This newsletter relies on paid subscribers, who currently make up just 5 percent of readers. You can make this work sustainable by upgrading to a paid subscription. The rhetoric of 'empowerment'A fascinating case study in the use of 'sexual wellness' as a rallying cry and legal defense.
This month, a federal judge rejected an attempt to dismiss forced labor charges against former executives at the “orgasmic meditation” company OneTaste. In response, one of those former executives, Nicole Daedone, posted an Instagram Reel of women supporters walking away from the courthouse wearing t-shirts reading, “UNLEASH.” Her caption: “Sexual Women On Trial. It’s time to start the movement.” The implication is that this is a trial against women’s sexuality. Since then, Daedone has posted about how women have been “sexually colonized” and need to reclaim “the vast realm of wealth that is sexual energy.” Feminism, she writes, “made a wrong turn because it lost the feminine” and disconnected women from “the infinite resource of Eros.” She presents her brand of sexual wellness as true empowerment, opposite the faux empowerment of feminism. Daedone has also posted a video in which she riffs about the “angry MeToo woman” and how we’ve been trained into a narrative of, as she mockingly puts it, “My story, my pain—me, me, me, me, me.” She’s also given a shoutout to the infamous feminist antagonist Camille Paglia and the writer Katie Roiphe, who is best known for questioning the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. Note, of course, that there have been allegations of sexual exploitation at OneTaste. In other words, OneTaste—and women’s sexuality more generally—is cast as the victim of the kind of “victim feminism” that Roiphe famously railed against. All of this makes for a fascinating case study in empowerment rhetoric. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the future—but, for now, I’m re-upping a post from last year about this case, and about the potential dangers of “sexual wellness.” Earlier this week, two ex-leaders of OneTaste, a company that promoted “orgasmic meditation,” were indicted on charges of forced labor and conspiracy. Federal prosecutors allege that the company’s founder, Nicole Daedone, and Rachel Cherwitz, the former head of sales, coerced and groomed members to “engage in sexual acts,” including with investors, for the company’s financial benefit. In a statement, Anjuli Ayer, OneTaste’s CEO, called the allegations “unfounded” and pointed to the company’s culture of “individual empowerment” and “choice.” That’s interesting because the allegations feel like an indictment of the dangers of “individual empowerment,” “choice,” and “wellness” culture. Back in 2011, I reported on a OneTaste workshop in San Francisco, where I watched Daedone stroke a woman’s clitoris for exactly 15-minutes in a demonstration of orgasmic meditation (or OMing for short). She did it in front of a large audience of women who had paid hundreds of dollars for the weekend retreat and seemed desperate for so many things: pleasure, love, intimacy, power, confidence—the list went on and on. At the time, I was intrigued by Daedone’s rhetoric around the worship of women’s pleasure—as well as the fact that OMing typically involved fully-clothed men “stroking” half-naked women. Still, I was skeptical of the capitalistic enterprise of it all. Years later, the journalist Ellen Huet published a report on allegations of trauma and sexual exploitation at the company, which led to the recent Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc. Now, the indictment alleges that Daedone and Cherwitz used “the guise of empowerment and wellness” to seek “complete control over their employees’ lives.” This is what stands out to me from the indictment and OneTaste’s statement: Empowerment. Choice. Wellness. This is the language of neoliberalism, which recasts structural problems—including those arising from sexism and racism—as personal shortcomings. A classic example is Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, a book that coached women on how to individually excel in the workplace while underemphasizing systemic inequalities. Neoliberalism often depicts structural issues as problems to be solved through the marketplace. Instead of casting a critical eye outward at, say, oppressive patriarchal structures, the blame is redirected inward. Instead of burning it all down, we’re turned into savvy consumers and self-improvers. This applies to “sexual empowerment,” too. As I’ve written before, “The improvement of women’s sexual experiences has now been detached from imperatives of social justice and collective struggle.” Forget consciousness-raising circles, here’s a 24k gold vibrator. The scholar Rosalind Gill argues that neoliberalism has turned sexual empowerment into the kind of commercialized self-improvement project that has long been a staple of women’s magazines. As Katherine Rowland wrote in The Pleasure Gap, a fantastic book about the fallout of the unfinished sexual revolution, the hallmark of neoliberalism is “the vaunting of the choice-driven individual whose great imperative is to exercise agency.” So, yes, it might be that OneTaste has a culture of “individual empowerment” and “choice.” The whole culture has that culture—and it’s a problem. The guise of “empowerment” and “wellness” is used to control us all the time. Now, federal prosecutors allege that it was used for criminal ends, too.
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četvrtak, 16. svibnja 2024.
The rhetoric of 'empowerment'
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