TheQuartering [4/26/2021]
Hollywood is populated by some of the worst people on the planet, and they continue to prove it.
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 40s, dressed in a black silk trouser suit, auburn hair falling to her shoulders, Daedone did not, of course, put it quite like that. In the course of the talk, which has since been watched more than two million times on YouTube, Daedone, who had recently published a book entitled Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, and was standing in front of two glowing, vulva-shaped lights, described how in 1998 at a party she had met a man who practised what he called ‘contemplative sexuality’. He invited her to lie down unclothed, shone torchlight 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 30s and 40s, nodding thoughtfully and bathed in a self-congratulatory aura, as TEDx audiences are wont to be. ‘I just broke open, and the feeling was pure and clean.’
This story, which would come to be repeated, in Daedone’s words, ‘thousands of times’, was subject to variation. Sometimes the man would be a ‘Buddhist’, sometimes ‘a monk’, and at others, in her words, ‘a cute guy’ who delivered ‘the best pick-up line I’d ever heard’. But the result was always the same. ‘For the first time in my life,’ she said, ‘I felt like I had access to that hunger that was underneath all of my other hungers, which is a fundamental hunger to connect to another human being… ‘And then, I had a moment of thinking, I want to know how to live here in this place and, in my philanthropic way, I want everyone else to know how to live here.’