Part One: The Orgasm Cult

Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to weave the half-century long history of orgasm cults in the U. S., culminating in the rise of Nicole Daedone's OneTaste. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Behind the Bastards! That's the podcast you're listening to, right now. Worst people in all of history, we tell you all about them, and you know-

• 0:13Speaker 01

  All about them?

• 0:14Robert Evans?

  This has been a rough year for a lot of us here at Behind the Bastards. We've 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.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  My name was so close to "pedophiles" there.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  That didn't wind up working well.

• 0:36Speaker 01

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

• 0:42Robert 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 Jamie? Uh, I don't know. I did it the wrong way. I'm sure about that.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  I have one complaint at the start here. Robert, why are you not wearing a hat?

• 0:58Robert Evans?

  I don't like hats.

• 1:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:02Speaker 01

  So?

• 1:02Robert Evans?

  I don't have a statement hat, but Jamie, you are wearing a Theranos hat right now, which-

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I am a well-worn one.

• 1:09Robert Evans?

  A well-worn one. Yeah, Theranos hat that's been around the block.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  It's kind of rusty.

• 1:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it looks like fucking Liz Holmes sweat through that thing while she was waiting to hear she was getting indicted.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  I, yeah, I actually contributed to her bail fund and she mailed this to me. Iconic. Um, I'm wearing a hat that feels very appropriate for today's episode. It says disappointment awaits.

• 1:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. You're both going to get what you want today. Cause 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.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  And then the crowd bursts into applause. They're like, you muscled through six weeks of pedophiles to get to the orgasm cult. We did it, folks.

• 1:59Robert 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.

• 2:06Speaker 02

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

• 2:12Robert 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.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  And we love to see women in a leadership role.

• 2:24Robert Evans?

  Exactly. A woman who is, 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...

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:36Robert Evans?

  It'll, it starts the process.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  After, after...

• 2:38Robert Evans?

  She goes through a lot of guys.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  After Specter and Savile, thank you.

• 2:43Robert Evans?

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

• 2:46Speaker 02

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

• 2:50Robert Evans?

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

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Who is this person?

• 2:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna guess you, there's a good chance you haven't heard her name. She's Nicole Daedone. Like, like, D-A-E-D-O-N-E.

• 3:04Speaker 02

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

• 3:08Robert Evans?

  A lot, Sophie. It's impossible.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Can we get a control F on this?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I just got really excited.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

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

• 3:20Speaker 02

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

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Only six.

• 3:27Robert 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.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  It's like an operating theater approach to coming?

• 3:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's exactly what they do. That's exactly the art of The Grift, Jamie.

• 3:56Speaker 01

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

• 3:59Robert 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 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 guy has endorsed this business. So, so many beautiful crossovers.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Ooh, oh, god, yeah. Anytime you have a Silicon Valley grift, you have some incredible side players. There's always a great series of cameos.

• 4:47Robert Evans?

  Tim Ferriss shows up. It's awesome.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Really?

• 4:51Robert 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.

• 5:01Speaker 01

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

• 5:08Robert 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 and popular awareness and medical conception, right?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Okay, 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?

• 5:42Robert Evans?

  What, is it just a picture?

• 5:43Speaker 01

  And let's all be on the same page.

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  You've got like a laser pointer, so it's like right there.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Just mining information. So let's talk about it, ladies.

• 5:52Robert 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 10, something like that.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  My sex ed, I took it over summer school and they just showed us multiple horrific birthing scenes.

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  Oh, great. Yeah, we did see one of those, just one, because it was Texas.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Not one, not two, maybe four.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  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 other.

• 6:43Robert Evans?

  My connected, yeah. I, 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, 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.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  It's important.

• 7:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really crucial stuff.

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• 7:26Robert Evans?

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• 9:00Robert 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, 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 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 seemed 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."

• 9:43Robert Evans?

  The wide-stage Tiresias was brought in to give like, an answer to kind of adjudicate this, and he was like, "Women feel nine or 10 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.

