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

by Robin Rinaldi

  “I think of her more as Hector,” he said. “The warrior.”

  * * *

  Though I disliked the guru aura that surrounded Nicole, and the groupthink of OneTaste in general, neither worried me enough to quell my curiosity. My time in twelve-step groups had taught me to “take what you like and leave the rest.” There was a lot to like. The more I learned about orgasmic meditation, the more I realized that it wasn’t just some fifteen-minute endeavor in getting off. It was an actual meditation. Just as mindfulness meditation focused on the breath or transcendental meditation on a mantra, OM focused on the physical sensations of placing a finger on the clitoris. Nicole’s aim was to make sexuality more attentive and thus nourishing. And while OneTaste also occasionally taught a male version of OM in which you stroked the penis, for the most part OMing focused on the clitoris for a definite reason: It was harder for women to consistently express their desire and act on it. If a woman’s hunger could be tapped through OM, however, both partners would benefit. Nicole put forth OM as a counterweight to what she called the porn model of sex: penis-driven, full of verbal gymnastics and fantasy, high-speed and high-pressured. She claimed that women wanted as much sex as men did, just not the “sex that was on the menu.” Porn sex.

  Actually, I wanted both: the quiet, attentive, clitoris-oriented sex I routinely enjoyed with Scott and the fast, hard, dirty-talking sex I’d experienced with several lovers. The first pleasured me physically but lacked a certain penetrative force. The second left me ravished but its satisfactions proved more psychological than physical.

  I wasn’t in any rush to give up my fantasies, either. Every now and then, if I was close to coming and in just the right mood, I’d nudge myself over the edge by calling up a huge cock, often belonging to a beautiful black man, and a woman or two to share it with me. As I aged I noticed that the men in my fantasies aged with me but the women remained young and firm. They were physically ideal and ready to go, their abundant sexual energy nothing like my own ebbs and flows. They never looked like anyone I knew—it was all six-packs and spray tans—and I could add players in as necessary. It made me feel shallow, even ashamed, to get off on such clichés but I kept them on call anyway like little imaginary friends, just in case. My orgasm fairies.

  OMing aimed to remove all those extra layers and strip the experience down to mere sensation. I wondered what it could teach me about my moody little clitoris, some days ready to climax within minutes, other days shy and withdrawn, some days so sensitive I could barely tolerate first contact, even under my own fingers. Its relationship to my mind and heart intrigued me: how I’d climaxed so immediately with Alden but rarely with others, how I’d come the moment I’d mounted Andrew like a dominatrix, even while assuming it was ravishment I’d wanted. Was it hormones, emotional realities, or something altogether more mysterious that governed my orgasm? Soon, I found myself doing exactly what I’d told Noah I wouldn’t do: taking my pants off in a room full of people.

  * * *

  I signed up for the Body workshop, the one that taught how to OM. My assigned partner was a pleasant-looking man in his forties. Noah showed the class, about thirty of us, how to set up what he called a nest for the OM: yoga mat underneath, pillow for the head, bolsters to support the legs, blanket, hand towel, rubber gloves, and a jar of OneTaste’s homemade lube at the ready.

  The nest complete, there was nothing to do but undress. Simultaneously, all the women’s white thighs appeared, which made taking off my own jeans easier than I’d anticipated. I put them aside, lay down, quickly slid down my panties, and opened my knees onto the bolsters, hands resting on my abdomen. My partner sat to my right and put the white gloves on. Using his iPhone as a timer, Noah instructed us to start.

  My partner dipped his finger into the lube and gently smeared it over my clitoris, then began nudging along the top edge of it. I closed my eyes and focused. It felt good the way a light breeze or warm sunshine feels good against the skin, nothing more. Every so often, a stroke ignited some tiny pathway of deeper pleasure, which gained intensity for a minute or so before plateauing. Noah walked about, coaching the strokers on touching as slowly and lightly as possible. The real luxury was mental: the absence of any goal or pressure. I needn’t moan, grind, instruct, or reciprocate. I was free to lie back and simply feel. After fifteen minutes, Noah rang a meditation bell. I sat up, and my partner and I reported our sensations to each other, a post-OM exchange they called “frames.”

