered, sexual liberation. People had very different experiences with the Morehouses. Again, most folks are not joining the cult. They're taking some classes, right? But there are people who, like, live there. And over the years, they start. They build separate morehouses, right? Where, like, they're all over the country and they're selling courses and people are living there and having, like, compulsory sex. Right? Because they're kind of told you have to constantly be having sex. There's, like, quotas and stuff. And Vic keeps a strict in and out list of his followers, and he'll encourage them to exchange sex with each other in order to improve their standards.

[Jamie Loftus]

How quickly does this, like, escalate? This is.

[Robert Evans]

That's 10 years or so, I think something like that, you know, I mean, it lasts longer than that, but it's over, like, the first decade. I think that, like, all this is slotting into place. As Hewitt writes, people were assigned job shifts as technicians, and their only duty was to fill a certain weekly quota of tricks or sexual service encounters. The technicians would look within the community for customers to have sex with that day, and they would take payment using the group's internal paper currency. Residents were screened for STDs and forbidden from sex outside the group. Vic was criticized during his life, but the grift never exploded, and some form of this community exists today. As one former teacher later said, the institute is a good scam. We call ourselves hustlers and other people marks. Victor hustles their asses and their souls. He takes their dough to feed himself. But he sees to it that they win, too. Right now, whether or not that's true is something different. People have Very different takes on.

[Jamie Loftus]

I wouldn't say certainly not everyone is winning this. Not everybody, no.

[Robert Evans]

But the Morehouse Institute is mostly relevant to our story. Because if, you know, like in 1992, that's when they had like the Morehouse Institute has one of their big legal spats and they get a bunch of bad press. And one of Vic's students, a guy named R.J. testerman, leaves the group to found his own orgasm cult, the Welcomed Consensus, which our friend Nicole is going to join in 19, I think 97. In the late 90s.

[Sophie]

Okay, so welcomed Consensus.

[Robert Evans]

The Welcomed Consensus. What an upsetting name. I don't like that at all.

[Sophie]

I don't like it, honey.

[Robert Evans]

I don't like that at all.

[Jamie Loftus]

Yeah. If you have any problems, it's actually answered by the name of the organization. Yeah, so go back to the sign.

[Robert Evans]

Just tapping the sign. Yeah, tapping the sign. Jamie, you got anything to plug before we write out for a day? Before we get back to orgasm cults?

[Jamie Loftus]

Before. Yeah, before we cool off. You can listen to the Bechtel cast. We are having our 10 year anniversary soon, which is nuts. You can listen to we the Unhouse. I have a book that'll be available for pre sale sometime in the summer. I'll let you know. Check Instagram. Jamie Kray, superstar, rock on.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. All right, everybody, this has been the episode. We'll be back with more of us having to say uncomfortable phrases to read in a broadcast. Like clustoral stimulation that nobody wants to sit and read off a script. That's not anybody's ideal day.

[Jamie Loftus]

I don't know. I think we all had a nice time. Part one is always the fun one.

[Robert Evans]

Part one is the fun. It's weird cause I've always been a pretty like sex positive guy. And by the end of like the research for this, I was like, stop fucking. Stop fucking. You people are doing it wrong. Stop. And stop doing drugs. You're doing that wrong too. Get a job. All right, we're done.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com BehindTheBastards we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.