Future Sex by Emily Witt Page A

concentrated on breathing and feeling the pressure of his body. At one point he said, thoughtfully, “I feel a deep swelling at the base of my cock.” Then the bell on his iPhone chimed and it was over. We shared “frames.” I had trouble thinkingof anything to say and remember only that whatever it was I said felt somewhat fictional. Then I put on my clothes and left. I did this two more times, both with Eli. I never reached the point of eagerness. I turned down several other invitations and canceled on people with whom I had scheduled appointments. The third time I tried orgasmic meditation was in a room with other people also practicing.I climaxed, or “went over,” as the OneTaste people put it, as I stared at a coffee urn on a table. I felt sad afterward, as I did sometimes after sex. It had not been so different from sex, where some orgasms happened because I concentrated and willed them. A climax could be perfunctory. It could be just another form of service to another person, to give him a sense of satisfaction. I could climaxeven during sex I did not enjoy.
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    For months I pretended that what I saw at OneTaste was so far beyond the boundaries of my day-to-day reality that it didn’t affect me. This was easy to do because what the people at OneTaste did was very strange. At the time, I would have rather socialized with any other group of people than them. I disliked them. I preferred the company of people whodid not insist on sympathetic eye contact, who did not need to talk about all of their feelings at every instance, who drank and smoked cigarettes. I felt more comfortable in situations where I had the right to remain maladjusted, to leave some feelings undisclosed, to acknowledge and enjoy the prospect of my own mortality. Their language made me cringe. They would describe themselves as feeling“tumesced” and used the word penetrate to indicate a personal breakthrough. They liked to use sex as a verb instead of a noun: “My sexing changed,” said Rob Kandell. “So how I OM informed how I sex, and how I sex started to inform my OM-ing.”
    I would see people I had met through OneTaste on the street in the Mission, or run into them at the Rainbow Food Co-op, the great temple of antioxidantand raw snack foods. Once one asked me out, inviting me to a tea lounge on Fourteenth Street that many of them frequented. He wore a beaded necklace, and he stared into my eyes. “It’s an open space,” he said of the tea lounge. “It doesn’t have the darkness or oppression of a bar.”
    “I like bars,” I replied snottily.
    After I left San Francisco that summer, OneTaste kept calling. First it was theoccasional text message from Marcus or Eli or Henry asking if I wanted to OM, to which I would happily reply that I was no longer in San Francisco. Then members of the organization would occasionally call to invite me to a lecture or a workshop.
    The updates of the meditators filled my Facebook newsfeed with their daily epiphanies. I continued to read them and would watch their video testimonies.
    “The moment you realize you’ve built a life based on ‘stroke for your own pleasure,’” one would write.
    “The (much earlier) moment when you realize that you haven’t. And that you could,” another would reply.
    “Thank you,” the original poster would write. “And the much later moment when you realize there is no going back. And that you couldn’t.”
    “So, so good!” someone else wrote.
    But if theirfollowers, or those of the Esalen Institute (“pioneering deep change in self and society”) or the Landmark Forum (“create a future of your own design”) or the Zen Center (“may all beings realize their true nature”) or Lafayette Morehouse (“you are perfect, the world is perfect, and you are totally responsible for your life”) or the Pathways Institute (“the exploration of human consciousness leadingto your personal, professional and spiritual wisdom, skills and