The Wild Oats Project: One Woman's Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost

by Robin Rinaldi

  A few hands went up. Noah called on a slim young woman in the front row, wearing skinny jeans and a hipster T-shirt. Her long, dark hair fell to the middle of her back. Half the men in the room raised their hands to begin the questions.

  The first man asked, “Are you happy?”

  She thought for a moment, tilting her chin. “Mmmm, pretty much so.”

  A second man asked her, “What do you want?”

  She shifted in her seat. “I want more passion in my life.”

  Noah asked, “Do you control men with your beauty?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. Everyone laughed. The room grew palpably cozier.

  As the game progressed, more people volunteered, including me. Noah called on me and I sat down on the stool. Nervous and excited, like a kid waiting in line for a roller coaster, I slid my palms under my thighs. Several hands shot up and Noah pointed to a man in back to begin the questions.

  He asked, “What is your body language saying right now?”

  I looked down at my hidden hands and released them into my lap. “I guess that I’m protecting myself a little, because I don’t know any of you.”

  A woman in front asked, “What are you protecting yourself from?”

  “Being judged.”

  “What’s dangerous about being judged?”

  The answer seemed obvious, but I played along. I didn’t even think about passing or lying.

  “I don’t want other people flinging their psychological garbage at me.”

  Noah chimed in. “Do you ever protect yourself from people you do know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like who?”

  I went mentally fuzzy, the way I used to in therapy when the question hit too close to home.

  “Probably my husband.” My heart rammed my rib cage. All eyes were glued on me.

  A man asked, “What do you want?”

  “I want intimacy.”

  Now the brunette from the front desk raised her hand. “What scares you about intimacy?” she asked. She had a regal, avian face atop a long neck.

  “Um, no, I said intimacy is what I—”

  “Thank you,” she interrupted. “Why are you here?”

  “Honestly? Because I just started having an open marriage. I’m here to find lovers.” My neck and cheeks went hot but I forced myself to stare hard at her, thinking Bring it on, bitch.

  “What are lovers going to give you that your husband can’t?”

  “Life experience,” I said. “Masculine energy.”

  “Okay,” Noah said, “nicely done,” and the group applauded as I returned to my seat. I felt enlivened and clear, the way I did after a good workout.

  At the end of the hour and a half, Noah announced that we’d go around the room cleaning up any emotional charge left over from our interactions. “So if anyone needs to say anything, now’s the time.” Several seats to my right sat a thin, long-featured man with full lips and a dimpled chin. He said, “When that woman on the hot seat said she wanted lovers, I was really turned on. I wanted to volunteer.” His name was Jude and he wore a jean jacket and a striped beanie atop a nearly shaved head. Not many men could have pulled off such a look.

  Two chairs away, a woman with wiry curls stiffened. When her turn came she said, “I feel pissed off and violated by men outwardly telling women they lust after them. I come here to feel safe.” The air hung heavy with her disapproval. Jude’s face momentarily clouded before he regained a yogi-like calmness.

  At my turn, I was still registering what Jude had said. “I guess I just want to say thanks to Jude. It feels nice to be wanted.” At this, everyone seemed to relax except the angry woman. The anxiety of getting on the hot seat and the discomfort of the woman’s reaction only added to the buzz. Jude smiled at me with serene eyes. Lover number four, I thought.

  I joined OneTaste. For ninety dollars a month, I could take an unlimited number of workshops, each of which cost a few hundred bucks. As Noah signed me up, I said, “I’m probably never going to take off my pants and let a man stroke my clitoris in public.” He smiled as if he knew better and said, “That’s fine. It’s completely up to you.”

  I didn’t need orgasmic meditation. The wordplay at OneTaste was more than enough. What do you want, what do you fear, what are you protecting yourself from … these were questions I’d been asking Scott for seventeen years, with very little in the way of answers. He had what he wanted. He didn’t fear much. Sometimes when drunk, he would become overly talkative and hint at his unedited feelings, but I had trouble following him and if I revisited it the next day, he didn’t remember the conversation. When sober, he usually answered my queries with “I’ve never thought about it” or “You know as much about me as I do about myself.”