• 9:56Speaker 02

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

• 10:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, Zeus Slender's always on the calendar.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Zeus Slender is absolutely always on the calendar and we do talk about him like he is a guy that was

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:09Robert Evans?

  He's just a dude. Yeah. Like we met him at Cinnabon.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  My only compliment to Zeus is that story about when Zeus birthed somebody from his forehead.

• 10:18Robert Evans?

  He did, he did Athena, yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  And that's how I think I got Anderson.

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, oh, there you go.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:24Robert Evans?

  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?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  First of all, swans not nice. Second of all.

• 10:37Robert Evans?

  No.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 10:39Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Sure, that's what Zeus said. Uh, 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 kinda 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,

• 11:24Robert Evans?

  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 guardians. So. That's gonna actually be relevant to every, every modern day orgasm cult. All of which are getting wrapped in like, this is all about the women. And all of which are going to wind up recreating that like ancient Greek and Roman shit. Like, it's crazy how it's, nothing changes.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, so we already have, this is maybe a record for, for you, Robert, of like, we can't talk about this before we talk about ancient Greek mythology.

• 12:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we gotta.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:21Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 12:22Speaker 01

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

• 12:29Robert 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.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  My sex cult is gonna be better. This is, this is instructive.

• 12:40Robert 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. Cause 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 is not a no, brah. Like, that's, that's Ovid, right? Like, he's that kind of guy.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  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 Tyreseus. 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 the widespread understanding in medieval Europe, which breaks a pretty important misconception about medieval life, right? That like, they were frightened and ignorant of sex? Cause they weren't nearly as ignorant as a lot of people who would come later. For one thing, everyone lives in the same room. So you like, know where kids come from, right? Like, there's no missing that.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  You see them being created constantly.

• 13:52Robert 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- 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, Decoitu, on sexual intercourse. He was actually translating the work of a Muslim scholar, as is often the case with stuff like this,

• 14:37Robert Evans?

  Ibn al-Jazir, 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.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  It's my fuck book. It's my fuck book. Don't worry about it.

• 14:47Robert 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 Decoitu, The Little Book of Intercourse. That's, that's all kind of fun, right?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That is fun.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  That's all interesting. Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Okay, people are, so like Wattpad goes way back. Everyone's always been writing their horny little things.

• 15:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Forever.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Also, Ovid is like spouting the game, basically.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the first pick-up artist.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  He's like, no, no, they love it, dude. They love it.

• 15:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, huge fans. So, Jazir 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 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, 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.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I'm already sold. I'm like, there's

• 16:25Robert Evans?

  I'm locked in.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  You've hit a lot of my buzzwords today.

• 16:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Is the nun fucking cool?

• 16:32Robert Evans?

  We've got a horny nun? She's, she's a horny nun, but more than that, she's, every now and then you like read about someone in history and they're from long enough to go 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.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  You're reading it.

• 16:48Robert Evans?

  And that's 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 giving one of them to the priesthood, or to be a monk, or to be a nun, right? Like, that's a normal idea.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  I didn't know that extended to flesh. That's not.

• 17:16Robert Evans?

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

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you can get to 10.

• 17:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We get to 10, we'll give one to God. Um, and her parents were also, may have been motivated. She started seeing visions at age three. Um, 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. Um, 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. My interpretation of her story is that the latter is more likely, but yeah, I, I'm an atheist and 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.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  That feels like so, you know, that's like the history of women in religion is like, oh, actually, a guy we 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 would just respond and like from a separate email and be like, hi, I'm Kevin, Jamie's representative.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Kevin is such a great fake guy name.

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Kevin's a perfect fake guy name.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Kevin could be a guy. He's a great negotiator, Kevin. If you ever get an email from Kevin, look out. You're about to get lowballed.

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  You're gonna get fucking, yeah. So 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 Judda. And an anchoress, that, that whole thing means that like Judda 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.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  As opposed to like, there, are there, I guess, like, some nuns are loose?

• 19:18Robert 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, cause, 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. It seems, that makes sense. I know I've heard of anchoresses before.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Your anchor nuns or your loose nuns?

