One Taste explores female pleasure

This time of year, visitors choke the streets of Southwest Florida. It takes more than an hour to cross a three-mile stretch of Fort Myers Beach and another 30 minutes to drive to the nearest grocery store. In Publix, I spend more time dodging snowbirds than buying groceries. I understand why so many people flock to our shores — the weather, the beaches, the ambiance — and I know how businesses in this area depend on seasonal traffic. Which is why I'm sorry to report on a new destination, sure to lure visitors from our area to the rolling hills of San Francisco. Ok, maybe not everyone. But definitely the women.

According to a recent New York

Times article, San Francisco is home to One Taste Urban Retreat Center, a spiritual commune dedicated to female sensual pleasure. Sure, it offers other features — lectures on Tibetan Buddhism, yoga classes (that were, at one time, naked) — but the core of the center's focus is exploring women's sexuality.

Each morning, the members of the retreat center gather for daily practice, an event that culminates in the women "going over" (a euphemism the group uses for sexual fulfillment). Men and women are partnered off for the exercise and are not necessarily involved romantically. In fact, the practice has almost no romantic overtures: there's no hand-holding or flirtation, and eye contact between partners is prohibited. During "orgasmic meditation," the men are not touched by the women, and the exercise focuses solely on female pleasure.

On first read-through, One Taste sounds like a sweet deal. As a woman in a world where men dictate the sexual norms, I appreciate the novelty of an institution dedicated to women's happiness. It's true that many men profess that their girlfriend's pleasure is more important than their own — in fact, every guy I know has confided this at some point — but when it comes to game time, few actually deliver. The center is so focused on female pleasure, that the exercises are often classified in clinical terms. The article quotes Reese Jones, boyfriend of the retreat's founder, as likening orgasmic meditation to yoga or Pilates. "It's a procedure to nourish the limbic system," he said. "With no strings attached."

But here I have to wonder: Isn't the point of intercourse to commune with another soul? It seems dangerous to distill the experience purely to stimulation, and I worry what happens when we take our partners out of the equation. In this climax-focused atmosphere, One Taste feels dangerously close to a one night stand.

Perhaps One Taste would be wise to focus less on going over and look more to the teachings of, say, Tantra. This spiritual practice, started in India more than 6,000 years ago, claims sexuality is a path to the divine. Rather than emphasizing the end-goal, Tantra encourages the meditative union of two partners joined by trust and intimacy. To me, this seems a better way of going about personal fulfillment.

But if tourism revenues suddenly decline in Lee and Collier counties, we'll understand why San Francisco is experiencing a sudden boom.

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