  * * *

  The first workshop I attended ran from Saturday morning through Sunday night and included about twenty people, split pretty evenly between women and men. Jude was one of them. This time, the instructors were a fresh-faced woman named Grace and a huge bald man named Silas who looked as if he could crush anything in his path between his bare hands.

  We played more word games like the ones at InGroup: what I’m feeling right now, what you’d never guess about me, what I hate most. We each stood up and danced spontaneously to a theme song the leaders chose to fit our personality. They assigned me a percussive dance number by Shakira. Half the participants put on blindfolds and the other half rotated among them, listening to the blindfolded people confess feelings they usually kept secret. I sat in front of a man named Andrew as he told me how angry he was at his mother, how she had used manipulation and guilt to shut him down and poured her hatred of men onto him. When I asked him how it felt to divulge this, he placed his hands on his pelvis and said, “I feel a lot of energy gathering right here. It feels good, like I’m growing bigger. It feels like I want to push it outward.”

  I was seized with a desire for him to rip my clothes off and unleash his mother anger on me. I wasn’t allowed to comment.

  Grace and Silas described how, in the culture at large, men constantly ogled and lusted after women’s bodies, while women weren’t taught to objectify men or unleash their own physical cravings onto them—indeed, they were out of touch with their desires. To illustrate and reverse this process, they instructed the men to line up in a long row and lie down on the floor faceup. The women would wander among the men, touching them however we liked, for our own pleasure. The only rules were that we couldn’t kiss them or touch their groins, and the men had to keep their eyes closed and their hands at their sides. They put on a slow, sexy song and the women walked over to the line of supine men, approaching them slowly, unsure.

  My urge was to start at one end of the line and interact with every man, in the interest of fairness and not hurting anyone’s feelings. Then I remembered they weren’t allowed to open their eyes, and I was supposed to act on my own impulses instead of worrying how I’d be perceived. I made my way straight for Jude. I knelt down at his head, feeling the shadowy stubble where he’d shaved his hair off. I ran my finger down his cheek and into the Cupid’s bow of his upper lip, staring at his mouth with no fear of being caught. I touched his soft T-shirt and felt his ribs underneath. He was very thin. I lifted one of his hands and tugged gently at his fingers before releasing it.

  I crawled from Jude over a pile of legs, carefully, to where Andrew lay, then straddled him and moved up to sit astride his stomach. I could feel the warmth of it through our clothes. I touched his chest at the opening of his denim shirt, then bent over and ran my cheek against the hairs poking through. He smelled clean, healthy. I let my hair fall over his face and dragged it along his neck. He moaned quietly. A sudden fear rose in me—what if he got a hard-on?—until I realized that it wouldn’t be a problem. I wasn’t going to be held accountable. I needn’t do anything more than what my body wanted.

  I sat up for a moment to digest the novelty of this. It was the first time I could remember acting solely out of my own inst
incts, without the pressure of performance or obligation, without an awareness of myself as an object of male desire—a desire I must always navigate and often mitigate. Suddenly I was the protagonist. Even during masturbation I thought of myself more as the one reacting instead of the one doing the touching. I glanced left and right, taking in the sight of the other women writhing against the men, running their hands over them. Most of them had their eyes closed and were smiling. They looked free. And hungry.

  As the first day of the workshop came to a close, we gathered in a semicircle in front of the couch again. I sat on the floor in front of Andrew, who was in a chair. Though his eyes were closed both times I’d interacted with him, we were already linked, perhaps by scent. I could almost feel his knee a few inches behind my head. As Silas spoke about how to “come down” from the day’s high energy by taking a hot bath or watching a relaxing movie, Andrew put his hands on my shoulders and began slowly rubbing them.

  “Is this okay?” he bent down and asked in my ear.

  I nodded yes, backing up until I was leaning against his shins. His touch was un-urgent. He gave off a highly awake, meditative sense of dwelling fully in the moment, of not planning ahead.

  As we were leaving, I passed Jude near the door. “Hi, I’m Robin. We kind of met at InGroup. You liked me.”