• 19:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, your anchor nuns and your loose nuns. Um, your pocket nuns, so to speak. And by the time Hildegard's a young adult, Judda's died, and it says a lot about how good Hildegard is at the social game, that Hildegard gets made anchoress when she dies. Like, Judda passes the title on to her, so she's in charge now, 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.

• 20:23Robert Evans?

  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," Hildegard told the abbot.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  I love her.

• 20:35Robert Evans?

  Fucking awesome. She's so cool.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  I just like, love her. It's like, oh.

• 20:43Robert Evans?

  Hey, you know this guy you're telling me exists and talks to us? He's talking to me right now and oh!

• 20:49Speaker 02

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

• 20:53Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Oh, that's genius.

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  It's so cool. She's awesome. So the nuns, I get to leave and they set off to find it.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  We gotta bring the name Hildegard back. It's a banger.

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  Hildegard whips, yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  I love it. Sorry, continue. When you're talking about a cool nun, that just really just gets me going.

• 21:10Robert Evans?

  She's rad.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  I'm really coming alive right now.

• 21:12Robert 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. Uh, he'd been giving her visions all these years, totally. She'd been having, but she just had kept them to yourself, herself. She never like told them 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

• 21:54Robert Evans?

  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 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-

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Sorry, God wants me to pivot.

• 22:13Robert Evans?

  God wants me to pivot, pivoting to books.

• 22:16Speaker 02

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

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 22:25Speaker 02

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

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  It worked. Any nun can do it, unfortunately.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  This is, this is that, that strategy being used in the right way.

• 22:48Robert Evans?

  In the very coolest of ways. So Hildegard reaches out to the Pope and she's like, this is what God said. She like, she sends what I just read basically to the Pope. And the Pope is like,

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Which Pope?

• 22:57Robert Evans?

  Hell yeah, God wants you to write. Like, here's some fucking money. Why don't you pick out a team of like helpers? And they'll like transcribe and write out and like publish, you know, all of, 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 don't, I didn't look that up. This isn't a story about a man, Sophie.

• 23:18Speaker 01

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

• 23:24Robert Evans?

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

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Pope W is few and far between.

• 23:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Especially in this period, 12th century.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying.

• 23:33Robert Evans?

  She publishes a bunch of books and one of them is called Cause et Curi. And it contains what is generally agreed to be the oldest description of a woman having an orgasm written by a woman, right?

• 23:44Speaker 01

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

• 23:51Robert Evans?

  She says it's God. She, cause she couldn't know, obviously. God, she hasn't experienced one.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  God's like, you're a nun, so this is, so like, I'm just gonna let you in. You're missing out on something crazy.

• 24:04Robert Evans?

  It is fucked up if you think about it that way.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  I love it. It's like God is taunting her.

• 24:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. He's being a real dick here.

• 24:13Robert Evans?

  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, you know, very Catholic, you know, very 12th century.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. I honestly, I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed. I wanted something, I wanted something sexier.

• 24:55Robert Evans?

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

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yes, but if she was alive now, she would have loved that song Pussy Palace by Louis Allen.

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  She would have been huge about that one. Yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 01

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

• 25:16Robert Evans?

  It's super funny.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of relatable, I think.

• 25:20Robert Evans?

  Hildegard lives a great life. The church censer, she gets to do all the things she'd always dreamed about. The church censer on four long speaking tours where she like travels around like 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 talk, impact our episode, but I couldn't read these and not include them because some of them are pretty spot on today.

• 25:52Speaker 01

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

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  What do men be like? So you got to 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, right?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  They missed that nation in Last Airbender, the bile nation.

• 26:16Robert Evans?

  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, uh, 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?

• 27:01Robert Evans?

  Is kind of what she's saying here, I think.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Right. This is like, she's just describing a man who could be a friend.

• 27:07Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Possibly. It is also sounding like vaguely kind of astrological, the way that she's categorizing them. Yeah.

• 27:14Robert Evans?