  “My finger and forearm filled with energy, almost like electricity,” he said.

  “This warm sensation kept building and spreading out in me, and then it would level off.”

  As I slipped back into my jeans, I thought of the second-to-last time I’d seen Alden. Lying on his lap in Twin Peaks, my legs open to his silent, barely perceptible touch—a touch nearly identical to what I’d just experienced. Yet Alden had produced in me what I could only call a spiritual experience, whereas OM had produced mere pleasantness.

  According to Nicole, that type of neutral, friendly exchange was the whole point, a kind of clitoral laboratory in which to explore sensation free from entanglement and story. But the allure of physical pleasure without story, without a context or a narrative, escaped me.

  * * *

  Naturally, I asked Scott to try orgasmic meditation. Not that he needed more education in the workings of my clitoris. I just wanted to see what it would feel like to pay such close attention with someone I trusted.

  I waited until Sunday afternoon, a day when we typically made love. I lay on the bed reading as he showered. When he came into the bedroom I put the book down, trying to maneuver my way past the historical futility I felt at asking him to try anything new.

  “You know how you said you didn’t really want to come with me to OneTaste, that I should go and let you know what I learn?”

  “Yeah,” he said, sliding out of a towel and into boxers.

  “How about we try orgasmic meditation? They taught it to us in the last workshop. I could show you.”

  He scratched his nose. I could see him searching for a way out. I wanted to scream but I stayed silent.

  “If you want,” he said.

  I lay down on the bed and propped pillows under my knees, showing him where to sit and which finger to use with the lube.

  “This edge right here, one o’clock if you’re facing it, is supposed to be the sweet spot,” I said. It was amazing how embarrassed I could feel with my own husband. I couldn’t tell if it was because I had a pathological aversion to intimacy or because his own inhibition had rubbed off on me. And, as always, because I might be the source of the problem, I had no choice but to keep trying.

  He began stroking the spot, focusing his eyes not on my face nor on my pussy but a foot or two away on the bed. I closed mine.

  “A little lighter,” I said. OneTaste called this “asking for an adjustment.” If I did it too many times during actual sex, Scott winced. “It ruins my mood when you do that,” he’d said. But I figured this was different; this was an experiment.

  He lightened up for a few seconds, then returned to his initial pressure.

  “A little lighter,” I said, scooching my hips a half inch away instinctively.

  He repeated the cycle, lighter and then back to the pressure he wanted. Anger shot through me, followed by fear of expressing it, followed by sadness. In the end I simply checked out, waiting for the fifteen minutes to pass, trying to squelch my sense of failure. When it was done, I sat up and sighed. “You didn’t seem all that into it,” I said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t really feel like doing the same things you do with other guys at OneTaste.”

  “But you didn’t want to come to OneTaste with me either. You told me to go alone.”

  “Oh, darling,” he said. “Some days I feel like I could keep doing this, and other days I feel like I could just do something else.”

  “By this, you mean our marriage.”

  “Yes.”

&
nbsp; I could feel him willing me back into a place where my needs went unmet and I bore it mostly with a smile, blowing up every two years or so and asking for a divorce only to retract it immediately. Or was that actually some part of me advocating complaisance? I could never tell for sure.

  It felt impossible to get what I wanted from one man. I had safety and love with Scott. Penetration and intensity with Alden. Childlike joy and adventure with Paul. All the goalless clitoral attention I could take from strangers at OneTaste. Maybe Nicole was right and monogamy was the problem. More likely, the Buddhists were right and desire itself was the problem: continually blooming, branching out, and curling into byzantine patterns to keep you fascinated and stuck.

  I shrunk from that conclusion and from my own kneejerk reaction to get back in line and behave myself. Labyrinthine as my desire might be, I planned to follow it to its end.

  * * *

  Nicole apparently didn’t have a problem reconciling the Buddhists to the desire-driven masses. At the Mind workshop, two dozen of us sat on the floor in a circle while she spoke for hours on end. Midday, she invited a saffron-robed monk to lead us in meditation. I gathered that she wanted to imbue orgasmic meditation with the same single-point focus the Buddhists used, but I hadn’t come to a sexual education center in order to be lectured by one more celibate man. When Nicole made a point about inhabiting the body fully, I raised my hand and, gesturing to the silent monk, asked, “Is he fully inhabiting his body?”