  “I still do,” he said. “Come to lunch with me tomorrow.” His forwardness surprised me, coming as it did from such an ethereal frame.

  * * *

  At the lunch break the next day, Jude strode straight up to me, put on his denim jacket, and said, “Ready?” We walked a few blocks to a large natural foods market; there wasn’t much open in SoMa on a Sunday afternoon.

  Jude was vegan. We filled our plates with greens and vegetables from the organic gourmet salad bar, then sat down at a table. Summer sunshine poured in through the market’s glass walls. I had topped my salad with chicken and feta cheese.

  “How long have you been vegan?” I asked.

  “Ever since I saw Earthlings.”

  “Is that a documentary?”

  “Yeah. It’s brutal. I’ll loan it to you if you want, but you have to be prepared.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a healer.” In San Francisco, that could serve as one of many euphemisms for unemployed. With Jude it seemed legitimate. He’d attended two different schools in New York, where he’d studied astrology, Hindu philosophy, meditation, and intuitive healing. He did full-on astrological readings with birth charts and conducted weekly fire ceremonies in which participants purged themselves of old problems and negativity. This could easily have put me off if there weren’t something street-smart about him. I asked him his last name.

  “Liebman,” he said. Ah, Jewish. Raised in New Jersey. That explained it.

  “You seem very grounded for such a spiritual guy.” By this time he was sitting within inches of me.

  “It’s because I’m a Taurus,” he said, staring at my arms and hands.

  “Really? Me too. April twenty-second.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said, pulling his chin back to focus on me. “That’s my birthday.”

  I’d only met one other man who shared my birthday, back in my twenties. He had felt like a kindred soul, though I’d ultimately declined his advances in favor of Scott.

  “I bet we don’t share the same year,” I said, shining the overly confident smile meant to cover any trace of insecurity. “I’m 1964.”

  His eyes widened. “Wow … I’ve got myself an older woman.” Twelve years older, to be exact.

  Jude was working on a fable-like novella about a gifted boy on a mythical journey. He waited tables at Café Gratitude, San Francisco’s infamous vegan restaurant. He wrote and recorded songs and played guitar. He came forward to kiss me and I leaned away.

  “My husband and I are actually monogamous on weekends. Then we live apart during the week.”

  “That’s cool. How’s Tuesday, then?” He was careful not to touch me on the way back to OneTaste.

  * * *

  That afternoon we were introduced to orgasmic meditation. An Asian woman with long, dark hair walked into the room wearing a red silk robe, accompanied by a middle-aged man with big blue eyes and a sweet face. She disrobed and lay down naked on a massage table that had been set up in the middle of the room. We gathered our chairs in front of the table, looking at her spread legs straight on.

  Her knees angled outward, the soles of her feet touching. Her buttery tan skin smoothed out over firm muscle. The man stood beside the table to her right, his left palm placed gently on her pubic bone. Grace stood on the other side, narrating the process.

  “Joe will begin by asking May if she’s ready to be touched,” Grace said. May nodded and closed her eyes, her hands resting on her small, peaked breasts. “Then he’ll start with light strokes on the upper left side of her clitoris, as lightly as he can possibly touch her.”

  Joe dipped his hand into a jar of lube that looked like Vaseline, then bent over and began moving his finger ever so slightly, concentrating. Almost immediately, May began to moan, exhaling a “ya” sound to the beat of Joe’s stroke. The air around us condensed. We shifted in our chairs. Gradually, Joe increased his speed, which made her moans louder. “Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya.” She sounded like an instrument being plucked. Joe hunched over, gazing slightly askew of the action and listening for nuance like a cello player in an orchestra.

  “He’s taking her higher now,” Grace said. “Upstrokes increase the energy.” Every so often, Joe would pause, and May would go momentarily silent until he resumed. Then her moan would recommence, building in intensity until, a little more than ten minutes in, she seemed to climax.