  For sure, for sure. Um, she's, and yeah, she, she also includes an incisive description of toxic men, who she describes as being full of bile.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  The bile men.

• 27:24Robert Evans?

  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.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  This, her ex was fuming when he read that. That was, oh, I do appreciate, that is, that is like a very, like, subtle but important distinction of like, um, a, a, a man who is just like wildly horny, and a man who is both horny and really into mind games that are like ruinous.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Let's, let's, let's retire fuckboy and bring back, you're full of bile.

• 28:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. You're full of bile. That's, that's, we gotta do that?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know who's not full of bile, though, Robert?

• 28:20Robert Evans?

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

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I did it first.

• 28:24Robert Evans?

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

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Honey, bileless.

• 28:34Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 29:02Speaker 05

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• 29:32Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Stories of survival.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  The only difference between me and her frankly was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be dead.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it. And he got a year.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:41Robert Evans?

  And we're back. They might've had some bile in them. I don't know.

• 30:44Speaker 02

  We don't know.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  Who knows what you people listen to?

• 30:47Speaker 02

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

• 30:50Robert 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.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Wait, is this the fourth kind of guy?

• 31:02Robert Evans?

  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 just like, some men are fine with it. And it's like, well, you're missing a piece of the story, Hildegard, but that's fine. But she, 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 attitudes, so they can't enjoy company anymore." It's amazing how spot on that shit is.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  She's talking about clavicular.

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  That's the 12th century.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  That could have been written this year.

• 31:54Robert Evans?

  She wrote that shit 800 years ago, 900 years ago.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Man, we always think that like this jet, like whatever generation has really reached the final stage of misogyny and like being socially horrible, but.

• 32:07Robert Evans?

  Nope.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Hildegard described the manosphere all the way back then.

• 32:14Speaker 01

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

• 32:19Robert Evans?

  That's fucking crazy. Now, unfortunately, this is where we gotta leave our friend Hildegard.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:26Robert Evans?

  Who's awesome and never did anything wrong, but we are not the show our friend Margaret Killjoy does, so we're not gonna talk about Hildegard anymore.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Margaret, drop the Hildegard episode, please. Margaret, I love you.

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  Just as this episode's gonna be kind of downhill after Hildegard, the way women's sexuality was discussed in like pot, 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 Hymer who used the term to describe what happens during a pelvic massage.

• 33:05Robert Evans?

  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?

• 33:20Speaker 01

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

• 33:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, I mean, that's basically the idea.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, right.

• 33:31Robert 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.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Not being allowed to read or vote.

• 33:46Robert Evans?

  Not being allowed to read, go to school, vote, having to have 11 children.

• 33:51Speaker 01

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

• 34:06Robert Evans?

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

• 34:09Speaker 01

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

• 34:12Robert 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.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  The steampunk vibrator is so.

• 34:36Robert Evans?

  A steampunk vibrator, yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 01

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

• 34:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's actually, there's a, 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.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  I was like, were the Victorian vibrators also inextricably had 40 settings that you have to click through every single one to turn it off? Cool.

• 35:04Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Cool. So that's, that's a feature, not a bug.

• 35:06Robert Evans?

  That goes back, yeah.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  So the, the vibrator was the fifth common household appliance to become electrified. It beat the vacuum by about 100 years. So that's pretty cool.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I think that's priorities.

• 35:17Robert 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 decades since, we've learned a lot more about the vagina and the clitoris, which

• 36:02Robert Evans?

  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 end to 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 eurogenital health, doing it regularly reduces the odds of certain diseases. There's a bunch of that that we understand.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  So I just want to make sure I'm being clear. After the eight, nine years of this podcast existed, we're coming and saying clearly, coming is good.

• 36:36Robert Evans?

  Coming is great.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Coming is good.

• 36:38Robert Evans?

  Never been an anti-cumming podcast.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

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

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Cumming is medically good.

• 36:50Robert Evans?

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

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, consensual cumming is good. Yeah.

• 37:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. 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 fibransgrin, 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 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

• 37:44Robert Evans?

  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?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we would sooner drug someone than try to have an interesting conversation with them.