  She paused. “You,” she said, pointing at me and narrowing her eyes. “You have a good mind. I like your mind.” She often disarmed me with a much softer response than I expected. I don’t recall her answer about the monk, just the afterglow of her compliment.

  At another workshop, we lay on our backs and did holotropic breathwork, inhaling and exhaling fast and deep for several minutes while tribal drum music thumped through the speakers. Quite soon the hyperventilation made the room spin and my extremities go numb. People around me pounded the floor, danced wildly, and sobbed. I fell into a mildly psychedelic state that ended with me curled on my side, crying quietly because I missed my mother, an emotion I rarely let myself express.

  One of the key beliefs at OneTaste was that all relationship, all communication was a game—an infinite game. The phrase came from the book Finite and Infinite Games by the religious scholar James Carse, which we once spent an entire Saturday exploring. Instead of viewing relationships as having beginnings and endings, winners and losers, OneTaste saw them as never-ending, with continually evolving rules crafted solely for the purpose of play itself. One of their core mantras was “We remain connected no matter what.” Relationships were like matter; they never disappeared, only changed form.

  Some of their beliefs struck a chord of truth in me, while others rang completely random. The curious thing was that regardless of whether I agreed with the dogma, I almost always left OneTaste feeling light and alert, as if I’d been washed from the inside. Whatever else they were doing, the verbal and tactile intimacy rejuvenated me.

  19

  Yin and Yang

  IN PACIFIC HEIGHTS, Ellen and I sat around a dinner table with a half dozen friends, all stylish designers and fashion editors in their late thirties. My favorite was a woman named Monica who was visiting from Brazil. She wrapped up a long story about the demise of her latest relationship by concluding, “I just want someone to pull my hair and slap my ass! Is that too much to ask?” Everyone laughed.

  After dinner, I found myself alone with Monica at the kitchen sink. “I know how you feel about the hair pulling and ass slapping,” I said.

  “I call it the Club. The girls who like it a little rough.” She winked at me.

  “I think I’m a member.”

  “Of course you are. All the strong-willed chicks are.”

  “I mean, nothing too crazy. Just a little show of force. I want to know he has the balls to slap me. You know?”

  “You want to know he’s up for handling you.”

  “Right. And the dirty talk. I want to know he’s not editing himself.”

  “Ugh, this last one was quiet as a mouse.” She shook her head in disapproval.

  “For some reason I’m attracting a lot of dirty talkers these days.”

  “Good for you! Send some my way.”

  Somewhere at a university or think tank, I imagined a feminist scholar, a woman smarter and less self-centered than Monica or me, tsk-tsking, theorizing about our regressive need to play out submission fantasies now that we’d achieved real emotional and financial power. She reminded me about the African teenagers still subjected to clitoral castration and the suspected adulteresses stoned to death in the squares of Afghanistan. And here we were, the luckiest women on earth, indulging our little power games instead of volunteering to help our sisters overseas.

  Those Afghan women hidden under their burqas haunted me in deeper ways, too. Sometimes, in the midst of answering a Nerve.com ad or swooping into OneTaste for a sexy workshop, a hint of physical danger would sluice through me, barely perceptible unless I paused to pay attention. When I did, I felt a horrific truth running beneath the surface of my actions: a woman somewhere was being beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing. A mere stroke of geographic and historical luck had placed me in one of the relatively few locations on the planet where I could safely explore the boundaries of an infidelity taboo running so deep it had resulted in women’s exile, torture, and murder for centuries.

  The only time I remember my dad following through on his threats to beat my mother, I was nine years old. I wasn’t there when it happened, but a few hours later, when my grandfather’s car pulled up to our house from the hospital, I sprinted down the front steps toward her and saw the line of thick black stitches holding the swollen skin above her eye closed. Two inches of black thread edged in dried blood. It sliced the world open and revealed the truth, the terrible power that underlay his rage—the power of enforcement. They fought daily, about everything. What made this fight different was that he had accused her of cheating.