  “Now Joe will take her down,” Grace pointed out. Joe moved his finger from the top of May’s clitoris downward a few times, then inserted his right thumb into her vagina and pushed firmly down on her pubic bone with the heel of his left hand. “His thumb in her introitus and the pressure from his other hand will ground her,” Grace concluded.

  Joe took a hand towel and gently wiped May’s vulva. He helped her sit up and she pulled her robe around her, smiling. Both she and Joe were flushed a deep shade of pink. The class applauded.

  In OneTaste language, the pleasure May experienced from the first stroke to the last was “orgasm.” Her climax they called “going over.” Going over did not end an OM session, which always lasted fifteen minutes, and neither was it the goal. Many women, Grace reported, never went over during OM, while some went over more than once. The goal was simply for both partners to fully experience every sensation. Afterward, they communicated their discoveries. May described how the pleasure swirled into her stomach, and Joe spoke of spirals of energy moving from the tip of his finger up his arm.

  It all sounded similar to what I had read in The Illustrated Guide to Extended Massive Orgasm, authored by two of Regena’s friends, a Bay Area couple named Steve and Vera Bodansky. They too claimed the magic point on the clitoris was in the “upper left quadrant,” the one o’clock spot if you were facing it. In Regena’s parlance as well, “orgasm” simply meant pleasure, and actual climax was deemphasized, even denigrated as a crotch sneeze.

  I appreciated that OneTaste was trying to teach a model of sex that centered on the female. But I didn’t want to call all pleasure “orgasm” or my actual orgasms “going over.” I liked calling things what they were. Both the practice and the language had been the doing of OneTaste’s founder, a woman named Nicole Daedone, whom I’d yet to lay eyes on.

  As evening fell and we got up to go, I walked up to Jude.

  “My husband is picking me up outside,” I said, feeling a little like Cinderella leaving the ball. “I’ll see you at my place on Tuesday at seven.”

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said, watching me walk off.

  12

  Eight Days

  AT THE MAGAZINE, I worked with eight other editors, all of them women, in an open, high-ceilinged spa
ce above an Agnès B. shop in the middle of Union Square. The office’s mint green walls, sheer white curtains, and flower-box-framed windows made it cheery despite the never-ending piles of accumulated mail. Car horns, sirens, and a handful of foreign languages wafted up from the street below as we quietly typed away to a nonstop alt-rock soundtrack: Gomez, Arcade Fire, the Shins. I sat next to the executive editor, and behind our two desks, layouts in all phases of production hung on horizontal racks. It always lifted my spirits to arrive in the morning, or return from grabbing a coffee at the French bakery around the corner, and see the pages hanging behind my desk. I loved my job and enjoyed my colleagues to a degree I’d never imagined possible. The long hours, constant deadlines, and semi-decent pay were more than offset by creative freedom and camaraderie, and by invitations to every concert, play, new restaurant, and party in town.

  We all had iPhones. They beeped continually with text messages and the pervasive marimba of missed calls. On the day of my date with Jude, mine vibrated around lunchtime, his name highlighted in the familiar blue box. It said, How are you feeling?

  Is there any question a woman wants to hear more than that?

  Happy and excited, I wrote. It was midsummer and I had a real date with a man I’d met in person instead of through a computer. Though I was a busy, carnivorous magazine editor and he was a placid, table-waiting vegan, I sensed a potential kinship.

  I’m excited too. See you at 7. I’m bringing you something.

  I left the office later than I’d planned and ran to Whole Foods, a few blocks away. I’d never cooked for a vegan before. I raced through the aisles, picking up pasta, sundried tomatoes, broccoli, vegan tofu “sausage,” and a bottle of organic wine. By the time I emerged with a heavy bag of groceries, I was late for the train, so I spent fifteen minutes hailing a cab.

  I raced into the studio at five to seven, hoping Jude would be late, dropped the groceries, washed my face, and dug through Joie’s closet for something to wear. We’d already determined that we were the same size and any clothes we left in the closet, the other could borrow. This little routine smoothed the transition between my dual existences. I slipped on a cotton skirt of my own and a black ribbed tank top of Joie’s that said, in large white letters, “Hugs For Thugs.”