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  And 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 for Masters & 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 which 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 DeDon was born on August 24, 1964, right in the smack

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  in the middle of this massive period of evolution and how we talk about and understand sex. She had a difficult upbringing. Her father, Joseph, separated from her mother, Beverly, when Nicole was like seven. 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 summon him. She invented bargains with the universe, certain that if she sang out loud the songs of Al Green, her dad's favorites, 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. Yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  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 passage, in a way.

• 40:00Robert Evans?

  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 coldest, I'm sure I 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, and we had no money. And he got a job in New York City, and he like 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 a very sad story. My dad came back. Hers never did. Because it turns, and it's good, well, it's good that

• 40:42Robert Evans?

  he didn't, because Joseph was a creep and a pedophile. In 1976, he was arrested and charged with child molestation.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Sorry, 41 minutes?

• 40:51Robert Evans?

  41 minutes.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  41 minutes, pedophile free. That's a new record.

• 40:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's buying the bastards, the new shirt. 41 minutes, pedophile free in 2026.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Most aren't so lucky.

• 41:04Speaker 02

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

• 41:07Robert Evans?

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

• 41:10Speaker 02

  I just don't wanna sell anything. Thank you.

• 41:12Robert 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

• 41:53Robert Evans?

  Ways. She has a thing for like, she, 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.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  I liked Pokemon cards, but okay.

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  It's weird. It's a little weird. Uh, and her.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it doesn't, she does have like an OCD kind of like ritualizing. Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 42:20Robert 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. Uh, 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, uh, and she had a sugar daddy at age 16. That's all we get about that. Um, but she's, she's not very heavily watched, right? Uh, 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." 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?

• 43:01Robert Evans?

  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. She's like processing it, right? Uh, she goes to college, um, a couple of different colleges, but they don't work out. And so she finally winds up back in the Bay area attending San Francisco State University. The Guardian says she graduated, but Hewitt, her biographer denies this. Either way, Nicole spent her twenties 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 nineties. And that is actually a really relevant part of the show.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Just like a hat trick of unfortunate.

• 43:48Robert Evans?

  It's in the background, like of a lot of things here. Like a lot of people, a lot of people in this story meet at, or like, e- even if they don't meet there, they get into like experimenting with alternate, you know, uh, medicine and all that stuff because they like take mushrooms at Burning Man. Like that's a really common story with the, for the men in this tale, but like particularly.

• 44:09Speaker 01

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

• 44:22Robert 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.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:31Robert 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.

• 44:37Speaker 01

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

• 44:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I know, that's fine. I got, we had a flood one year that nearly killed a bunch of people. It was fucking crazy.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Somebody die, people die, it's, yeah.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  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?

• 45:00Robert Evans?

  Not having a job and taking a lot of drugs.

• 45:05Speaker 01

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

• 45:10Robert Evans?

  Taking a break from my job. I mean, 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 were 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.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I have to wear some really bad outfits this week to blow off some steam.

• 45:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna dress ridiculously.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Good lord.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  If you're a fight fan and you haven't seen the BKFC app yet, you're missing the world's most exciting combat sport. Bare knuckle fighting championship has changed the game. No gloves, no stalling, no boring rolling around on the ground, just pure violence and pure entertainment. The BKFC app includes live events, past fights, original series, behind-the-scenes access, merch discounts, and more. Only $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Get the BKFC app at BKFC.com.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worse.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  And get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 47:18Speaker 04

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:42Robert Evans?

  So Nicole, in her early twenties, 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 a full-on machine guns, and it's, like, largely insane libertarians and wizards. So it's a slightly different period of time.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  What a weird, yeah, like, transitional time in the Bay. I feel like I don't hear about it very often.

• 48:26Robert Evans?

  Well, the Bay used to be a lot-

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Before or after.

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  The Bay used to be a lot cooler and a lot, yes, less governed by all of the people who are billionaires live here. Like, it was, 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 time. 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 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.

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  But periodically you have, you know, 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.

• 49:32Speaker 02

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

• 49:37Robert Evans?