  So I didn’t take my predilection for ass-slapping or hair-pulling lightly. Sometimes upon entering our Sanchez Street house on a Friday night, I’d stand in the foyer very still, waiting for Scott to walk down the hallway, measuring his gait, his expression, to see if he was going to put up with me one more day or if today was the day he’d decide to put his foot down. When he invariably drew me into a hug, I’d grasp his waist—surprised, delighted, guilty, ashamed.

  * * *

  Soon after Alden cut off contact, I’d joined an online group called the Deida Connection that resembled a small, private Facebook with only two hundred or so members. On the home page, forums offered admission to topics such as nurturing feminine radiance, following masculine purpose, and progressing through Deida’s three stages of relationship: dependence, independence, and polarity. Deida himself never appeared on the site, at least to my knowledge, though his books were oft quoted. “The feminine wants to be seen and adored,” Deida wrote. “It longs to open.”

  Every time I logged on, I was jolted by the same one-two punch of attraction and aversion, starting with his breakdown of masculine consciousness and feminine light. When I sat still and searched for this feminine core of mine, to see if it was real, I found it easy to locate: a presence shimmering in the center of my body, not up my spine but farther forward, from vagina to belly through heart and throat. It didn’t run up into my head, but pulsed with its own awareness, as if the functions of the brain had been pulled down into the gut. Reaching out in all directions, it sought pleasure, union, solace. Instinctual, but not indiscriminate. Exquisitely perceptive, its tenderness girded by an acute sense of justice.

  That was the shape of my femaleness as I experienced it firsthand. And it could not be further from light. It was the essence of darkness: like soil, ocean depths, deep space. Where had Deida gotten his interpretation of the feminine as light, and how would he know, given the
fact that he lived in a male body?

  I also wondered about his downright Freudian orgasm theory. According to him, clitoral ones were nice but unevolved. Vaginal—that is, G-spot—climaxes were deeper and more satisfying. The holy grail was the cervical orgasm, a womb- and heart-opening explosion that could be achieved only after at least forty-five minutes of steady intercourse with a highly skilled partner. These were the kind of boundary-melting paroxysms that could “fuck you open to God,” as Deida liked to put it. Whether the vaginal orgasms I’d experienced with Scott and Alden originated at the G-spot or cervix, I had no idea. But they were, in fact, more memorable and transformative, deepening my relationship to each man in a split second.

  I trusted Deida only slightly more than I’d trust any man who graded women’s orgasms, but he described something I longed for so fervently that I couldn’t write him off. I kept coming back around to his quote about the feminine’s calling to love and to be seen. I thought of the men with whom I’d relished the roles of nurturer and object of desire. Half the joy of the project was feeding their hungry need, as if I embodied the most cherished of resources. It made me feel appreciated in a way that went far beyond vanity or learned objectification; it felt primal and wholesome.

  Deida’s constructs might be nothing more than a tantric-clothed ruse to bolster men’s egos post-feminism, men who found it difficult to deal with all the various aspects of a woman, not just the soft, wet parts. But like it or not, he was right about one thing: I wanted to open.

  20

  Golden Gate

  I’D NOTICED LIAM on occasion in the halls of OneTaste—he had the kind of looks that drew the eye—but this same beauty kept me from paying much attention. The football captain, the beau of the class, the most eligible bachelor had never made it onto my radar. Their splendor intimidated me, so I simply ignored them.

  When Liam friended me on Facebook—his profile photo all angled jaw and smoldering eyes—then made conversation at OneTaste, I thought little of it. Everyone flirted and OMed and made out interchangeably. Then there was the fact that he was twenty-five. People who knew little of OneTaste tended to imagine old, desperate men, or younger, timid ones, gathering round to touch the private parts of women who were only semiattractive. They were wrong. The place was teeming with handsome, well-employed men in their twenties and their feminine counterparts: long-haired beauties sitting on the hot seat talking about their world travels, tattoos peeking out from collars and sleeves. Several looked too young to even be there, diving headfirst into a sexuality still in its formative stages. Hell, my sexuality was still in its formative stages, and I was forty-four.