THE SEX CULT THAT SCAMMED HOLLYWOOD

In 2011, an American author and businesswoman named Nicole Daedone gave a TEDx talk in San Francisco in which she spoke of her plans to build an empire on the female orgasm. A tall, self-assured woman in her early forties, dressed in a black silk suit, Daedone did not, of course, put it quite like that.

During the talk, which has been watched more than two million times, Daedone, the author of Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, described how she had met a man at a party in 1998 who practised what he called “contemplative sexuality”.

He invited her to lie down unclothed, shone a torch on her vagina and proceeded to describe her “colours” in some detail (“Your outer labia are coral …”). He then stroked her clitoris “no firmer than you would stroke your eyelid”. “I had never been looked at or felt that kind of compassion in that area before,” Daedone told her audience – nicely dressed people in their thirties and forties, nodding thoughtfully. “I just broke open, and the feeling was pure and clean.”

” In this story, which would come to be repeated, in Daedone’s words, “thousands of times”, sometimes the man would be a “Buddhist”, sometimes “a monk”, and at others “a cute guy”. But the result was always the same. “For the first time in my life,” she