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

• 49:42Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Liberated many, many lost souls.

• 49:47Robert Evans?

  Many a soul.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Cracked.com.

• 49:50Robert Evans?

  So the big difference

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  between like kind of where our paths diverge here is that Nicole starts like she decides that the kind of work that's going to take me out of this like rat race that I hated first is like sex work, right? And she's a high, 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, what title they have, like men are dumb and I can control them, right? Like that's the thing she learns.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  That's a, that's an important day.

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  It's an important lesson.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a very common thing. I've, I have several friends 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 a, from a sex worker.

• 50:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  And um, there's a lot of crying.

• 50:58Robert 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, uh, 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.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:14Robert Evans?

  Just like, okay, that, that implies some dark things about your day job, but like.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  You're like, you know what? No follow up questions.

• 51:23Robert Evans?

  No follow up questions for me.

• 51:28Robert Evans?

  So she's a, 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. 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, yeah, tells her like, yeah, he's back in prison. Um, and that's how Nicole learns that her dad had been arrested for child molestation again, this time for abusing two preteen 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.

• 52:12Robert Evans?

  And again, we know this because she tells this 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. Well, 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. It's a perfectly fine way to deal with things.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Who among us?

• 52:50Robert Evans?

  Who among us?

• 52:51Speaker 01

  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, she could have been a fake medium. She could have done all sorts of shit.

• 53:02Robert Evans?

  So many other jobs.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. She's got so many skills.

• 53:05Robert Evans?

  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

• 53:48Robert Evans?

  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. Um, you know, make sure you've known someone for a while before you start taking drugs with them, kids. If you're gonna 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.

• 54:13Speaker 01

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

• 54:20Robert Evans?

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

• 54:22Speaker 01

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

• 54:29Robert 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.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Like Hildegard, kinda.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  There is the kind of this Mad Libs approach to her life that I appreciate.

• 54:51Robert Evans?

  It's it's very Bay Area in the 90s.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like my equivalent of it is like when you find out your like Los Angeles therapist was in three episodes of SVU 20 years ago.

• 55:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  You're like, right, this is the pivot. This is this was coming.

• 55:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. When you live up in the mountains of Northern California and the 20 teens and everyone over 40 that you know, in the cannabis business, had previously lived in a warehouse in San Francisco where they take drugs with wizards.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  It's a circle.

• 55:24Robert Evans?

  Or they work cartel.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  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.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  A Buddhist Rumspringa.

• 55:45Robert Evans?

  A Buddhist Rumspringa. In a 2025 article for the New York Times, Kareen 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 that's interesting. Like, 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.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  I.

• 56:28Robert Evans?

  Because I met a stranger at a party, so I get it.

• 56:32Speaker 01

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

• 56:37Robert Evans?

  What kind of parties you have access to.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  What kind of man?

• 56:39Robert Evans?

  And who offers to take you back to what ashram? Right?

• 56:42Speaker 01

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

• 56:46Robert Evans?

  Very scary. Apparently, he wasn't.

• 56:49Speaker 01

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

• 56:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:03Robert 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. Um, it didn't last, uh, thank God.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Long party.

• 57:12Robert Evans?

  That ended badly.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  No cake and a half, buddy.

• 57:17Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, in other encounter 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, 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

• 58:01Robert Evans?

  commune started in 1968, the Morehouse Community, which had been founded by a guy named Victor Baranco, or Vic, who was himself a product of the free love and the self-improvement movement. He was also a used appliance salesman.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Okay, that's fun.

• 58:18Robert Evans?

  His name is Vic.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Context is great here.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  That's fun.

• 58:22Robert Evans?

  This is, I love.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Just like a neighborhood rumor, like you won't have any idea who you've just bought a wrench from.

• 58:29Robert 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, in the Bay Area, solely in California. Well, they spread, but they start in California. You damn sure about that.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 58:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, uh, here's how, 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 Vic 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 Vic's lieutenants put it. "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."

• 59:28Speaker 01

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

• 59:46Robert Evans?

