Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

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The NY Times Magazine Section (March 13, 2009) had an article titled The Pleasure Principle about a co-ed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm in San Francisco called "One Taste." It's founder Nicole Daedone, places emphasis on women's pleasure where love, romance and even flirtation are not required. She was quoted as saying, "I don't think women will really experience freedom until they own their sexuality."

At first I think Nicole is a kindred sister teaching women masturbation skills. However it turns out that clothed men are doing the women who lie comfortably naked from the waist down with their eyes closed while the guys carefully stroke the upper left quadrant of each clitoris. This morning ritual is called orgasmic meditation or "OMIng."

Please! After nearly forty years of teaching masturbation skills to women, I have never found one place to touch that works for "all women." There's another problem here when guys never "get done" and gals not learning how to do themselves. This is a perfect role reversal where men often do the coming while women provide the means either with manual, oral or penetrative sex. It is my belief that we create the opposite of what exists to see the dynamic so we can change it. So a passive woman getting nice clit stim isn't the same as experiencing freedom or owning her sexuality. I'd see it more like training women to become dependent on someone else's touch.

Several friends have emailed me asking if Nicole is the next Betty Dodson to which I respond, "Absolutely not." When I began running my masturbation workshops in the seventies, it was at the height of the Guru Craze and religious cults. I was NY based but spent half of my time in San Francisco where I actually wrote, illustrated and published my first book Liberating Masturbation: a Meditation on Selflove. It was in 1974 that I made a commitment to never create any system where I would have followers. Each time we follow a guru or teacher we adore, they become authority figures and we end up surrendering our power to them. Since that time, I have called myself "a one-night-stand guru." The antithesis of sexual freedom would be creating thousands of little Betty's who were all having orgasms just like me. Even the idea that there is "One Taste" should ring some alarm bells. I fear Nicole is flirting with becoming some kind of "Mother Superior" with many dependent followers.