  Gotta bring a witch into this.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Like.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  There's money in this.

• 59:52Speaker 01

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

• 59:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  You could have done it at any time.

• 59:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, married man in his 30s discovers orgasms and decides there's money in it.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Monetizing women's orgasms. Go, let's go Vic.

• 1:00:11Robert Evans?

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

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  It's bad and it's also corny.

• 1:00:34Robert Evans?

  It's corny.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Which makes it worse.

• 1:00:36Robert 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. It's an understanding that to be happy, you have to do embarrassing things, right? Like, that's, that's it, folks, sorry. You can't be cool once you're no longer like 19.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Robert Evans?

  So give up.

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  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 like, you are Marks and we are like hustling you, right? Like, 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? So that's, that's the way they're kind of advertising themselves. KQED, there's an article, 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's." Having a three hour orgasm and Baranco took advantage of California's loose post-secondary

• 1:01:42Robert Evans?

  education standards to turn the Lafayette commune into Moore 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.

• 1:01:59Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:02:00Robert 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. Broncos, over the years, sue several newspapers for libel. Those lawsuits all fail, but they make public some fascinating details about how the group works during discovery, like that their Moore University's advanced sexuality class conducted research on, quote, 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.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

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

• 1:02:39Robert 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.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:15Robert Evans?

  So there's a, there's a hunger for this kind of thing. And, you know, what's, 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 have, make men, 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 There's nothing wrong with treating them like sexual beings, whether or not they want that, right? It's the same conclusion.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:55Robert Evans?

  2000 something years later. Um, it's, it's pretty wild when you lay it out like that.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:05Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, they buy a big commune.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Very curious about who's, who's teaching these classes and what the gender split is there. Um, it's, it's so true because it's like that on its face, you know, maybe there, there's elements to it that are positive and like are speaking to like, uh, how puritanical the US was and is about sex and wanting, uh, you know, their partners to have pleasure. But there is this element of 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, a clitoris and, and, and make, uh, make

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  someone come, I want to be able to like brag about it and have a graduate degree in it.

• 1:04:55Robert Evans?

  Have a degree in him coming?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  So yucky and just feels like still asserting yourself, the, you know?

• 1:05:03Robert Evans?

  I'm, I'm imagining like a fucking seventies 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.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:05:14Robert 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 ends. Uh, 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.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Oh, so close Vic, so close.

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, 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 standings.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  Per Hewitt's book-

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  How quickly does this like escalate? This is, that's-

• 1:06:26Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:34Robert Evans?

  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, it's something different people have very different takes on.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say, certainly not everyone is winning in this tradition.

• 1:07:19Robert Evans?

  Not everybody.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:20Robert 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 RJ 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.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Welcomed Consensus.

• 1:07:47Robert Evans?

  The Welcomed Consensus. What an upsetting name.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  I don't-

• 1:07:50Robert Evans?

  I don't like that at all.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  I like it, honey. It's-

• 1:07:53Robert Evans?

  I don't like that at all.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, if you have any problems, it's actually answered by the name of the organization.

• 1:07:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  So go back to the sign, just tapping the sign.

• 1:08:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, tapping the sign. Jamie, you got anything to plug before we ride out?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:08:09Robert Evans?

  For a day before we get back to orgasm cults?

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Before, yeah, before we cool off. Um, you, you can, uh, listen to the Bechtel Cast. We're, uh, having our 10 year anniversary soon, which is nuts. Um, we, you can listen to We The Unhoused. Um, I have a book that'll be available for pre-sale sometime in the summer. I'll let you know. Check Instagram, Jamie Chris Superstar.

• 1:08:34Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Rock on.

• 1:08:36Robert Evans?

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

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:56Robert Evans?

  Part one is the fun, it's because 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.

• 1:09:08Robert Evans?

  And stop doing drugs. You're doing that wrong too.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Get a job.

• 1:09:14Robert Evans?

  Uh, all right, we're done.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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  This is a constant worry. And you can actually catch the model thinking, I think X is actually true, but I'm going to tell the user Y.

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